Battle Map W.I.P - White Plains

[Flavious]

Progress report: Texturing completed. Now I'm planting trees and placing objects to complete the map. Everything looks great so far, and the White Plains battle map continues to load and play smoothly in Vanilla. New in-game screenshots to come soon!

[MorganH.]

great !! Looking Forward mate !!

[ToonTotalWar]

Progress report: Texturing completed. Now I'm planting trees and placing objects to complete the map. Everything looks great so far, and the White Plains battle map continues to load and play smoothly in Vanilla. New in-game screenshots to come soon!

Nice mate!!! sounds really good

[Flavious]

As promised, here's an update on the battle map, along with some screenshots.
The good: It's almost done, once I get the houses placed properly and tweak deployment zones. It will be a 2 v 2 map. I think the terrain looks varied and impressive, but you be the judge.
The bad: I'm hitting a snag with object placement (putting houses on the map). I've got my buildings appearing nicely, but nowhere near where they're supposed to show up. I'm doing everything exactly as Lord Badger's tutorial says, so I'll have to ask the Lordz for help again on this one -- I'm optimistic, since they've helped me rescue this project several times already. The map plays only in vanilla at the moment, but there's hope that our TAR gurus will be able to make it play inside the mod as well (I think it might just be a matter of some lines added to the mod's localisation file).
The ugly: No stone walls or fences - Very unrealistic for Colonial America, but ETW just doesn't leave us with that modding capability. Same for the trees -- even with the season set to autumn and the appropriate regional climate setting, trees appear in summer foliage. I think they only come in green foliage and bare winter branches. If I can, I'm going to try to get bare trees on this map instead -- that's at least more realistic for the time of year.
Now for some eye-candy (numbers on the captions correspond to spots on the "You Are Here" map, earlier in this thread):


The British diversionary attack crossed here and scaled the hill to attack the Colonials frontally.


Rall's view of the wooded hillside his men had to climb to outflank the Colonials.


#5 - Fisher's Hill, looking toward Chatterton's Hill. Here the British bombarded the Colonials for over an hour with 20 guns.

What do you think?

[Flavious]

One other note: In real life the face of the hill would have been rocky, but the rock would have been covered with scrubby bushes and plants -- ETW's rock and cliff styles don't completely allow this, so the steepest face of the hill ends up looking a bit bare.

[Primergy]

The ugly: No stone walls or fences - Very unrealistic for Colonial America, but ETW just doesn't leave us with that modding capability. Same for the trees -- even with the season set to autumn and the appropriate regional climate setting, trees appear in summer foliage. I think they only come in green foliage and bare winter branches. If I can, I'm going to try to get bare trees on this map instead -- that's at least more realistic for the time of year.

Hey Flavious, did you recieved my Email on the Tree- Topic?

[MorganH.]

Flavious,thats Amazing allready mate ! +rep
Very ,very nice!
Yeah on the autumn colors and the stone fencing,thats a shame,but what can you do without the appropriate modding tools eh ?
No worries, yre doing an incredible job allready man!
Cant wait to see bare trees on this map !!

Regards

[Flavious]

Hi Primergy,
No, I never received any e-mail from you -- try a PM instead?
I tried loading my trees list with the standard tree names, only adding the _winter extension to the names, but then my map appears in game with no trees at all.
So I'm stuck with summer green trees at the moment, but any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated so I can get autumn trees -- or at least bare trees -- onto this map. Thank you!

Latest news: All buildings and objects are now in their proper places and looking excellent -- even props like wheelbarrows and apple barrels. The only slight problem is that a few buildings have a corner just very very slightly elevated above the ground level if you zoom in very close. But I haven't been able to completely fix that, and it looks good from 99 percent of any normal camera view, so I'm going to leave it there. My trees are all exactly in place just where I want them now, too -- but at this point they're still summer trees. Hoping for help/advice to get bare trees of autumn trees onto this map as the finishing touch.
Now it's on to tweaking the deployment zones, and it's finished.

Toon and Morgan H: Give me your e-mail addresses and I can send you the completed map files when completed. Then you can try getting it to play in TAR, and perhaps we can give it a go with a MP session to see what it's like? I will also share the files with the Lordz so they can convert it into a map for NTW if they want.

[ToonTotalWar]

Hi Primergy,
No, I never received any e-mail from you -- try a PM instead?
I tried loading my trees list with the standard tree names, only adding the _winter extension to the names, but then my map appears in game with no trees at all.
So I'm stuck with summer green trees at the moment, but any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated so I can get autumn trees -- or at least bare trees -- onto this map. Thank you!

Latest news: All buildings and objects are now in their proper places and looking excellent -- even props like wheelbarrows and apple barrels. The only slight problem is that a few buildings have a corner just very very slightly elevated above the ground level if you zoom in very close. But I haven't been able to completely fix that, and it looks good from 99 percent of any normal camera view, so I'm going to leave it there. My trees are all exactly in place just where I want them now, too -- but at this point they're still summer trees. Hoping for help/advice to get bare trees of autumn trees onto this map as the finishing touch.
Now it's on to tweaking the deployment zones, and it's finished.

Toon and Morgan H: Give me your e-mail addresses and I can send you the completed map files when completed. Then you can try getting it to play in TAR, and perhaps we can give it a go with a MP session to see what it's like? I will also share the files with the Lordz so they can convert it into a map for NTW if they want.

Just PM us personally and we can receive the map that way

[Flavious]

Here's another little teaser. A pastoral scene from atop Chatterton's Hill. Bare vegetation now in the map -- shrubs look a little frosty for an Indian Summer afternoon, but much better IMHO than the summer versions.


Now for the not-so-good news: I've started playtesting the map in Vanilla, just to experiment and see how units move around on it, etc. Unfortunately, the troops simply refuse to scale the face of Chatterton's Hill, even at the historical spots where they did so.
The movement cursor just changes to an "X" on the terrain, except at the crest and top. If I click the top, the troops just try to march south along (or in) the Bronx River to get to the Dobbs Ferry Road ford near the town. Very realistic, I guess -- I mean, who would climb a hill like that if there's an easier way to do it a little way down the road?
Well, I tried a few of the simpler possible solutions: I changed all the hillside to blue color in blendmap_jpg, in case that might make the units read it as normal instead of rough/slow terrain. No effect. Since the units seem to recognize my roads, I used the blendmap_alpha (which defines the road areas) and drew little nearly invisible roads all over the hillside, in hopes the units might overcome their cowardice and use them. Again, failure.
Now I'm looking at two other options, both of which will take time and (unfortunately!!) would alter the map's faithfulness to its satellite-data-derived heightmap: Fiddle with the terrain_type setting in the map to see if the game might be able to read the hill as passable ground instead of impassable rocky cliffs, or try some manual tweaks of the heightmap to create some "stairsteps" in the hill that let the troops climb but still look realistic. As you can imagine, lots of trial-and-error involved in that to tweak and test, tweak and test.
Does anyone know how flat a hill has to be before ETW units will climb it? I know I've had battles in TAR campaigns with some small, steep and even rocky hills that my troops could at least partly climb. I know we don't want a game where the troops can climb like Spiderman, but the pathfinding seems awfully restrictive in this situation. Any thoughts? Ideas?

[Flavious]

Latest news: Map completed today! Files PMed to Toon & crew to see if it can be made to work with TAR (plays fine in Vanilla). Hopefully we'll all be enjoying it soon in TAR.

[ToonTotalWar]

Latest news: Map completed today! Files PMed to Toon & crew to see if it can be made to work with TAR (plays fine in Vanilla). Hopefully we'll all be enjoying it soon in TAR.

hmm...I get CTD in Vanilla and TAR mod? can you tell me your setup in data folder please?

[Flavious]

Crashing? That's so strange. It's loaded and played flawlessly for me in Vanilla. You need to go into Steam and launch the game from there -- is that what you're doing? Make sure TAR is not running and its scripts are deactivated. Also, when you want to play TAR or your other mods again, you have to move my two map files out of your Data folder and park them somewhere else.

I'll experiment with loading and playing my map again, to make sure it's still OK. I wonder if you need to have all the original source files for the map also in your Data folder, too? I'll try removing them and see if the map still loads. Also, it's always possible there was a problem with my upload or your download -- that has happened before on some of the file hosting sites.

Once you're running it OK in vanilla, we try and see how to get it to work in a mod.

Technical note: Both pack files are in "movie" format at the moment. Lord Badger has said that to get a battle map to work as a mod, the "Talavera" pack file has to be changed in Pack File Manager to "mod" format. But the second "lcmapmod" file must remain in "movie" format. Then some script lines would need to be written/added to make the map load as a mod.

The Blue & Gray modders supplied several custom battle maps with their mod, so it has been done before. I just don't know what they did to make them work that way. Hoping we can get this figured out!

[ToonTotalWar]

Crashing? That's so strange. It's loaded and played flawlessly for me in Vanilla. You need to go into Steam and launch the game from there -- is that what you're doing? Make sure TAR is not running and its scripts are deactivated. Also, when you want to play TAR or your other mods again, you have to move my two map files out of your Data folder and park them somewhere else.

I'll experiment with loading and playing my map again, to make sure it's still OK. I wonder if you need to have all the original source files for the map also in your Data folder, too? I'll try removing them and see if the map still loads. Also, it's always possible there was a problem with my upload or your download -- that has happened before on some of the file hosting sites.

Once you're running it OK in vanilla, we try and see how to get it to work in a mod.

Technical note: Both pack files are in "movie" format at the moment. Lord Badger has said that to get a battle map to work as a mod, the "Talavera" pack file has to be changed in Pack File Manager to "mod" format. But the second "lcmapmod" file must remain in "movie" format. Then some script lines would need to be written/added to make the map load as a mod.

The Blue & Gray modders supplied several custom battle maps with their mod, so it has been done before. I just don't know what they did to make them work that way. Hoping we can get this figured out!

hmm...ok so I need to deactivate every mod in my Vanilla game to get this to work correct?

[Flavious]

You can leave the files for your mods where they are, but you need to make sure the mod scripts are deactivated before you go into Steam and launch ETW.

[Flavious]

Those two pack files are all you need -- even after I deleted my source files from the data folder, the map still loaded and ran fine in Vanilla.
If you have DMUC, be sure to deactivate those files too in the DMUC launcher before you go into Steam. Go to your "Games Library" and launch ETW from there. The Whiteplains map should show up in your list of single player land battles.

[ToonTotalWar]

You can leave the files for your mods where they are, but you need to make sure the mod scripts are deactivated before you go into Steam and launch ETW.

Those two pack files are all you need -- even after I deleted my source files from the data folder, the map still loaded and ran fine in Vanilla.
If you have DMUC, be sure to deactivate those files too in the DMUC launcher before you go into Steam. Go to your "Games Library" and launch ETW from there. The Whiteplains map should show up in your list of single player land battles.

Ok, i will try in Vanilla and deactivate all my units..I really will need help to get this map into TAR mod mate, so can you request the Lordz to help out please?

[Flavious]

Yes, I'll see what help I can get from the Lordz.
In the meantime, here's what my Data folder in ETW looks like now:

http://i830.photobucket.com/albums/z...ure_2aug10.jpg

Hope that helps.

[OneEyeMick]

Gentlemen, Add the map name and description into your mods loc file.

[Flavious]

Gentlemen, Add the map name and description into your mods loc file.

I just tried that. Since the game can handle only one localisation file at a time, I added the following two lines to tar_update.pack/text/usa_localisation.loc (is that the right one?):

battles_description_whiteplains (and on the right hand column) Whiteplains
battles_localised_name_whiteplains (and on the right hand column) Whiteplains

Then I changed the pack file type to "movie" (this is required for the localisation file of a custom map to work), saved it, and placed this and my map mod (now in mod file format, saved as mapmod_WhitePlainsBattle.pack) into the data file.

Then I added this line to near the bottom of my TAR script:

mod mapmod_WhitePlainsBattle.pack

Tried to launch TAR from the launcher, but got CTD.