Expanding range of ship-worthy water?

[Snipafist]

Greetings mappers.

I wanted to expand a bit of ship-capable water around the northwestern coast of Africa to allow the Moors (or any enterprising reconquistadors) to more easily reach the rebel province located on the shore there by boat, and then potentially fight their way inland to Timbuktu rather than having to trek through a long desert (the AI doesn't usually go after either of these two extremely rich provinces, which means the Moors are inevitably canned by the Spanish, Portuguese and Sicilians). How do I go about doing this?

Thanks in advance and +1 rep for any help.

[Socal_infidel]

I believe you need to edit the map_ground_types.tga. If you open that file up you'll a splotch of dark red off the west coas of Africa matching the untraversable Atlantic Ocean color that only opens up once the world_is_round event occurs. Change it (using eyedropper) to a red that you can sail on!

[Gundug]

Backup everything you will change first. Make sure you understand how to create mod folder or file first options as described in the tutorials section of this site.

In data/maps/base you will find the map files you need to work with.

Open map_ground_types.tga and sample the lighter red color that is used for water throughout most of the map. Draw that color over the darker red that represents ocean in the areas where you would like it. Be sure not to draw over any of the land colors - it will help to use the magic wand tool (in Photoshop or similar) to select just the darker red color region to work with.

Delete the map.rwm file, load the game and start a new campaign. If everything is ok, the campaign will load after it rebuilds the map.

Edit: Oops, I was beaten to the post.

[Snipafist]

Thanks for the assistance thus far. It would appear my basic paint application is incapable of modifying TGA files. Any recommendations?

[Gundug]

The Gimp works well, and is free.

http://www.gimp.org/

I find the interface a bit weird to work with, but it's either that or around $500 for the latest version of Photoshop.

[Snipafist]

Excellent. It's working just fine. Thanks for all the help!