Crucible DE report

Behind the scenes QoL fixes

This section will discuss if DE has fixed many bugs that limited our ability to mod the game, and forced us into awkward solutions/workarounds or made certain features impossible to implement.
TLDR: For the most part DE has not fixed the vast majority of issues that made life more difficult for us as modders, so modding DE instead of Legacy has no additional incentives from this perspective.

Here is a list of bugs/engine limitations that caused us major problems over the years, we will not be going into detail in each one and why they are important, the point is to show how much of this has or has not been fixed.

45 entity limit for modifiers on abilities. Not Fixed
Air Pathing. Unknown, looks like it is fixed for the maps in the game, but they may have just applied the air fix rather than fixing the pathing, more testing required on official and community maps.
Deepstrike not being restricted properly.Furthermore Deepstrike has no visual indicator in regards to it’s range , even though it’s range can be changed. Not Fixed
Attaching leaders to units. Not Fixed
Can’t put multiple structures on a hotkey group. Not Fixed
Tau cannon on soulstorm map not doing anything. Not Fixed
Campaign : Attached or Garrisoned Honor Guard is considered dead at the end of the match. Fixed
Campaign : Adding new units on a races sbps folder completely bugs honor guard on saved games. Not Fixed
Ability Recharge Modifier doesn’t work properly. Not Fixed
Lack of Modifiers for Jump/Deepstrike range. Also lack of modifiers for any modification in regards to jump. Not Fixed
Lack of Modifier Types in regards to abilities : Ability Damage , Can’t buff or nerf an individual ability. Not Fixed
Lack of a Modifier that increases reinforce speed squad leaders , current ones do not. Not Fixed
Lack of Modifiers that buff specific weapons in a squad. WeaponType affects the blueprint which means that the stat alteration is permanent for the duration of the match. Not Fixed
SOB : Act of Faith : Ascension: hard coded ability can’t be replicated or edited outside of editing the summoned entities. Not Fixed
Dark Eldar : Top bar is entirely hard coded , nothing can be added nor can it be replicated.Unkown
Necron : UI Tooltip is hard coded to only display power , even if another resource is assigned to their units , it won’t be displayed in game. This is connected to the uses_requisition switch on the race bp. Not Fixed
No proper map editor that properly handles air pathing for maps. Unkown
Inability to set hardpoint priority on units. This creates situations where units with multiple weapons of varying ranges get stuck using only the weapon with the longest range unless manually microed. Not Fixed

Scar Issues :

Scar crashes occur when an objective is killed via high levels of burst damage or abilities. Fixed
Soulstorm Campaign : Lack of a MetaMap function that fetches whatever table holds the deep strike units. This creates the weird situation where even though scripted maps are possible , deepstrike units will not be deployed since units on scripted maps have to be spawned manually , but they will also be considered lost since the end of match isn’t finding their Squad IDs.Unkown
Stronghold Objectives : Increasing game speed can cause issues with objectives. Fixed
Inability to generate scar logs on multiplayer making debugging multiplayer maps a pain.Not Fixed
Scar forgetting registered functions after those are loaded through an import function via an if clause.Unkown

Documentation

The sheer majority of t functions in the function_list_ai file have no description so we don’t know what they really do. Furthermore they use C++’s data types in terms of function arguments and returns which are not applicable for scripting.

As you can see, even some basic bugs, like deepstrike not restricting properly, have not been fixed. Until they do, we do not have much faith in DE’s ability to make modding easier for us.

Modding tools

There have been no additional modding tools or fixes to existing modding tools as far as we can tell. In fact, most of the current modding tools dont load in DE, because they forgot to add a pipeline file from Dark Crusade, and you need to do that manually if you want to get them to work… Take that as you will.

In general the modding tools look exactly the same, with the only benefit being that for the map editor, you dont need to transfer files over to Dark Crusade and back to work on Soulstorm maps.

Ways in Which DE is worse than Legacy when it comes to playing with mods (both player and modder perspective)

Player Perspective

The new UI - There has been some weird information floating around the new UI, so I am going to give our perspective on it, and why I do not believe it's up to the mods to fix this.

The 3 pictures below showcase the base soulstorm UI vs the new DE UI. As you can see, base soulstorm looks like it was made for widescreen, things are a bit wider than they are tall, and there is a bit of dead room in the center box to make up for the extra wideness, but overall it works pretty well in my opinion.
DE on the other hand feels like it is designed for 4:3 and has not been properly adapted to wide screen. The 3rd picture was taken at 1600:1200 resolution, and interestingly enough, that awkward gap is gone, and it looks identical to the modded UI picture, which we will get into a little bit later. In general, I strongly recommend you play around with the resolution in DE to see how low effort their fixes to the resolution at different UI scales really are.
Picture 1 - base SS UI.
Picture 2 - DE UI at widescreen scale.
Picture 3 - DE UI at 4:3 scale.
Now lets compare the modded UI that relic is claiming is our job to fix. The first picture is the Crucible UI in Soulstorm, and the second one is in DE.
As you can see, they look nothing alike, the modded UI has a bar above the center, and more buttons on the right side. The DE UI looks suspiciously identical to the base DE UI at 4:3 scale.
Lets also compare a faction not in the base game with a completely custom UI. As you can see in pictures 3 and 4, whilst the UI now looks visually the same, the DE one is noticeably squished to fit a 4:3 scale, even in soulstorm it worked completely fine on a wide screen. Also changing the resolution doesn't do anything here, as the UI gets even more squished, even if you change your resolution to 4:3 before starting the mod.
Also, when you 4:3 the base game, you can click outside of the UI on the left and right of the screen and it works just fine, but for the modded one, you cannot issue any orders anywhere on the left or right of the UI, where the black borders are.
Picture 1 - Soulstorm Crucible UI.
Picture 2 - DE Crucible UI.
Picture 3 - Fully Custom faction Soulstorm
Picture 4 - Fully custom faction DE
On top of all of that, there are also many cases of base game UI/icons overriding mod ones. This goes against the whole point of mods, if they hardcode base game features or make them override mod files, that is not mod friendly, it's the opposite.

Units phasing through each other. It is a bit difficult to explain why this is such a big deal, so please stick with me here.

Here is the same engagement in DE vs SS in crucible. In the DE one, the devastators get destroyed despite having a great concave and forcing the orks through a choke point. The ork units just phase through each other and all 70 orks are able to hit the devastators all at once.
In SS, only like 20-30 orks are able to hit the devastators at once, unless you stutter step them forward, making it a much more even fight, where positioning actually matters.
Note that this is not a pathfinding difference between the games, in both cases the orks had trouble getting on the bridge with just an attack move, and get jittering back and forth, so in both cases I had to do the same number of clicks to get them to move into position and then attack.
Redoing the fight with 3 shootas and 2 slugga squads behind, in SS the sluggas are stuck behind as you expect until enough shootas die to let the sluggas trickle through. In DE they just phase through the shootas and destroy the devastators in seconds.
This also brings up a different issue. Commanders are balanced with their small hitbox being part of their advantage, only so many melee units can hit them at the same time. In picture 5 the brother campaign got killed in 3 seconds because all the sluggas could attack him at once due to the lack of collision.
Picture 1 - DE fight, devastators get wrecked by the fact that all 70 orks are able to shoot them at the same time.
Picture 2 - SS fight, much more even fight, as many of the units are stuck behind unless the ork player stutter steps them forward.
Picture 3 - DE fight, with 2 sluggas positioned behind 3 shootas.
Picture 4 - SS fight, with 2 sluggas positioned behind 3 shootas.
Picture 5 - DE, way more melee units are able to get onto the commander and attack him at the same time compared to SS.
So why is this such a big deal? Well, apart from this completely breaking multiplayer balance, even single player content is affected in some major ways.
The orks stronghold is designed to send massive waves at you down a central path, giving you the feeling of smartly defending against a dumb, but unrelenting tide. But now with the orks not getting stuck on each other, that defence is much more difficult if not outright impossible on higher difficulties. Many other strongholds with a lot of enemy units such as Sisters and IG will also suffer from this.
The Survival map is similar, the later waves are balanced by the fact that they can get stuck on each other and smart positioning of your defences can deal with them.
Furthermore, this is not something people can just agree not to abuse, this will happen naturally, especially with ranged and melee infantry.
Additionally, units that phase through each other will sometimes get irreversibly stuck on pieces of terrain. This leman russ is stuck on the LP and will not move for anything.

This appears to be inconsistent and map dependent, on some maps they will phase right through the listening post and not have any problems, on others they will stop like this.
Our best guess is that some maps have defined the space under the listening post differently in terms of pathing. We have encountered this kind of bug when making maps, the catch is, normally the unit wouldn't be able to get into the space of a LP to trigger it, but with the clipping it seemingly can. I have had multiple cases of leman russes backing up or moving over the listening post completely.

The Fog. Currently there is no way to get rid of the fog as far as we know. This makes big maps or strongholds extremely difficult to play.
AI on lower difficulties. We have received multiple reports that for Crucible the AI on easy difficulty is significantly harder in DE than in SS. This is very difficult to test or get concrete evidence for, or to even figure out why it's much harder.

Base soulstorm vs base DE easy difficulty AI. Seems to be doing the exact same build order, no differences.
Crucible SS vs Crucible DE. There were some minor changes in how the game played out, but nothing that would indicate a major increase in difficulty on easy difficulty. (this was done through loading crucible from the SS folder, whether there is a significant difference if Crucible is installed directly into DE still needs to be tested)

Units not displaying invisibility properly. The visual that shows if a unit is in stealth appears to be broken. There are a number of such visual issues with DE, but this is the most impactful one gameplay wise, since it's not obvious that this is a visual glitch.

As shown below. Units will not seem like they are stealthed to the player, but they are actually in stealth.

Modders Perspective

Harder to find the right files or figure out which game something belongs to. Modding any dow game is already very confusing, but for DE, they dumped a lot of the different files from the games into the same folder. For example, the single player folder now contains all maps for Dow, WA, DC and SS, with no indication of which files belong to which part. Even in legacy games figuring out which files are relevant and which ones don't do anything is a massive pain, and now that everything has been mashed together, figuring out what is what has become exponentially more difficult.
Many of the existing modding tools no longer work. If we were given new/improved mod tools, this wouldn't be an issue, but what is the incentive to figure out how to make these tools work in DE when modding it is going to be the same as the existing pipeline that has worked for the past 20 years and that everyone knows?

Conclusion

For those who want to play Crucible in DE, we cannot in good faith recommend it over soulstorm, even if it was free. The lack of collision completely upending any semblance of balance, where you can now lose your entire army to 1 AOE blast because they all decided to clump together. The UI being very broken, and Fog making viewing or playing big battles a pain (which was meant to be the point of having increased performance, to see big battles in action.) Means that we cannot recommend it in its current state to those wishing to play Crucible. If you are looking to increase performance or decrease crashes in legacy DOW, there is a performance patch that can help you do that. https://www.moddb.com/mods/soulstorm-overdrive-performance-patch/downloads

As a modding team, we do not see ourselves moving to modding DE at the moment. They would need to prove that they are willing to listen and fix bugs that have been plaguing the modding community, and help make/improve the mod tools, so we dont have to work with the same clunky tool that we had 20 years ago. Right now there are only a few minor positives to moving to DE, and multiple major negatives, so on balance we will continue modding legacy DOW until DE is up to scratch.

Similarly, we will not be making DE specific changes to the mod. We were promised seamless mod support by relic, so if something doesn’t work specifically in DE, that's on them to fix. Now if we had to change things because of an improvement to the logic or operation of the game, that would be a different story, but most of the bugs from a backend perspective have not been fixed, and those that have didn't cause problems with running Crucible. DE was able to handle a lot of changes that Crucible made, especially to the campaign that I was sure wouldn't work or cause problems, but they don’t. So relic claiming that they need the modders to fix things like the UI and they can't fix it on their end is absurd. They definitely can, don’t let them move the goalpost.

Lastly, I would like to remind everyone that if you are unhappy with the state of DE, the best way to get your voice heard is to vote with your wallet -
If you have not purchased DE, write to Relic, explaining what interested you in their product, why you ended up deciding not to buy it, and what they need to change for you to consider purchasing it.
If you have purchased DE, consider refunding it and writing to Relic detailing why you chose to refund it, and what needs to be done for you to consider buying it again.
If you let it sit in your library waiting for them to fix it, you are sending a mixed message, they already have your money, what incentive do they have now to improve things?