IWTE - World editing - (General Discussion)

[wilddog]

Still struggling with the rotations from the .anim files. Whenever I put into milkshape I always get a flip at a certain point. Its all tied with Eulers but keeps confusing me. The problem is the .anim rotations seem to start with values for all 3 where they range the full 360 degrees. eg a wooden palisade gate opening starts at binary 0, 192, 128 and rotates to 0, 252, 128 it then readjusts to rotation 128, 124, 128 and rotates through to 128, 83, 128. The crossover point flips in milkshape but I can't figure out how to correct it.

[leo.civil.uefs]

1 - Hey mak, Im planning to do something... limiting some factions so they cannot more upgrade cities or castles or both.
This way, dwarves, for example, can capture a town, and upgrade all its buildings, one level after another, even without firstly upgrading the settlement itself.
We will modify the techtree of such factions to be like that. I know it is possible but, again, do you imagine any possible issue related with this, on the engine?

2 - IWTE allow us to delete all the techtrees of a settlement, but how do I delete a specific one? Keeping the other ones? Lets say i want to delete just the churches...

PS: I dont understand a **** about what wilddog says... thanks God. lol. Anyway, its never enogh to thank you two from what you have done with IWTE, you two, heroes of all the gamer community arround this world.

[makanyane]

1 - Hey mak, Im planning to do something... limiting some factions so they cannot more upgrade cities or castles or both.
This way, dwarves, for example, can capture a town, and upgrade all its buildings, one level after another, even without firstly upgrading the settlement itself.
We will modify the techtree of such factions to be like that. I know it is possible but, again, do you imagine any possible issue related with this, on the engine?

should be fine I think... just a matter of getting the EDB coding working as you want

2 - IWTE allow us to delete all the techtrees of a settlement, but how do I delete a specific one? Keeping the other ones? Lets say i want to delete just the churches...

load the settlement - use "Gameobjects" "View TechTrees" to see them, "Change TechTree" button, select the one you want in 2d view (It'll highlight red), press "Delete TechTree" - it's name and size will appear under 'deleting Item' so you can check it's the right one, press "OK" - save binaries

(you have to clear view and refresh it for the change to show up in the 2d view window)

PS: I dont understand a **** about what wilddog says... thanks God.

[leo.civil.uefs]

While trying to implement a custom settlement in the strat map, I noticed that the culture box in the PKG file makes difference. I mean, you must find the right cutlture to place on it, otherwise your settlement will not load on battlemap.
Thats strange because I tought only FACTION box would really make any difference and culture could be anything.
However, as I said, I had to find the right culture for each of my settles, testing all cultures, one by one, until the settle loads.
Ive implemented them all, by trying the cultures until I found the right one, still I dont know how it works, what the logic of this at all?

[makanyane]

Generally you'll want the culture to be the faction's culture as assigned in desc_ sm_factions.txt that should work for cultures like north and south european, for the two that don't normally have their own settlements but default to others ( greek to SE and eastern to NE) then you might need to use the parent culture, I.e. NE or SE instead of its actual culture

Also be aware that the control is the faction_creator in descr_strat.txt not the occupier/owner which might be a different faction...

[FireFreak111]

I have a question regarding terrain importing from a completed .worldterrain file. Currently I am having issues editing it using the default settings. With the GCP, etc at default, I get this:



With the values at 32, 32 and 0.5 (32 is the RGB of that tile on the campaign map), I get a fully complete terrain:



Problem is, I have no idea if thats the settings used of whoever made the file, and in turn if thats how its supposed to look (or if the buildings will actually align with the terrain). Is it possible for future .worldterrain files to have a separate file created alongside it with the three values it used within (or even embed them into the .worldterrain file) for other peoples ease of use? And more pressingly, what can I do about this? (I need the terrain rotated to the right for the correction orientation for my campaign map).

It would be so much easier if there were an inbuilt function for rotating the terrain in IWTE.

[wilddog]

Hi sorry we've been in Malta the past week so haven't been able to respond.

Problem is, I have no idea if thats the settings used of whoever made the file, and in turn if thats how its supposed to look (or if the buildings will actually align with the terrain). Is it possible for future .worldterrain files to have a separate file created alongside it with the three values it used within (or even embed them into the .worldterrain file) for other peoples ease of use? And more pressingly, what can I do about this? (I need the terrain rotated to the right for the correction orientation for my campaign map).

It would be so much easier if there were an inbuilt function for rotating the terrain in IWTE.

The TGA process is just using a rough translation to allow you to more easily edit the terrain via a graphics tool. It therefore just creates grey scale for values it can create based on the three values and these have to be rounded according to the scale chosen. You can edit the files with whatever scale you want for the area you want. You cans separately edit each point to whatever height value you need. So there is no way to create each value exactly and restrict it to a scale of 256 values. The internal format of the file has no 'comments' bytes to add this even if you could.
Unfortunately when I did the rotation bits I never really though of people wanting to also rotate the terrain (though a pretty obvious requirement ).

Incidentally the campaign map values are irrelevant to the settings. The issue is around how much the height on the battlemap changes, what increment you want each greyscale to represent, and what range you want to edit.

I'll add a function to do this for the next release it should be straight forward. It may be a bit of a dirty release as I have a few changes underway and the interface certainly won't have been cleaned up.

Anyone knows where can I find the effects for "light" and "...dust..."
I want to change the light one to have a far bigger range. For the dust one I want it to have a different colour and also have a larger range.
The dust one can be anyone I can edit to get it really bigger.

Leo, Mak probably needs to answer. For light I'm not sure if you can really change that. There are light values associated with the model but milkshape can't handle so they get dropped. Thats one of the things that makes things darker. Other than that you need to do a find on your files and find the named effect then amend or add a new one.

[FireFreak111]

I was thinking about creating a set of generic 'ruins' settlements. The best way to do this IMO would be to use the destroyed versions of buildings (for when a catapult destroys them, etc) and the northern_european generic settlements as a base. How would I go about switching the normal buildings to use the destroyed models instead?

NVM: I just found out. I can delete the normal ones in the ms3d provided by IWTE, and duplicate the normal ones. I then rename it to the undestroyed version. Any possible issues that could arise?

[wilddog]

I was thinking about creating a set of generic 'ruins' settlements. The best way to do this IMO would be to use the destroyed versions of buildings (for when a catapult destroys them, etc) and the northern_european generic settlements as a base. How would I go about switching the normal buildings to use the destroyed models instead?

NVM: I just found out. I can delete the normal ones in the ms3d provided by IWTE, and duplicate the normal ones. I then rename it to the undestroyed version. Any possible issues that could arise?

Hi, make sure you do delete the existing objects and then add one of the damaged states in its place. That way the old animations and collisions will be removed. Then just create a new collision as normal. You could then pick walls in various states of collapse rather than just the last one.

I'm just doing some tidy up on the Geog and vegetation bits and hope to release a new version in the next few days. Haven't tidied up the interface though yet or completed the animation changes (was modding something else instead).

[leo.civil.uefs]

So, where is makanyane?

It is possible to change the light effect or not? In positive case, where can I find it? Ive searhed on the text files but none has that name...

[wilddog]

It is possible to change the light effect or not? In positive case, where can I find it? Ive searhed on the text files but none has that name...

Which is the specific effect you are asking about Leo? If its a general lighting question (ie not an effect) then the answer is no as explained as it is removed due to milkshape not handling correctly. If you can give me the name of the effect we can provide help.

[FireFreak111]

I managed to create the ruins settlement by adding the modified structures in order to each complex, and then deleting the old ones (so effectively replacing the structures in the same complex.) My problem now is collisions. How do I reassign the collisions back to the buildings? There are currently no collisions for the buildings, even though the .worldcollision file is the same size (so the collisions themselves are still there I guess?). All the objects are still there in the list too.

This is all for the village settlement btw. Here is a screenshot of my progress:

[wilddog]

@FireFreak111

Collisions is the same size because the unused ones haven't been deleted. They don't need to be as they have a sort of 'switched off' setting and tend to be left to support re-adding the same object. However you can remove them by using the >specials > Delete all unused collisions button.

To add them back in you need the >collisions>Create object collision button or if its an already set up collision you can use the Assign Object Collision (but you need to know the number of the collission which you can see in the Objects window).

Hope that helps.

[makanyane]

@Firefreak
Don't try and re-assign the old collisions to objects where you changed the number of groups, i.e. where you deleted the undamaged bit of the object - you'll need to use the 'create object collision' bit for them as the collision has to have the same number of groups as the object (or something horrible will probably happen if it gets hit by artillery...)


@Leo
If you meant the sort of light that comes from the torches/street lights/braziers there's actually quite a few variants - not sure why you couldn't find them with search...

one is in descr_burning_building.txt it's

effect_set light

{
	time_of_day night
	
	lod 10000
	{
		burning_building_light
	}
}

which uses

effect burning_building_light
{
	type light
	{
			
		keyframe_colour
		{
				0.00, 	238, 173,  140
				0.05, 	238, 148, 108
				0.15	236, 158,152
				0.18, 	220, 151,  119
				0.21, 	230, 165,  108
				0.26, 	238, 177, 137
				0.31, 	236, 158,152
		}
			
		keyframe_radius
		{
				0.0, 	3		
		}
		
		light_map_scale 0.05
	}
}

don't change that one or you'll mess up other settlements that use it - do similar to what I said above and add to that .txt file

effect NEW_burning_building_light
{
	type light
	{
			
		keyframe_colour
		{
				0.00, 	238, 173,  140
				0.05, 	238, 148, 108
				0.15	236, 158,152
				0.18, 	220, 151,  119
				0.21, 	230, 165,  108
				0.26, 	238, 177, 137
				0.31, 	236, 158,152
		}
			
		keyframe_radius
		{
				0.0, 	3		
		}
		
		light_map_scale 0.05
	}
}

and

effect_set NEW_light

{
	time_of_day night
	
	lod 10000
	{
		NEW_burning_building_light
	}
}

then play with the values within NEW_burning_building_light

[wilddog]

Version 13_06_A released

with version 13_06_A
1) Fixed all known issues identifed tied to paths and doors. Prior version managed to mix the connections under certain circumstances.
2) Full GeographDB editor added. Does not do all cross checking but is a lot more fool proof than text editing. It also retains the RGB colors.
3) Vegetationdb editor options now changed with Lod (distance) and the veg groups updatable directly (similar to geography.DB)
4) Automatically saves new files when doing vector changes (ie rotation of full settlement). They tend to be large scale changes so Mak decided it was best.
5) Added option to rotate or change height of world terrain (in specials tab).

Still to come :
Ability to create/amend animations - buttons set up but still need to complete the extraction of rotation info into milkshape and sync the position and rotation keyframes. Until I complete that the rest are not useful.

[leo.civil.uefs]

Well... I was refeering not to the fire/brazier ones but the LIGHT one.
There is a effect called light, you can see it on the effect list in settlements like huge city.
This is the one I want to edit.

[makanyane]

leo that is the one I quoted above

if the effects list says "light" then the one it reads is the one that has

effect_set light

{
time_of_day night

lod 10000
{
burning_building_light
}
}

and that looks up

effect burning_building_light
{
type light
{

keyframe_colour
{
0.00, 238, 173, 140
0.05, 238, 148, 108
0.15 236, 158,152
0.18, 220, 151, 119
0.21, 230, 165, 108
0.26, 238, 177, 137
0.31, 236, 158,152
}

keyframe_radius
{
0.0, 3
}

light_map_scale 0.05
}
}

as I said above though that's used in lots of different places so you need to make a copy with a slightly different name and add that new name to the effects list for your settlement

[alreadyded]

Just wanted to stop by and say thanks for the umpteenth (don't think I have ever typed that word before) time. IWTE is working like a dream, great work!

[wilddog]

@ alreadyded - thanks for the comments


The bit on the ability to amend the .anim files that has been delaying me can be seen on the attached video created from milkshape. As you can see some of the animations are 'flipping'. I need to solve that bit then test the reload of an amended animation. We have done some testing there so we know its possible but it might be the backward processing of the rotations is just a awkward but I'm hoping that should be Ok to handle.

[leo.civil.uefs]

So, Im just passing here to tell Im leaving modding activity. Almost 3 years using IWTE and creating custom settlements.
I did all I wanted and I want now to thank you guys for creating IWTE.
mY 3.0 sub-mod version is about to be released. And then I will turn into a normal player like everyone, not more a modder.
Thanks for all!