Custom generic settlements?

[*Helios*]

Hey all,

I've been trying to use leo's custom generic settlements for Eriador in a personal mod, but I'm having trouble actually locating the files . The Eriador faction uses the same culture (northern_european) as Dale, but the two faction settlements have different strat_map and battle models. Also, if I use IWTE to peek into the settlement files in the northern_european folder, all of them seem to be assigned to the Dale faction. What should I do?

[makanyane]

A lot of the third_age/leo's stuff is in the 'Unique_settlements' folder. Try that.

The thing you need to look at is the .worldpkgdesc for each of the settlements - you need to know the actual internal name of the faction you're looking for - check the data/text files - Eriador looks like 'turks' in my version. So if you find a pkg that is for northern_european culture and turks faction that'll be the stuff they'd build...

There is a complication! Where unique settlements aren't upgradeable for one reason or another (EDB conditions) then the settlement will always stay as that of the "faction_creator" in descr_strat.txt - some of the turks settlements look like they have timurids as creator so you'd need to look for those.

Must admit I can't find them either at the moment - but not sure if the version I have is Leo's or straight TaTW - have you tried asking him in his mod thread which ones they are?

[*Helios*]

Thanks for the reply!

I did check the faction (Yes, Eriador is assigned to the turks) and the Unique settlements folder, and I will go ask in his thread now. However, I might be one step closer to the answer.

I checked the generic european .worldpkgdesc with IWTE, and saw that the textures correspond to the ones I want (Eriador). Dale also uses northern_european culture and is the faction_creator for its settlements. This begs the question though: What decides if the settlement battle map uses the Eriador version versus the Dale version?

[Withwnar]

What decides if the settlement battle map uses the Eriador version versus the Dale version?

The "faction" entry in .worldpkgdesc. If a large_town was built by Dale (scotland) then the game will search for and use the model whose .worldpkgdesc has these entries:

Type = large_town
Culture = northern_european
Faction = scotland

For Eriador (turks) it would be the same except Faction=turks there. If no such .worldpkgdesc exists with all of those entries then it will use the one with:

Type = large_town
Culture = northern_european
Faction = unused (or "any"?)

...meaning "faction is irrelevant, if the builder was northern_european culture then it's a match".

Vanilla TATW and my copy of Leo's submod (which might be out of date) don't have a .worldpkgdesc like that last one but vanilla M2TW does and so that is what is used. i.e. Vanilla TATW uses the vanilla M2TW model for both Eriador and Dale, while Leo's uses the vanilla M2TW model for Eriador and his own custom one for Dale.

If you want Eriador to use Leo's Dale model then create a new .worldpkgdesc that has:

Type = large_town
Culture = northern_european
Faction = turks

...and likewise for other settlement types. It doesn't matter what the files are named, nor where you put them so long as they're somewhere under the data\settlements folder. e.g. Use IWTE to edit (change faction) of Leo's dale_large_town_a.worldpkgdesc file and click OK to save the changes. It creates a file named dale_large_town_a_wd.worldpkgdesc in the same folder: rename it to eriador_large_town_a.worldpkgdesc (just to make it clearer what this file is for - this step is optional).

Pretty sure there's a tutorial here explaining all of this. Maybe even written by Leo himself.

NOTE: just to expand on what Mak said... "built by" means whichever faction most recently upgraded the settlement. If nobody has since campaign start then the faction = faction_creator from descr_strat. If a settlement has been upgraded then faction_creator is now completely irrelevant.

[*Helios*]

Pretty sure there's a tutorial here explaining all of this. Maybe even written by Leo himself.

Hahaha, thank you for your reply, and forgive me if I seemed too ignorant . I did read through his tutorial, but the problem is there is only one .worldpkgdesc in each of the northern_european settlement folders. Each is also assigned to Eriador textures. However, these (custom) generic settlements all look something like this in IWTE:

Type = large_town
Culture = northern_european
Faction = scotland

Meaning they are not assigned to the Eriador faction (turks) in the first place.

Contrary to expectations, the Dale faction (also with northern_european culture) uses vanilla M2TW settlement models.


Unfortunately, I'm not too well-versed in IWTE, so I apologize if I missed another tutorial out there covering this.

Hopefully this clears up my question, I'm sorry for the confusion earlier .

[Withwnar]

Ah, I think I misunderstood what you're trying to do.

I've been trying to use leo's custom generic settlements for Eriador in a personal mod

I thought you meant you're trying to use Leo's custom Dale models for your Eriador. On closer inspection Leo does not have custom Dale models ... his custom .worldpkgdesc files are merely telling the game to use southern_european models (vanilla M2TW) instead of northern_european ones for Dale.

Furthermore, large_town seems to be have been a poor example for me to use. Leo does have custom Eriador models but only for city and large_city (and castle and large_castle). Is it these that you are looking to use in your mod? If so then you'll need to copy across his .animinstances, .world and .worldcollision files for those settlement types into the same folders that he has them in. And you'll also need to copy across all textures that those models and their animations use ... hopefully a tutorial exists to explain how to do that. However, this would make all northern_european cultures use those models, which in vanilla TATW would also include Rohan (milan), so, if you didn't want that, you'd need to use some .worldpkgdesc files to point them to something else (like Leo is pointing Dale to use southern_european).

EDIT: in case you were wondering... what Leo is doing here is replacing/overriding the vanilla M2TW models, by giving those model files the same names and folder locations as the vanilla ones. Any faction who previously was using vanilla M2TW northern_european models will now use his instead. No .worldpkgdesc is needed in this case because there's already one in vanilla M2TW to do that, e.g. data\settlements\north_european\settlements\city\north_european_city_a.worldpkgdesc for the city model.