Hello, when I was setting up my Rise of the Witch King to have both the Age of the Ring and Edain mods to play online with friends, there were a lot of small issues I was able to solve by searching all over the internet. I see some people have had similar issues to mine from the many forum posts here, so I figured I would share my personal guide for when I set the games up on friends' computers. Hopefully you will find solutions to any of your issues here:
ROTWK
This guide starts off assuming you already have LOTR BFME ROTWK installed and working.
Firstly we have the ROTWK mod-patch 2.02 v7 installed which makes it so ROTWK does NOT require a CD to be mounted in order to play the game.
On top of that, we have The Age of the Ring mod installed, which uses mod-patch 2.02 and as a result also
does not need a CD mounted. To have AotR working, you need to have ROTWK be on patch 2.02 v7 (using the patch switcher),
and in the T3A launcher you need to "hook" ROTWK (at the top of the T3A launcher near "file",
click hook and click ROTWK to check it off). This makes it so that running
lotrbfme2ep1.exe (the game executable file found in the game's installation folder) opens up the T3A launcher instead of the game itself, so then from
the launcher you can run ROTWK and get into the game from there in order to play
multiplayer with the mod installed. In summary: be on patch 2.02 v7, have T3A "hook"
ROTWK, and then open the AotR mod from its desktop icon which will open the T3a launcher
so you can click to open ROTWK from there.
NOTE: Above two games require the programs to be run AS ADMINISTRATOR.
So lotrbfme2ep1.exe needs to be run as administrator, but that can only be called by
the T3A launcher if T3A is also run as administrator. So to have it work without extra
clicks, go to the ROTWK install location, find
lotrbfme2ep1.exe, set its compatability properties to "run as administrator". Do the
same to T3A (for me, "C:\Program Files (x86)\Revora\T3AOnline\").
They also require Edain to be disabled (done so in Edain launcher).
~~~BUT RUNNING AS ADMIN CAUSES PROBLEMS FOR EDAIN DISC MOUNTING~~~
Edain does not use ROTWK mod-patch 2.02
To use Edain, simply bring up the 2.02 patch switcher, and switch to 2.01.
2.01 requires a CD to be mounted in order to play the game, so mount theSmokingMan .mds thing using the program "winCDemu".
(Shouldn't need to also mount the .mdf, but sometimes I just do that anyways because idk?). Then change the lotrbfme2ep1.exe (in the game's installation folder) to NOT run as
administrator (reverse of above). You also need to "unhook" it from the T3A launcher. (Open T3A launcher, in the "hook" drop down, uncheck ROTWK).
When on patch 2.01, not hooked to T3A, with theSmokingMan mounted, and not running
as admin, Edain should work!! -Note: The Edain launcher is seemingly hard-coded to run as admin
so I have to open the Edain launcher, make sure the mod is endabled, close the
launcher (optional), then manually run lotrbfme2ep1.exe (by going to the ROTWK install folder and double clicking that file, instead of clicking play from the Edain
launcher).
NOTE: Edain requires me to change the 2.02 file "!new202music.big" to
"new202music.big" in order to not overwrite edain music to play the game. Not sure
if I have to change this back as well when I want to not-play Edain? (Would also
have to do this to "!vanilla202music.big" if using that music from the 2.02
patch switcher).
Been told everyone uses GameRanger to play Edain online, so that's what my friends and I use.
The forums here have suggested that Edain DOES work with T3A by hooking, but I haven't been able to get it to. Maybe someone else who has got it working can comment how they did it?
(I make T3A hook to ROTWK. Since Edain needs to be run not as administrator, I also set T3A's properties to run not as administrator. T3A not
running as admin has its problems when you try to join online, which is what I want to use it for).
I have read that also apparently I can just replace the game.dat file in the install folder while on patch 2.01 with the one
from 2.02 in order to not need to mount a CD. Issue is there's like 3 different
game.dat things and I don't fully understand how they change when using the patch
switcher so I might just be approaching it all wrong because I can't get it to work. Oh well.
If you have comments or questions please share them. Hopefully I can help anyone with trouble. I've got this working on like 5 different computers by now, and we all successfully play online together.
Edited by Electro226, 12 September 2019 - 08:49 PM.
