Congrats sir, excellent job.

Epic.

Very nice work here Heavenfall, as always. Just wondering, but is there any chance you could also push the rider back a little on the existing horses as well? They look rather odd being that far forward.

I've done the entire set-up for the mounts, given them stats, abilities, designed tiles for resources and so on.

But I can't make the AI use the mounts, which makes it all pointless. I'll try to make it work, otherwise I'll just give up and leave it like it is.

Kalin, that is entirely reasonable, and I will put that in the next release. Unfortunately, that won't be until after 1.1, since Cari_Elf confirmed that the AI will not use custom mounts, it will always choose the "first one in the list" only. That means I'll be waiting for 1.1 before improving this mod again.

Great work as always heavenfall!!

-Matt

I always thought Slags looked appropriate for mounts... and possibly Shrills (kinda like Scorpion mounts)

Unfortunately, both those models are too different from what I have available to work with. In the future, maybe.

Oh alright then.

Uploaded 1.5 with slags. Shrills, however, are REALLY far too different to do anything with the skeleton I'm using.

I am curious, do the skeleton's include the rider?

No, each mount skeleton contains a fixed point where the rider is attached. The original rider skeleton is still used for the rider (the rider is simply switched to a different set of animations).

Why thank you!  I wasn't expecting Slags THIS soon!  You work fast!!!

Uploaded 1.6 updating to 1.1

Uploaded 1.7, changelog and screens in main post

Just put mod in last night and finally got a bit of play time today.

All i can say is WOOOWWW an amazing job yet again.

Thanks for all the hard work you do modding.

Got a late christmas present in the mail from Akil Dawkins, a new skeleton to play around with!

http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/6475/elemental1294720428.jpg

edit: http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/2205/elemental1294724632.jpg

Uploaded 1.8 with the new spider mounts

Changelog and screens in first post. If anyone has any extra colours of certain spiders they feel would add to the feeling, let me know.

very nice I take it no joy yet in getting the changes needed for the ai to use your created mount resources?

Not only is there a lack of a system to ensure a balanced spawn of world resources, but the AI doesn't even use mounts. I've requested both, but for now, this is where we are.

I find it crazy that when designing the game they felt that one mount type for each race was enough. I can't decide if it was a blinkered design process or just plain bad decision making or lack of time. surely when they created the engine part of the thought process should have been what will people need in order to add to this game. I see people trying to create spells and quests running into the same problems.

But like you say this is indeed where are, and at least the view of where we are going looks brighter than what's behind.

There are signs that they initially intended to put more mounts in, but I think it just got such a low priority they never got around to it.

If you take a look at how the Umberdroth and the skath models are made, for example, someone who knew his/her way around the models could have hooked them up as a mount in about a minute.

Another example is the horse armor already in the game files, but not hooked up properly.

Uploaded 1.9 with the (old) armored horses, 2 different models in 3 horse colours each

Uploaded 1.10, added support for all the factions in ExpandedFactions, Distinct Factions and Elemental: New order.

Cheers for the multi-mod support!

Uploaded 1.11

Finally I was able to add dragons to this mod. As you know, we've been requesting the skeleton of the dragon for a while, but Stardock haven't helped us out there. In fact, this is a pure XML hack, using no 3d software other than the havok content tools. For whatever reason, havok 3d files can be translated into pure complex XML files, and today I was able to gain a bit of insight into the structure of that XML. Basically, at the coder level this means I can insert new xml objects (such as Kumquat 3d engine materials) into any existing 3d file, changing anything in it. Obviously this is an extremely slow process to model 3d files (it took me approximately 45 minutes to position a single point of reference, a polygon requires 3), but for altering the function of skins or adding an object such as a pointer for a mounted unit, it is perfect. For another example of the utility of this kind of insertion, the lost souls in the expandedfactions mod are 95% xml based as well.