Lord_Chris

Yeah you could tell that a lot of effort had been put into your submission. A really well deserved win. I think with using just the game itself, you've done a pretty incredible job really in what you've managed to come up with. It's taken a lot of imagination and work, and of course the testing must have been a lot of well. A new tutorial would be fantastic- I'm sure it would be very popular I have to say I was very impressed with the difficulty levels. Not only did you spend a lot of time on the map itself, but also creating the different difficulty levels and re-balancing the troops etc must've taken ages. Really impressive. I liked the fact it didn't start on your army actually and started on the capital instead. It made you look around a bit to find out what was what. It's kind of like those really old "adventure maps" where you have to head over to a certain place, and you never know where to go. This game started showing you where it was, and you had to work out how to get there. It's nice! I'm sure we can forgive this little historical inaccuracy Although it would be nice if it were somehow possible to modify the game and add in some kind of behaviour similar to this. I've wanted this behaviour in Stronghold 2 myself before, and to a degree I technically managed to do it with the "move lord" event, but it was never really 100% accurate because it depended on things like markers or the lord being damaged a certain percent. In which case the event never really triggered because the lord was killed before he managed to flee. I had noticed that and wondered what was going on there. Very clever. I think people might like to learn some of this stuff actually, if you ever felt like doing any articles on tips or tricks that you know of. It is disappointing that the game is in this state still. It doesn't really run well on even my new machine. Though, we can't really fault Firefly's drive and attempts at making things better, as not many companies would keep going doing what they have done for so long. Hopefully Warlords will be in a better state when it's released.

And the results are in! Feedback posted here

Well, after an intense competition which spanned over many months, we can now FINALLY reveal who has won our contest to win Stronghold Warlords for FREE! Thanks goes to everyone who participated in our contest this year. I have to say that when checking the entries, @EaglePrince and I were completely blown away by the quality of the submissions. It's clear that substantial effort has been put into every single one of the entries, and we're really grateful for the submissions members have made. It's made judging the entries incredibly difficult because they were all so good. I feel very privileged to have been able to judge these entries, and I know @EaglePrince feels the same way as well. The Prizes to be awarded are as follows: 1st place: Free copy of Stronghold Warlords upon release and the Stronghold Kingdoms Starter Pack 2nd place: Free copy of Stronghold Crusader 2 Ultimate Edition and the Stronghold kingdoms Starter Pack 3rd place: Free copy of Space Colony The categories for the competition were as follows; Category A (Easy): A Custom scenario using any Stronghold game; Category B (Medium): A historical structure from the far-east; Category C (Hard): A game modification in some way; The Judges for this contest were: @Lord_Chris (me) @EaglePrince For entry to each category, entrants receive 1 bonus point for their submission, on top of the grading of the actual submission. Each Judge grades the submission independently between 1-5 points, then these scores are averaged out and the bonus points added on: (My score + Eagle's score) / Number of Judges + Bonus points. We received a total of 4 entries before the deadline, all of which were valid. In accordance with the Competition Guidelines, we have awarded the results as follows: 1st place: @Krarilotus for the submission Mongol Invasion 1258: 8 points; (5 by me+5 by Eagle) / 2 = 5 + 3 bonus points for valid entry to Categories A, B & C = 8; 2nd place: @artofmath for the submission The Mamluk Siege of Acre, 1291: 7 points; (5 by me+5 by Eagle) / 2 = 5 + 2 bonus points for valid entry to Categories A & C = 7; 3rd place: @Andreas9541 for the submission Blue Star: 5 points; (4 by me+4 by Eagle) / 2 = 4 + 1 bonus point for valid entry to Category A = 5; 4th place: @Lord Mordred for the submission A Three Way Skirmish: 4 points; (2 by me+3 by Eagle) / 2 = 2.5 (rounded = 3) + 1 bonus point for valid entry to Category A = 4; Congratulations to all winners! Your submissions are absolutely superb and we're so pleased and excited to be able to award you the prizes you deserve. Feel free to message me at any point to claim your prizes. Commiserations to @Lord Mordred who missed out on 3rd place by 1 point. It's worth noting that in the case of @artofmath's submission, we were at first unsure which categories to award bonus points for, given that the map is for the middle-east, and not far-east. However after a conversation with our history expert @Crusader1307, and @EaglePrince, we have both decided to award a bonus point for Category C, which is for a game modification, purely on the basis that the Castle was very difficult to construct and required a lot of effort. We unfortunately couldn't award any more points, because the map wasn't really for the right geographic region. The official feedback for entries, taken into account for grading, is as follows: Mongol Invasion 1258: My feedback: Excellent landscape. Very finely tuned with incredible attention to detail. The sheer level of depth and complexity is stunning. Great use of troops, with very well constructed natural defences and obstacles. Cleverly placed Oasis and an exceptional background history. Eagle's feedback: Here I like everything! The landscape, the castle, the scenario itself… Everything looks great, and it is fun to play. The story is great too. I like how the author of the map chose Vietnam’s history, which is what Stronghold Warlords is going to be about. At first it seems strange since we don’t have Far Eastern troops, but the scenario is so fun that very soon you forget about those “missing details” (about which nobody could do anything at all, actually). I have to mention that, once the scenario has been started, the player is looking around, to see what’s going on, and the idea about destroying barracks as soon as possible didn’t cross my mind. Simply because pretty fast those lords have plenty of troops in their castles. Maybe something about this could be mentioned in the story. Something like “those lords had lived relaxed lives, and once upon hearing the news that you’re coming, they have started to gather more and fresh troops.” Although something like this has already been told in the story. Maybe it’s just me. :) The Mamluk Siege of Acre, 1291: My feedback: Exceptional landscape. Perfect for the scenario, and very well planned out. Incredible build design and very well replicated in the game. Every detail of the map is perfectly placed and coordinated. Great use of troops, and an overall fantastic scenario. Eagle's feedback: I like how the scenario was made harder for the player (no inns, no churches), but with everything being justified in the story. And the backstory itself is very interesting. Those two Wolves in one custom shared castle work together really great. It’s needless to say that a lot of effort had to be put into making this scenario with this epic castle, but it was totally worth it! Missions like this are pretty great because here a player can build his usual castle, and test it, both its economy and defences, against an extraordinary opponent such as two wolves in a joined castle with plenty of resources on their hands. Blue Star: My feedback: Very photogenic landscape with excellent placement of ambient buildings. Great use of ruins, trees and shrubbery. Nice natural terrain. Sadly as this doesn't work in game it can't be awarded full marks, but nonetheless very well constructed and designed. Eagle's feedback: This game did work for me, I didn’t notice anything strange. Maybe I missed something, or maybe some lag would appear later in the game. A Three Way Skirmish: My feedback: A nice well constructed map. Very compact which makes it difficult to build everything. Nicely detailed without going overboard. Disappointing that it's based off an existing idea in Stronghold Legends, but nevertheless very well replicated in Stronghold 2. Eagle's feedback: I like that it’s about a map from Stronghold Legends. The landscape is really nice, and the only thing which I don’t prefer is stone keeps being too close to the edge of the map. But that’s just my taste. :) I've tailored my official feedback purely to the criteria and needs of the contest, so you can be sure that my personal preferences didn't play any role in my grading. However, as promised I would like to give each of you my personal opinion as well. So I've written a small piece below for each of you with personalised feedback from me. I will also be posting these comments on the official files a bit later on today, as well. I know @EaglePrince is excited to share his own personal experiences with you guys as well. I'd like to thank everyone again for their entries, and congratulate all the winners on their well-deserved prizes! @Krarilotus I will be in touch nearer the release of Warlords with a Steam code for you once I receive it off Firefly. You can however message me now if you would like your copy of the Stronghold Kingdoms Starter Pack already. Everyone else, please feel free to message me at any convenient time to claim your prizes. Thank you to all our wonderful community members and staff who showed their interest in this competition, dedicated their own time to it, and submitted content to our community. Finally, I'd like to thank Firefly for allowing this competition to be possible. Their generosity has allowed us to hold yet another historic contest and moment in the Stronghold community.

I get this is now 4 years hence, but I have added in URL forwarding to fix this problem. The new system I've built has allowed me to easily do this without impacting anything else on the site in terms of speed or efficiency.

Thanks for the clarification. I never doubted you owned a physical copy of the game, I was just cautious about discussion around copying the game onto other discs because it could lead on to other discussion in that area which would be contrary to the site rules (hence why I said it was precarious territory). I would be interested to know thought whether the issue is related to your own disk or not when you get a chance to install your Cousin's later on. My instinct seems to tell me though that it's something to do with your machine. Do you have another computer your could try your own disk on? Perhaps you could try to play it via your Cousin's computer since he already has Stronghold 2 installed. If you can get that working on there, we can be confident that it's your computer at fault and focus our efforts on trying to get a resolution on that for you.

Thanks @S0ck3tz, I've joined the new Discord. I'm happy to help out in any way I can.

Now Alcohol 120% is known in the past to trigger SecuROM which has prevented the game from running although it runs in Task Manager. Any of the following programs can trigger this: Alcohol 120% BlindWrite Daemon Tools Game-Jack CloneCD Game Jackal Xoom Game Clone CDSpace Virtual CD Fantom CD Anti-Blaxx GetRight Virtual Drives Speaking Clock Nero ImageDrive Usually in the past, this has typically resulted in an error by SecuROM, but on Windows 10 you never know as this is a very modern OS on a game that was built way before its time. And like I said, Microsoft pushed out that update which disabled SecurROM, so you may not even get an error anymore. I'm not using Windows 10 so I can't really comment on that. I would strongly recommend using the original installation media. I do have to caution you though that we're heading into precarious territory while talking about making copies of the game, which is contrary to the site rules.

Do you have this problem in other games as well? The thing which instantly comes to my mind here is an update that Microsoft pushed out in, I think, 2015 (KB3086255). This update essentially disables SafeDisc and SecuROM on Windows 8 & 8.1 machines, thus breaking many older games. Microsoft then decided that it was such as great update they'd push it to Windows 10 to the point where you can't even remove it anymore. The following page explains how to try and start the SecuROM service on Windows 10. I don't use Windows 10 so I can't verify any of this, but hopefully if this is the problem it will fix it for you: https://appuals.com/enable-secdrv-sys/ You will need to enable SecuROM prior to trying to launch the game. You aren't the first person who has reported this issue on Windows 10, so this may well be the problem. However if this doesn't work, we will need to explore other options. One possibility is that an anti-virus may be interfering with the game, it is also known to have happened in the past (offhand I seem to recall McAfee and one other whose name escapes me may have done this in the past). If the first solution above does not work, try disabling your anti-virus and launch it again.

So there's a lot going on here and it's not really easy to digest it all because there are so many files involved now. What I think caught my attention most of all is the fact that as you've previously pointed out there are two shaders, one for DirectX 9 and another for DirectX 11 (some textures also seem to have shaders for DirectX 10 as well, but at least in the case of the water this isn't happening). I suspect that in this instance the DirectX 9 shader would be used on DirectX 10 installations. What version of DirectX are you actually playing the game using? It's important not to just assume this, but to actually try and verify that (a) this version is actually installed on your machine, and (b) that the game is definitely running using this version (not as important if you only have 1 DirectX version installed). You can check this through creating a DxDiag file. The minimum version is 9, so I'm guessing it will probably be 9.0c as the lowest possible value (pretty common on older games). With Windows 10, I've be surprised if it wasn't 11 now, unless you have manually configured something. Once you've established this, you should also check to make sure that your hardware (specifically your graphics card) is fully compatible with Stronghold 3, and that it is fully capable of displaying all of this. I know that it probably is, so please don't think I'm being patronising, I'm just trying to make sure we've covered every possible angle first outside of the game before we start trying to look at the game itself, so we can quickly establish that it's definitely the game that is at fault. Next, you should check the graphics settings in Stronghold 3 itself. You can do this by finding the options.xml file in your My Documents/Stronghold 3/Profiles/ folder. The second row will look something like this: <graphics ssao="2" dof="false" terrain_detail="2" terrain_shader="2" terrain_detail_textures="true" rim_light="true" bloom="2" tone_mapping="true" lod_scaling="2" dynamic_lights="true" vertical_sync="false" shadow_quality="2" particle_detail="2" water_detail="1" texture_detail="0" overall="2" fullscreen="true" /> Please note that these are personalised settings, and will probably have been created automatically by the game on installation, depending on what it perceived as being capable by your hardware. You can also check or modify these via the graphics settings in the game as well. Once you've done this it's probably a good idea to enable error reporting. This is something you should always have enabled if you're playing around with the game files because it will alert you to any programming problems. It is possible that when you've changed the values, it could be causing some kind of mathematical programming error but because the game is handling it and error reporting is off, you don't know about it. To do this, locate the config.xml file in the bin/win32_release folder, and replace 0 with 1 on the following lines: <errordialog enabled=0 /> <!-- Enable/disable pop-up error/warning dialog. --> <onscreenprint enabled=0 /> <!-- Enable/disable drawing Vision::Message.Add() messages --> After this, restart the game and try creating a map with your river texture in. Save the map, play it in the game, and see if any errors appear. If nothing appears, nothing crashes and it all seems fine, then you can be sure that the values you have changed (that are actually editable) are being accepted by the game. I have a couple other files you should look into as well. I opened the River.ShaderLib shader file you mentioned and just from an overview I can see that this is an important file. I can see that the DirectX version is set to 9 from here. Whether or not this is a safety measure, i.e. a fallback in case DirextX 11 is not installed, I do not know. Have a look in some of the other files and see if you can find a class called WaterShaderPass. This could be significant. My instinct is that this is one of the compiled C++ or C# classes, so it might not be viewable, but I don't know as I haven't looked into it. I can also see from that shader file there's a potentially important DDS file called \textures\particles_and_effects\marsh_foam.colour.dds. Maybe looking at some of the .normalmap files might be useful as well, particularly in relation to opacity. This is the foam colour for marsh, but it's equally possible that this could be also loaded into the river texture as well, so it's worth ruling this out. As well as this, you should take a look at the RiverShaderPS.inc, RiverShaderVS.inc and WaterShaderHelpers.inc files. All of these have references to specifically the water depth. It's my honest opinion that a lot of this is being mathematically calculated by the shader files, which is probably why changing settings in the XML file is not having much effect. However, it might still be possible to change this through changing the algorithms. I don't want to overload you with info and I feel this has been quite a lengthy post so I'll pause here for now and we can continue again once you've had a chance to review all this. P.S. It's great that you're trying to add in new values with the XML file, but sadly as these values have to be parsed, adding in totally new values probably isn't going to work. That's really because the ones that are there already are hard-coded somewhere for the game to parse those values, and then use them. What I suspect is happening in relation to the Water depth is that the game is calculating it based on some kind of formula, and therefore, it's not using anything in the XML file, because Firefly didn't create it that way. So adding in new values only modifies the XML file, not the wider game where the XML values are read and used.

Hi @Geralt of Rivia, welcome to Stronghold Nation! So if I understand correctly, you have the standard edition, and are trying to download the 1.3.1 update and install it, at which point your game will no longer load? Or is it the case that you're installing the 1.3.1 straight off your disk, and it doesn't work? Do you get any errors when you try to run the game? What happens?

Yeah I'm sorry that we still haven't been able to conclude it yet. I'm aware it's been dragging on for a while now, but through extenuating personal circumstances I just hadn't managed to reach any of the previous deadlines set. I'm pretty sure I will be able to reach this one now, though so hopefully it shouldn't be too much longer.

Sure, we had 4 entries. Yourself, @artofmath, @Andreas9541 and @Lord Mordred.

I'm pleased to announce that after a small (and complex) renovation, the site downloads section is now back online and running as usual. You can now submit your files to us again. Not much has visually changed, however there have been massive changes behind the scenes that have taken many hours to complete. I've essentially rewritten the entire downloads section from the ground up and restructured all of the database tables, which is not easy considering it's live data. One of the major changes I've been able to make is the addition of a number of options available for each file your submit. Prior to the change, each download section had a number of set inputs of: estates, map balance, number of missions, and map difficulty (slightly different for CivCity Rome with Mission Type and Map Size). I'm pleased to announce that after putting considerable thought into design improvements, each download section now has unique field inputs tailored to that game. These are: Stronghold Difficulty Balanced Number of Missions Number of Players Map Size Stronghold Crusader Difficulty Balanced Number of Missions Number of Players Map Size Stronghold 2 Number of Estates Difficulty Map Type Balanced Number of Missions Number of Players CivCity Rome Difficulty Mission Type Map Type Number of Missions Stronghold Legends Number of Estates Difficulty Map Type Balanced Number of Missions Number of Players Stronghold 3 Number of Estates Difficulty Balanced Number of Missions Map Size Mission Type Random Events Number of Players Stronghold Crusader 2 Number of Estates Difficulty Balanced Number of Missions Map Size Mission Type Random Events Number of Players The files that have already been submitted to us have data available only for the options which have already been input. However, if you go to update your files, you will now be able to populate the additional data which we have available. I'm hoping this will provide more information for users when they try to download files. I've also refactored the submission form as well. Tags are obsolete, and the site will now programmatically determine which keywords are relevant to your file and generate them by itself. You also have the option to subscribe to your file upon submission now. You can subscribe afterwards once it has been approved by visiting your file's page, but you can also subscribe right away if you want and get notified when it's approved. In addition to this, based on feedback submitted by @Krarilotus and other members, I've changed the way downloads are submitted. Once you hit submit, a loading spinner will appear and you will be unable to do anything until the submission is complete. If you switch to another browsing tab during the upload, then the page title will animate informing you that the file is still submitting, so that you don't accidently close the tab. We also have a malware scanner now. While all files are downloaded and checked for safety reasons, I felt it was important to protect everyone as much as possible from any kind of threat. All files are scanned on upload to the site. As well as this, I've also added a number of new security measures, including file checks to ensure downloads are legitimate. Many other things have been optimised and improved, but I hope you guys notice a difference in how things are running. I'd like to thank all the members who have provided input into the new downloads system, and everyone for their patience while I've been busy working on this. I've tested everything thoroughly but as always there may be one or two small outstanding issues, if you can identify the cause or find an error message please shoot me a PM and I'll get anything fixed ASAP.

If the Sea is transitioning, but the River is not, then this is something to do with the game itself. I've checked the water.xml file and I can only find an entry added for River, not Sea. So you only changed one entry for the river water, right? It's also possible that Sea has different files to the River. I don't know about this as I haven't looked closely enough, but if this is the case, you would need to modify the files themselves and change the colour- try a really light colour at first, to see what happens, maybe something that isn't even a water colour at all like White, because this will stand out regardless of where it is placed, and will give you a clearer indication as to what shading works and what doesn't. In the particles folder there are also two files for water splashing and water mist. I don't know whether these may be of any use in this case or not. Additionally, it is also possible that this feature just isn't available for rivers, for whatever reason- even if it seems to be and the option is there. I know that in Stronghold Crusader 2 for instance the game has a whole load of files from Stronghold 3 such as environment, I think off hand, that just aren't used, but the functionality is still there. Firefly have a habit of leaving unused files within game installations, so this may be why if it still continues to not work. P.S. Without knowing the exact changes you're trying to make (i.e. seeing the code) it's very difficult for me to debug and see what might be going wrong. It may be worth posting your code below so I can run it in my own game line for line and see if it's working for me, or I see any issues with it.

Now that is interesting, particularly as I'd already thought it may have been an archive and tried to open it as a .zip and .rar. That means that if it is an archive, it's a pretty uncommon format. My instinct would be that a lot of this is down to the game engine. I don't really think Firefly will have customised some of this. The .v files are obviously done to stop people from being able to easily change things, almost like a protection. The .model file is obviously the same, because it's sensitive data and Firefly wouldn't really want people being able to get a hold of what they're doing easily. The .shmap file doesn't really matter, because it's only a saved map file with textures etc that are already existing within the game. So, it doesn't really matter if somebody gets a hold of the textures and saved map data.

That's fine Take as long as you need there's absolutely no rush. I'll definitely look forward to reading it, though!

Would you be interested in writing an article for us on how people can do this kind of thing? Or if not, possibly explain it to me so I could have a go and write something? I really feel that this could massively help people in customising the newer games and it's quite an exciting opportunity.

Crusader 2 (and from what I've seen of Warlords) also use the .model extensions, and use the same kind of file data for them too. If we find out the correct file format and how to open/modify it, this will work on all three games. I will continue looking and see if I can find anything on this.

This is pretty incredible I have to say. You have some awesome graphical skills, which has always been an area where I have lacked personally. The way you've brightened up that terrain really is quite remarkable. Do you think this is something that can be taught to people if we were to put an article up about it? Or does it depend more on the person's individual skills?

Yeah that's a nice addition to the downloads section as a stand-alone mod. If you have any others, please do consider doing the same! Users tend to download files more easily if they're small rather than packaged together, so don't feel that any one file or mod is too small to upload. Unfortunately, I'm not really sure what format they used to create it. But I would say we're on the right track in finding out. The description there of a pch file actually sounds pretty accurate to me, because we know that this is compiled code and not readable code. And we also know that Firefly have used variations of C in the past, on Stronghold 2 for example they use what I believe is some form of C or C++ in the shading. You inspired me to take a look if this is some kind of archive knowing how they do this with other files, so I attempted to open this file as a zip and a rar, but this doesn't work. So it's compiled code, not an archive containing other files. This makes it trickier to edit, but not impossible. I definitely think that we will be able to find out what this file format is, but it'll probably take a bit of work to do. It may be worth using the game engine website to take a look and see if anything is on there. Firefly originally used the Trinigy Vision engine, but in 2011 Havock bought this out and it has since been rebranded to the Havok Vision Engine instead. I have a feeling that while some things have clearly been customised (i.e. the shmap extension for maps) a lot of what Firefly are doing is 'out of the box' stuff in terms of the file formats. I could be wrong, but that's just a strong instinct I have with certain things. From the image in the following article you can clearly see that there are similarities between what you are using to try and open the software, and what is shown here: https://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/GDC/2011/Vision-Game-Engine-Goes-Mobile.aspx If you want to add models, you would have to use the same formats as exactly are there already for the game right now. So dds files for skins, model files, materials.xml, resources.xml etc. It's probably worth choosing a unit that is already pretty close to what you want to achieve, and then duplicate it and try to adapt it first, rather than completely create a one from scratch.

Apologies @Lord Aquila - this is a known issue as I'm currently in the process of updating the downloads section. It should be done within the next few days (I didn't think you'd be ready to submit quite yet ). If you want, send it to me in an email or via the PM as an attachment, and I will upload it for you (under your own account)in a few days when the downloads update is totally complete. Or, I can let you know when the update is complete so you can upload it again then. In terms of the downloads section, try our Site Questions/Support forum- you should be able to create a new topic in there to discuss any site issues you might have

I must be thinking of a different game then in that regard. I'm not sure which one. LUA files are a part of the game structure, but there's a lot more going on than just those. The game LUA files are mainly for behaviours and the mannerisms of the various units in the game. But it also controls things such as starting goods in multiplayer games. Firefly first used LUA scripts in CivCity Rome, and they've been re-used again in Stronghold 3, Crusader 2 and now in Warlords as well. In my opinion they're a really neat way of being able to control aspects of the game and make them more flexible. It's also great for us modders who can finally get to some things. I keep meaning to do an article on them actually, but I haven't ever been able to look into them in enough detail, or know the language well enough, to properly know how this would be best written yet. Given the way Stronghold 3 is so different to the earlier games and how flexible it is, I'd be surprised if you couldn't add in new units so some degree. There's certainly the functionality to do some of this. However, this isn't ever something I've really looked into, and it's probably a pretty complicated process. I would certainly be open to working with you on this and exploring it in more detail though if it's something you're interested in pursuing. Feel free to shoot me a PM if you'd like to talk a bit more about your project in person, or you could create a new topic on the forum if you'd like a more public audience. Once you understand how the game is structured, that's most of the battle and most things are just a case of renaming or altering. Yes, you can unlock the maps using the following tutorial. It's written for Stronghold Crusader 2 but it also works with Stronghold 3: https://www.stronghold-nation.com/article/244-lockingunlocking-stronghold-crusader-2-maps

Greetings @Lord Aquila, welcome to the Nation! Sorry for my slow reply. I've been very busy lately. That looks like a very nice modification! You may wish to upload it to our downloads section when you are done so other map makers can find it too I can't remember which way it is off-hand, but the game will automatically look for files within the directory or files within the archive, and load one of those first. I think it will look for files within the archive and if that doesn't exist fall back to any folders that may exist. You might want to make sure that the files are only in one of those formats first to ensure the game is loading the correct files. In terms of the .model files, I'm not really sure what software will actually open them. They definitely are not corrupt, though. It's just a case of the software not recognising the format of the file so it wrongly assumes they are corrupt. I suspect they're kind of like a hybrid file of some kind where Firefly have simply changed the file extension but are using a different type of file (such as gr2). They aren't gr2 though, I've checked. Don't forget that in earlier Stronghold games, they used .uni files. To this date there's still nobody who really knows how to open those either, although we do know they are compiled with information on how to load the model. It's my suspicion that .model files are something similar for Stronghold 3, with the extra addition of having a data folder containing resources and materials XML files to load the relevant shading and graphics file for the model. So in summary the model file is probably just a similar variation to the old .uni files built in a different format for the newer game engine used in Stronghold 3. We know that this engine is used again in Stronghold Crusader 2, and again in the upcoming Stronghold Warlords, and I know that the file formats for all three of these games are the same in terms of how the models are structured. If you're actually looking to modify the model, I'd recommend taking a look at the DDS files, because you'll have far more luck with changing the skin of a unit than the actual structure of a unit, and changing a DDS file is very easy in today's age and can be done in free programs such as Photoshop or personally I use Paint.net (software, not website).

It will definitely be ready before the release of Warlords, that's a cast iron guarantee. You will all get your prizes as soon as we've both graded and averaged your submissions. I'm sorry it's taken this long without any results. The things that have happened have been totally beyond my control, but I haven't been able to do this or much else because of them.

Unfortunately with delays due to covid and my own extenuating personal circumstances, I still haven't been able to grade any of the submissions yet. I'm very sorry about this, but there's not really anything I could have done about it. However, I have agreed to let @EaglePrince judge alongside me and both of our scores will be averaged out. The new deadline for grading the contest is therefore 30 November 2020. We will try to reach a conclusion by that time. Thanks to everyone for your continued patience and support!