Its more accurate to term this as a general scenario editing document, maybe, than to focus on the workings of the mpedit.exe file only.
I've done some technical writing that I'd been paid for (meaning at my day job); one thing I tried to be aware of was my intended audience, so that you can refine the language accordingly.
In this instance I was focused on pages 42 - 56. I entirely blew off the information about Sounds, because I never use them.
42 - 56 refer to 2 types of files: OOB files, and PDT (Parameter Data Table) files.
OOB: When writing, I always made a point to include relevant examples, that made sense and did not have contradictory information. I can't really say the same is true with this manual - and while a few things stood out, such as using outdated unit and leader lines (They'd changed around some of their coding earlier in the year- as was helpfully pointed out in the documentation itself, however the examples, knowingly, referred to unit coding from previous versions, and some of this coding had been changed around - most notably that which pertains to weapons and how the engine references this data.
Annoying, and a bit sloppy, not to mention the Musket and Pike's manual's cavalry example was copied and pasted from the comparable document for the Napoleonic Battles series- and you know this because the unit name is not the unit name from their example- but some obviously French name. Considering it amounts to copying and pasting the unit name from the example line- it isn't terribly difficult to correct, nevermind it should never have happened.
The actual thing I have is more about Morale -there is a nice list of numbers and their corresponding morale letters. The first list shows up as 0-7, unfortunately all throughout the units it shows as 0-9 as being available, so clearly it (probably) had to be one or the other (spoiler alert: it wasn't). And in order to determine this, I decided I needed to through together a custom OOB file -and just label enough units to cover the range of 0 - 9, but it being me, I decided to add in a 10, and eventually an 11 to see if anything got broken by doing this. In a lot of areas the engine will allow for negative integers, but not here- as '-' is a flag that adds in a Fanatic bonus -however you can keep going up and up (although I am not sure there is much point to doing so).
Going higher than 9 adds in another '+' to the morale, so I am not sure if there actually is that much practical value in having a unit with A +++++ morale, but it is possible to code it if you so wanted it.
Naturally I edited my leader's name to William Longespee (King Richard's and John's - and if you want to split hairs- Henry the Young King's half brother). The actual reason being- I did it for no other reason, other than I could -and why not?
I'm sure I will come back this a little later, when I am actually engaged in this, as opposed to conducting a quick experiment like this. There is a lot of advice in the manual, a lot of it is good solid advice, although sometimes it does come off as it being 'the only way of doing something'; that usually not being the case.
PDT: I'm going to leave this alone for right now, but as I mentioned above, much of this was sorting out the differing Weapons' impact coding, and where it was now found. A lot of this has to do with any designer being capable of defining and working out their own scale; you are definitely not limited to the broad categories referenced in the manual. You should be able to code whatever time interval that you want, and then it follows that you are going to be responsible for how far your coded units can cover (or do) within whatever time period that you go with, the terrain impacts (movement-wise, and defensive adjustments) - and I will add an example of what I was considering doing (and why) ... in the Crusades titles (probably others, but these for sure), I am at a loss for how individual buildings were coded on these maps, neverminding that they do have some defensive benefits (although some require a certain specific type of formation to make use of it), I am not at all certain there is any sort of documentation that ever so much as showed any of this, so was thinking that it might be worthwhile just removing the defensive modifier and treat it as if those buildings are simply part of the surrounding terrain. I cannot come up with any argument as to why this isn't a logical idea -well, not yet, anyhow.
The engine can actually handle quite a lot,and is pretty resilient; it can be pretty rewarding to work with. I suppose, ironically, working on one of their projects, despite my decision to give it back, has provided me with another and deeper, more meaningful hobby - building these.
Graphics shown are from WDS: Crusades: Book I.
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