Campaign map in-depth editing

[Sirlion]

Hi, I've been messing around with IWTE for a bit in the hopes to understand a bit more of the geography.db which is currently my main objective. I want to shape my campaign map in great detail and make it as realistic as possible. To this end, I want to modify the geography to make battlemaps look more natural and have the correct props in the right place. Lighting is also a big factor.

So right now I'm a bit confused and I hope you guys can provide some assistance.

1 - How can I open .lighting files in order to change light colour, fog distance and fog colour? I cant seem to find anything related to this anywhere.

2 - Geography.db: I read the brief tutorial made by Muizer, however there are still some things that are unclear to me. I want to do something relatively simple: I need to populate the bottom of the mountains with a patch of forest, and their summit as well, since right now all I see is a big chunk of rock which gradually shifts into gravel and then sand \ small grass and this is more appropriate for semi arid than mediterranean.
I understand by the tutorial that features such as this can change position and have a different type of terrain attached to one another but I really am not sure of what I should touch to make that happen.

3 - Linked to the above, I would also like to make it so that specific rocks and foliage is present only near rivers. Is this possible?

[makanyane]

Hi, I've been messing around with IWTE for a bit in the hopes to understand a bit more of the geography.db which is currently my main objective. I want to shape my campaign map in great detail and make it as realistic as possible. To this end, I want to modify the geography to make battlemaps look more natural and have the correct props in the right place. Lighting is also a big factor.

So right now I'm a bit confused and I hope you guys can provide some assistance.

1 - How can I open .lighting files in order to change light colour, fog distance and fog colour? I cant seem to find anything related to this anywhere.

IWTE - "Specials" tab at the far right - "Edit lighting files" button - Distance RGB should be the fog colour - the other RGB's affect the cast light (I think)

2 - Geography.db: I read the brief tutorial made by Muizer, however there are still some things that are unclear to me. I want to do something relatively simple: I need to populate the bottom of the mountains with a patch of forest, and their summit as well, since right now all I see is a big chunk of rock which gradually shifts into gravel and then sand \ small grass and this is more appropriate for semi arid than mediterranean.
I understand by the tutorial that features such as this can change position and have a different type of terrain attached to one another but I really am not sure of what I should touch to make that happen.

Tends to need trial and error I'm afraid.
in IWTE - Veg/GeogDB tab - Read/edit geography.db - select climate then either;
G-Hardness_To_BGT tab - and perhaps where it's got 'rock' ground type in bottom corner switch that to forest_sparse... and see what happens -

alternatively you could use Vegetation_distribution tab and add some 'forest' to the 'rock' ground type

To get more/less variation as to where the battle-map groundtypes turn up, you can tweak the values in SGT_To_G-Hardness, that's related to the campaign map ground types that the battle map sits on - battle map = 9 ground_types pixels so you might have a mix of types in one battle map.
The 'gs' fade-in/median/std dev columns are the ones that affect the placement of the battle map ground types.

It can be quite hard to work out which battle map ground types you're actually seeing and why - if simple experiments don't get you what you want I'd suggest - make sure whole area of campaign map is temporarily fixed to the one climate and one ground type - colour each of your battlemap ground textures a silly colour & preferably write text on it about what it's meant to be e.g. sand, gravel etc (if I can find my texture files I did that to I'll post them)

3 - Linked to the above, I would also like to make it so that specific rocks and foliage is present only near rivers. Is this possible?

mangroves and water-cover I think are meant to turn up in those areas by default - try adding your rocks foliage to those groups by 'Edit Vegetation.db' select climate and season, but also make sure a % of them is applied in the veg distribution in the geography file.

If you've worked out which battlemap ground type is turning up along the rivers you can also add specific vegetation types only to that ground type in the vegetation_distribution table. 'cactii' don't tend to be used in vanilla so that's useful to hi-jack...
'long_grass' 'grass' and 'small_shrubs' I don't think ever appear even if you try to apply them, all the other ones like 'large_rocks' 'small_rocks' you can adapt to only turn up on the battlemap ground_types you want


Vegetation doesn't have to match the thing described - e.g. you could put trees in small_rocks... The thing to watch when you do that is if the vegetation is large - make sure that it's got 'yes' to Tallveg in the Season table - otherwise it'll only show up when you're close to it...
and if you need troops to avoid walking through it put it's diameter in the 'radius' box.

have fun... send pics

[Sirlion]

Hi, I would need to add a new climate in the climate list inside descr_geography_new.db, but I'm unable to find a way to do so. How would I go about it? There's no option to export the db to txt so I cant edit the list directly.

Alternatively, I thought about using the climate "unused2" as a substitute, but the game keeps crashing without any specific error message whenever I try to use that entry, even with my own textures and models. So is it unusable?

[makanyane]

We haven't added a function to add a new climate because we don't think you can successfully if you read the thread with the 'tutorial' including wilddog's comments, you'll see the issue, we think the climate names are hardcoded - they're definitely in the .exe in 'text' form.

That thread goes on to discuss various people's success or not with Unused2 - I've used it successfully (it's 'The Neck' swamp area in the released Westeros 1.0 mod). Points to look at, check it's in your mods data/text/climates.txt file. Maybe check the colour, I've seen two different colours used for it in descr_climates.txt - the Westeros one uses;
colour 220 242 0
(which obviously has to match the colour used in map_climates.tga) Though I've no idea why that would affect it...

[Sirlion]

Much appreciated. I've used Tropical in the end, worked flawlessly as expected. I'll take a look at that thread and see if I can get some results.