Modifying Stronghold 3

[needforbleed 5]

So I found a resource which seems to be very close to what we are looking for.

 

https://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?t=7481

[Lord_Chris 267]

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The standalone engine idea is mainly due to the fact, that the Vision Engine and its Lua scripting is slow as hell. With less than a hundred units and mid- to large castles my game already runs below 100 FPS, which is a howler as I am rocking an i7 9700K@5Ghz and a RTX 2080S.

Yeah I have to say this is disappointing. I do wish Firefly would change the game engine they use as I really haven't taken to it, but on the plus side Warlords is a far better game than the previous two (in my opinion). They have sorted out a lot of the mess and a lot of depth has bene put into it. This does alleviate some of the pain.

15 hours ago, needforbleed said:

I figured out the model data format. Now I just have to convert it to obj and find each spot.
Basically the model format consists of several markers that split skeleton rig, (animations), texture/material references and vertices.

Thanks for this... yeah, I have to say that this was probably my biggest concern that this would indeed turn out to be the case. Combining the file data was something deep down I kind of felt was "maybe" going on but didn't really want to acknowledge... It does make the job of modding a lot harder, certainly for me, without a deeper knowldge of C++ and game development. Hopefully you could help us out with that a bit.

But, looking on the positive side, we do now have a breakthrough in at least we know the general format, even if we don't know the specifics yet. It also explains why when we've attempted to open the .model files in software specifically for that format, it just hasn't worked. So in your opinion, is this kind of format/setup "traditional"? Or has this been something completely custom made by Firefly that looks like it would only work on their system? The other good side to this is that if we do manage to crack this, then we've potentially cracked this on Stronghold 3, Crusader 2 & now Warlords as well. It would be a massive achievement.

The situation kind of reminds me of the SH2 Map Unlocker & AI Castles and all the work that went into those by the fine folks over at Stronghold Knights many years ago. They found that a lot of the code could be edited, but it had to be done by building their own application to do it, so was the SH2 AI Editor born. My suspicion is that we would probably have to do something similar here, but I would be very interested in hearing your point of view on this.

[Lord_Chris 267]

Going back to what you've found on the link..... this does make sense to me actually. Earlier versions of Stronghold, such as Stronghold 2 and Stronghold Legends contained Granny Viewer files for the models, and uni files for the compiled information on each model. But since Stronghold 3, this has ceased to be the case. I explain the files in these games briefly inthis tutorial: https://www.stronghold-nation.com/article/62-adding-units-from-stronghold-legends-into-stronghold-2

I often wondered why these files changed in Stronghold 3, and now this makes sense. They've obviously changed the format from Granny to merge them all into one file. Which makes sense given how technology has advanced since 2007-8 when Legends was released.

My guess is that the .model file contains all of the information previously stored by these seperate files in some format or another.