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Thread: What triggers the appearance of ambient buildings?

  1. #1

    Default What triggers the appearance of ambient buildings?

    I have some issues with settlement crashes and a near-total absence of ambient structures in battlemaps in an existing mod and I have next to no experience with battlemap editing and no idea whether there is anything to troubleshoot in relation to the battlemaps themselves, so I would appreciate any feedback.

    Is there, for example, a positive action needed for a particular ambient type to appear on a particular battlemap? Conversely, why are flat battlefields not jam-packed with ambient stuff, such as overlapping farms, stonehenges, etc? Apart from culture, what else determines whether a particular ambient type is triggered and is there a probability attached to its appearance in relation to other stuff? Is there anything known about the underlying mechanics?

  2. #2

    Default Re: What triggers the appearance of ambient buildings?

    Its all based on the edits you do in IWTE... here, according to what models you have in the apposite folder, you will be required to edit the various files of a given structure to be sure they match the culture you want to target...

    Moreover, about battlemaps, you could experiment via the battle editor... and there are the custom_tiles you may want to experiment too...

    But in due time the IWTE makers will provide extensive explanation


  3. #3

    Default Re: What triggers the appearance of ambient buildings?

    The mod I have issues with, as far as I know does not have significantly altered settlements. In any case ambient stuff does not work even with the vanilla models. I do not think it has anything to do with the models themselves. The mod, however, has a completely changed map, it is a completely different map from vanilla, so I wonder whether the map is missing whatever is supposed to trigger the appearance of ambient stuff.

    The battle editor was also not working in the mod when I had tried to make tests that way, so I cannot test anything with it.

    Just in case this was not clear, I am not using the IWTE tool nor am I editing anything. This is an old mainstream mod, in which nothing ambient appears in custom battles (apart from vegetation), including no settlements of any kind. Custom sieges are not possible and there seem to be few if any ambient buildings apart from settlements appearing in campaign battles. This is also the case when trying to revert to vanilla files for settlements and other ambient buildings. The original modders have all left and no one knows how this happened. My guess is that the modded map is missing some triggers to enable the appearance of all this stuff. If the IWTE tool would be useful in resolving this, then I would install it. I assume something triggers or enables the appearance of buildings such as farms or ruins or settlements on maps in general. What is it? Is it a number one has to put in a certain line of a certain file about a specific tile of the stratmap? What should I be looking for?
    Last edited by Geoffrey of Villehardouin; December 31, 2017 at 10:35 AM.

  4. #4

    Default Re: What triggers the appearance of ambient buildings?

    Well, given to what you said, definitively you need to explore and examine the "settlements" folder of this mod, but you'll have to use IWTE too to edit/change and make things appear.. all ambient buildings are part of this section, hence the need comes to this specific folder, basically...

    Look at the tutorials too, and you'll be receiving other answers too from the moderators.


  5. #5

    Default Re: What triggers the appearance of ambient buildings?

    No moderator, but as far as I know we sadly cant control when and where ambient settlements appear, the only thing we CAN do is provide the game with the necessary files. As rafmc pointed out they are inside the settlements folder. Each culture has its own folder, for the northern_european ones for example you should be looking at this path: data\settlements\north_european\ambient_settlements. In it you will find folders that contain the .worldfiles (the files you can edit with IWTE, like terrain, models, etc) for each ambient settlement.

    Not all of them, only a few select ones, will actually "randomly" spawn on your battlefields though, stuff like the lakes_a/b/c, the wooden_stakes_a/b, the watch_tower_a and many more are battle-editor only, you can use them to create custom maps/historic battles.
    Some of the ones that WILL spawn are:
    - small_farm_a, medium_farm_a, large_farm_a (huge_farm_a is battle editor only)
    - small_country_estate_a, medium_country_estate_a, large_country_estate_a
    - small_monestry_a, medium_monestry_a, large_monestry_a
    - small_hamlet_a, medium_hamlet_a, large_hamlet_a
    - henge_a, henge_b

    At one point I thought they are related to whats build on the campaign map in that region, ie if you have a church/cathedral build in a city and you fight a battle within the region of that city you have a chance of one of the monestry_a ambient_settlements spawning on the battlefield. However I somewhat disproved that theory when I added new ambient_buildings to EBII (we had no ambient_buildings showing up before either because EBII uses all custom names for their cultures so the vanilla ones obviously didnt work anymore, that could also be whats going on with your mod, what are the internal names for your cultures?), I started adding the farms back in by adding new worldfiles for them, the important bit is the .worldpkgs of your ambient settlements, the category in it is crucial whether its one of the ambient settlements that will appear or not, those category names are hardcoded, look at the worldpkgs of the working ambient settlements I listed above.. back to what triggers ambient settlements though, after I added the farms back to EBII I looked at cities without food production buildings built on the campaign map, played siege battles on them and yet got farms spawning all around the settlement for some reason, some were even overlapping eventhough I sticked to vanilla terrain size for the worldterrain files... and on the other hand I played siege battles on cities with farms built in them but no sign of the allegedly corresponding ambient settlement on the battle map. So yeah, once I had added ambient settlements with category entries from the ones above we now have them show up on battlefields every now and then in EBII, the exact triggers are hardcoded though, unless mak/wd have found out more by now? nudge nudge

    edit: sorry for the somewhat messy post, just wanted to put my thoughts on the topic down.

  6. #6

    Default Re: What triggers the appearance of ambient buildings?

    mhm, this degree of randomness seems inevitable, then...

    Btw, thanks for the precise explanations, again!!


  7. #7

    Default Re: What triggers the appearance of ambient buildings?

    Quote Originally Posted by Geoffrey of Villehardouin View Post
    The mod I have issues with, as far as I know does not have significantly altered settlements. In any case ambient stuff does not work even with the vanilla models. I do not think it has anything to do with the models themselves. The mod, however, has a completely changed map, it is a completely different map from vanilla, so I wonder whether the map is missing whatever is supposed to trigger the appearance of ambient stuff.
    A. which mod is it? I could download and have a look...
    B. because the 'wrong' ambient settlements are really hard to get rid of I did a mini mod that turns them all into little invisible stones - if you're not seeing anything then the mod might be using that - if it is the mod folder will have a lot of very small files in the /settlements/culture/ambient_settlements folders

    The battle editor was also not working in the mod when I had tried to make tests that way, so I cannot test anything with it.
    most usual cause of the battle editor crashing on load is that the mod's leaders' names are messed up - run this; http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downl...o=file&id=3493
    on it to check.

    Just in case this was not clear, I am not using the IWTE tool nor am I editing anything. This is an old mainstream mod, in which nothing ambient appears in custom battles (apart from vegetation), including no settlements of any kind. Custom sieges are not possible and there seem to be few if any ambient buildings apart from settlements appearing in campaign battles. This is also the case when trying to revert to vanilla files for settlements and other ambient buildings. The original modders have all left and no one knows how this happened. My guess is that the modded map is missing some triggers to enable the appearance of all this stuff. If the IWTE tool would be useful in resolving this, then I would install it. I assume something triggers or enables the appearance of buildings such as farms or ruins or settlements on maps in general. What is it? Is it a number one has to put in a certain line of a certain file about a specific tile of the stratmap? What should I be looking for?
    There's nothing particular about the map that's needed to trigger ambients, renamed cultures will get rid of most of them, but there's some that aren't culture specific and will turn up regardless, game also occasionally seems to ignore things that should be culture specific and sticks them in anyway - hence the ambient nerfing mini-mod I mentioned above.


    Anyway as a general thing - what controls if the ambient should appear or not is entirely within the contents of the .worldpkgdesc file - it doesn't matter what the file/folder name is, so being in the 'north_european' folder is completely irrelevant, CA and most modders have put things in culture named folders, but unless you look at all the pkg's you won't know for sure...

    And no neither me or wilddog have gotten any further about working out what causes them to spawn in specific places.

  8. #8

    Default Re: What triggers the appearance of ambient buildings?

    Amazing feedback, many thanks to all of you. I still need to do some checks. The mod is Broken Crescent. As far as I know it was never possible to play custom sieges, certainly not since version 2.3 - and as far as I remember I have never seen ambient buildings (except around settlements and forts), and rarely ever in custom battles (except maybe ruins). I should not think the mod uses makanyane's submod because it predates TATW but maybe some similar solution had been invented in parallel or perhaps makanyane's submod was added sometime down the line.

    Unfortunately, I could not test with the Battle Editor that is not working but I disabled all ambient buildings in the hope the vanilla versions would be used and this had no effect in custom battles but then I am not certain whether I should be seeing them in custom battles without adding them manually. Perhaps you can now see my unfortunate predicament. I would be grateful if Makanyane could check this in some other way.

    Edit: I saw today for what may be the first time ambient buildings not associated with a settlement. They were in a tile next to a settlement. Usually they only appear in a tile that contains a settlement. Invariably they are smallish farms and ruins. Maybe there is nothing wrong with the mod. It is possible that ambient buildings do not appear out in the countryside unless there is a high degree of development. Also the fact that it is only small farms or ruins may relate to the fact that buildings are expensive in Broken Crescent so that progress with construction is slow, just a guess, maybe it is just chance.
    Last edited by Geoffrey of Villehardouin; January 14, 2018 at 09:09 PM.

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