P.S. Single Player now works (haven’t heard a compliant to the contrary), and if people want to discuss a multiplayer option (SEE STOP PRESS) too late I think that is fixed!

Thankyou to anyone who takes the time to do some testing.

STOP PRESS

You ask, and we deliver.  The LAN multiplayer option has been reintroduced as a result of Steak and Khan telling me it actually use to work.  It is posted here.  Not tested yet but will try with my kids tomorrow, but if you want to score a first down, get in quick!  I’m pretty sure it will work because I didn’t actually change anything!  Update: Tried it over the weeked and got it to connect, but kept getting sync errors.  Waiting for someone who knows how multiplayer works to see if it is just me:(

Updated 8feb12

There’s a lot of questions being posted on the site or to the email. Here’s an FAQ; most of these fit Legends of the Third Age, Middle Earth and Age of Star Wars.

1. The file I downloaded is corrupt.
   There may have been a hitch in your connection whilst downloading the file. Try downloading again. If it’s not that then the actual download source is corrupt and we’ll try to sort it out as soon as we’re aware.
2. I can’t play online or with friends.
   We’re sorry, but the feature hasn’t been implemented. The feature was mistakenly advertised as being there. In terms of LoME, the multiplayer option was removed to tidy up the screen which linked to AoMH’s multiplayer servers.  I have seen reference elsewhere to the ability for two PCs to play over a LAN/direct connection and if this can be confirmed I can reinstate the option in the menu.  Having never played multi-player myself, I don’t know much about it, but if someone can explain how it works, I will look into it.  In terms of setting up dedicated LoME servers it won’t happen without financial backing (and I’m not sure this would be legal given the ownership of the core AOMX engine).
3. The computer doesn’t do anything in standard games.
   Unfortunately we didn’t have any programmers in our team to actually program an AI for the computer.  LoME TTT was released with one of the AI files missing.  The full AI was posted shortly after but it has only been downloaded about 200 times so most people have no installed it.  The latest release – just posted here at LFS – should have all the files (will wait until someone downloads it to confirm).
4. Things don’t look right – models, textures, etc are missing.
   The mod probably wasn’t installed correctly. Make sure that no other mods were installed prior to installing ours; don’t even install more than one of our mods at a time. Best case scenario is for you to make a fresh install of the game, copy the folder and rename it; then install the mod (into the folder that isn’t the one you just copy and pasted).  LoME and Star Wars (I think) both use seperate versions of most key files stored in a series of .bar files.  This means that key files such as proto, techtree, etc are unique to the games and won’t interfere with the standard version.  The main exceptions to this rule are uicampaign.xmb and uipregamenew.xmb and LoME 4.0 the forest, cliff, waterbodies etc definitions (now unique in 4.1).  If you have installed another mod that places these as free standing files, they will be loaded in preference to the ones we release.  The same thing applies to other mods with the same name – e.g. if you already have an Aragorn_anim.txt file the game will use this rather than our version, ditto for models, textures, or other files with the same name.
5. There are bugs in scenarios or other parts of the mods.
   Our releases are playtested thoroughly, but sometimes things go wrong. You can report the bug, but unfortunately due to lack of manpower we most likely won’t be able to fix them.  Please provide a detailed description of the problem and we will look into it.  Bugs consisting of it doesn’t work won’t be looked at.
6. Anything else.
   We are very appreciative of your interest in our mods and thankful for your feedback. However we literally can’t change anything about them now since non of the designers are active. The whole studio is on hiatus until I (RiderOfEternity/Inazuma) feel it’s time to revive it for a new game.

Thanks

Many congratulations to Stephen, his sidekick Lars and others for finishing this project.
Legends of Middle Earth is a merge of Legends of the Third Age and Stephen’s Middle Earth modpack, complete with the Two Towers campaign, plus a few scenarios for The Return of the King and The Hobbit. In addition, you are now able to play standard games against each as the race of Men, Elves, Orc or Dwarves!

On top of the hundreds/thousands of hours put into creating the new units, buildings and levels, there is also a completely original soundtrack. Please note there are also sounds and images borrowed from the movie in order to increase the realism/novelty.

All contained in a zip archive that’s less than the size of a graphics card driver.

So without further delay, here is the link to the file on our server: Fly you fools!

Update: 8th April 2011 – Problems were reported with the download file being corrupted. The above link now links to the file on LFS, which is uncorrupted.

Stephen, the main creator of Legends of Middle Earth has sent screens of his latest awesomeness:

As for a release date? I don’t have a clue.

Petar on the other hand has been busy working on a very robust mod utility for GRID and Dirt 2. If you’d like to know more about that, please comment on this post.

An official pre-compiled 0AD build has been released: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/LatestRelease If you don’t know what 0AD is, it’s a strategy game being developed voluntarily and for no profit – in other words – free to you. It’s a project that’s been worked on for more years than I can remember; certainly pre-dates LFS’s launch, and possibly Age of Mythology’s release. If I remember correctly, it was started by former senior designers of Tsunami Studios or SCNPunk. Those two teams were the best back in the Age of Kings days and were huge inspirations for Liquid Fire Studios.

Another indie game that was started during the same era and by people with similar backgrounds is Dawn of Fantasy http://dawnoffantasy.com/, and it’s just gone into closed beta. This game is much further along than 0AD due to the promise of paid work once the game is released. To be honest, I’m not sure if the game will ever see a commercial release. From what I know, the manager has been pitching the game to publishers for years without much success. I do hope the best for the project of course. I myself worked there for a month in 2006, but quickly realised the great probability of no end game.

Starcraft 2 is soon to be released next week. I’m gonna wait till I have more free time before buying it, because I will no doubt get completely hooked!

Last thing I want to say – if you’re interested in site/graphic design or 2D/3D animation, check out my site: http://sebcastilho.com/ I am currently studying Animation in university.

Legends of Middle Earth is being playtested. The guys want the release to be perfecto

I have to say there’s not much else going on here. We won’t be starting any projects for Age of Mythology or Age of Empires 3, and that means we won’t be recruiting. Nodgene does happen to be making an AOE3 multiplayer scenario though, so I’ll keep you updated about that.

I am doing an animation degree (ba) course at the moment, which keeps me 100% busy. Who knows though, I may get a band of people together to do projects for Starcraft 2 or some Unreal Engine 3 game. Actually if you didn’t know, the engine is being offered for free to non-commercial developers, and at a small cost if you go commercial.

The forums will remain indefinitely closed until the studio becomes active again. Oh and the studio will always be around. We’ve been around too long and achieved too much to simply drop out completely. I kind of miss the old days when we were competing with Ambition Designs to get the best projects out Shout out to Shrink and Archaeopteryx.

Last thing – A couple of people have been asking about troubles with getting some of our projects to work (eg. Incident 39, Age of Star Wars, Legends of the Third Age). I’m just going to put it straight – I personally can’t help you with that. There’s too many different factors, but I will say that if it doesn’t work then it’s usually because you have other mods installed.

As always, we appreciate that you appreciate our work and we’ll appreciate any appreciation shown through star ratings or comments

Till next time –

And we’ll travel there by the official LFS taxi!

Merry Christmas everybody

(Yes I saw this street and taxi coincidentally and quickly took my phone out to take a shot)

“Lars and I have finally had some free time, so we want to launch The Two Towers – and I am still planning to do ROTK and the Hobbit.
What we need now is some Beta game testers.

To test the game you will need to have the latest version of Legends of Middle Earth, which is available HERE, username = lomefiles, password = guardian. The release is about 120MB, with updates a lot smaller (and hopefully the 3.10 patch is the last!

By this weekend, the beta release of the scenarios will be available, and we want a bunch of people to playtest it.

If you are interested please email me at stephencaines@impulse.net.au and I will send you the additional login details for the scenario folder.

What we want from you is constructive feedback on bugs and playability. The campaign comprises 15 scenarios, and you will probably need to commit 30-40 hours to the task.

Look forward to hearing from volunteers!

Stephen and Lars”

So grab the files and make sure to give us feedback! This is a serious request. Email stephencaines@impulse.net.au and give him feedback.

But this isn’t the only one of our projects that has garnered massive public attention.

Birthright and Heroes Chronicles by Guardian_112 are in the top 20 most downloaded singleplayer scenarios. Project “Extremely Happy” and Tactical by Nodgene are in the top 100 most downloaded multiplayer scenarios. Petar Tasev’s Tasev Mod Manager is closing in to the top 100 most downloaded utility. Finally, let’s not forget Legends of the Third Age: Fellowship of the Ring coming in at 3rd most downloaded ever file on AoMH.

Overall our projects have been downloaded by an estimated 30 – 40 thousand people across the world.

And the best thing about all this? We all genuinely had a lot of fun making and playtesting these projects together as a team. I think each of our members involved in the projects will have lasting memories of the good times

Thanks to Petar for making this list.

As of 14th November 2009:

AoSW – 68th in Mod Catagory
LTA: FoTR – 3rd out of all AoMH files
Project: “Clear Fountain” – 281st in MPScen Catagory
Project: “Extremely Happy” – 76th in MPScen Catagory
Heroes Chronicles v1.1 – 20th in SPScen Catagory
Tactical – 92nd in MPScen Catagory
Birthright The Adventure v1.2 – 16th in SPScen Catagory
TMM – 103rd in Utility Catagory