TMO 2.0.0 PATCH NOTES

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*****TMO 2.0.0*****
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tl;dr: Mod now has compatibility with multiple forks as they've popped up and represents lots of our community and the broader playerbase. Also I'm pretty sure TNO is just straight up dying at this point and will prioritize things accordingly.
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Well, it's been a while! Apologies for the absence. On top of being tied down finishing Omsk for the 2WRW guys for the first half of the year the poor health of TNO itself has been a deterring factor in continuing to work for this. Since the last time we had an update TNO has largely become a shell of its former self and multiple fan forks have appeared. The sheer negativity that surrounds the mod now is staggering and frankly quite disheartening, as someone that spent a lot of time trying to make it play better over the years. For a while it felt like trying to build a house on quicksand. With the nearly unanimously negative reception to their plans to remove all current playable African content I think the writing was on the wall with that one.

###PLANS MOVING FORWARD###

So after a lot of pondering: the contingency plan is to simply make this mod compatible with multiple fan forks, and treating base TNO itself as a fork among many. Primarily we now have full support for TNO:Requiem (former 2WRW) and TNO:Rises Again (the Atlantropa restoration mod). I also added other forks as dependencies and will add more if they're requested by our community. This took a lot of work but as the community fractures it means that most segments of the playerbase can be tended to.

"Will this make the mod incompatible with regular TNO?"
No, it should still work just fine. Our content will still overlay on top of theirs and I'll keep around the Antarctica folders and other exclusive content. I just don't personally have any interest in maintaining future updates, and when I asked for help literally everyone just told me to move on from it. I did try but with their plans being questionable and the community being largely disinterested in them it seems like a good move to simply keep it on the backburner.
We here at team TMO wish TNO itself the best of luck going forward with their creative vision, and that their fans enjoy the content they put out.

###PORTRAITS AND HOUSEKEEPING###

I sifted through nearly a thousand folders to update all portraits to work with our new content plan and hopefully there'll be minimal glitches and other issues. This was a difficult task, but hopefully it'll all be good going forward. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but TNO having a full-on schism is something I can't control.

Some were ingored because they've been in TNO rework hell for a substantial part of my adult life, can't be played as, will likely never get playable content, and oftentimes were made so that a now defunct skeleton can interact with another skeleton that will have an interaction with a playable tag.

###TNO REQUIEM PORTRAITS###

First and foremost, brought things up to speed with the bulk of the Steam release's contents. Also tried to account for most new things, but expect some growing pains. I'll try and fix things up when I (hopefully) get more free time around the holidays.

BLR - Pyotr Masherov - New portrait.
DEN - Anker Jørgensen - New portrait.
DEN - Arne Munch Petersen - New portrait.
DEN - Poul Hartling - New portrait.
DEN - Soeren Kam - New portrait.
DOM - Pupo Roman - New portrait.
JAP - Mineichi Koga - New portrait.
JAP - Shigeyoshi Inoue - New portrait. Also fixed all the ones that were renamed a million years ago, sorry for taking forever.
KMC - Vasily Arkhipov - New portrait.
KMC - Yevgeny Ivanov - New portrait.
OMO - Father Men - 1970s portrait added. I'll fix all the other portraits later. Are there even enough DQ priestesses for this?
OMS - Mikhail Khronopulo - New portrait.
OMS - Vladimir Chernavin - New portrait. Will do post-apoc things later as those are subject to change + no one bothered to save the animation template.

New and missing content will be tackled later, this update was mostly just about making sure all the old stuff actually functions.

###RISES AGAIN PORTRAITS/ASSETS###

Fork has been made compatible using assets from a backup of TMO from 2021 that I had saved. Expect some growing pains here too, but this will account for all content in RA that's cut from future versions of TNO, as well as accounting for the different naming conventions TNO had back in those days. Lots of stuff like event pics will be kinda borked but going forward I'll try to at least have key things like Russia work as intended. Furthermore, several old tags have been reinstated.

AMK - Robert Shelton - I don't even know if this is used, I just wanted an excuse to use this portrait.
AMK - Bobby Seale - What are you waiting for? Launch Fall Rockwell already!

##CLOSING NOTES##

Sorry for not updating in forever, I needed some time away from the hobby.
I hope this multi-forking scheme will prove to be a successful solution to the problems caused by TNO's fragmentation, and I hope you'll have fun playing this mod going forward.
Hoping to get back to working on that TFR submod over the holidays, that just seems like a barrel of fun.