IWTE - World editing - (General Discussion)

[jmrc]

I've just started doing the battlemap settlements but I need some help with the overlays, which I'm sure someone has asked before but these 1600+ posts are a bit scary to browse.

- How do I change the placement of the farms? I've edited the overlay file to put more white areas and then renamed the file to the culture, but the settlement stubbornly shows the same farm placement as of the original settlement that I used as template.

- How do I change the texture of the roads? In some settlements they show up as dirt roads and in others they show as stone pavement. How do I choose which type I want?

I'm just working with custom battles, so these issues are not related to descr_strat

Thanks.

[makanyane]

It's probably looking up the old file

Read 3 binaries for the settlement - and still on 'WorldFiles' tab check "Update referenced paths"
make sure the worldterrain Path: is pointing to your new folder
change if necessary - hit OK and save binaries.

Go to "Terrain1 tab" and "Amend WT Mask TGA paths"
make sure the mask paths are pointing to your folder location

that's also where you change the road textures used

click OK and it'll write new terrain file which you then need to re-name to replace the old one...



If it's none of that then are you changing the right bit of the mask.tga?? You need to change the alpha channel not the visible RGB layers - that's easy to see if you're using Photoshop. In GIMP you need to use the transparency function.

[jmrc]

Yeah, it worked just fine! Thanks!

Let me say that IWTE is the brilliant example of how a very powerful and bug-free tool could be provided for the modders by any game maker. Without IWTE, any full conversion over MTW2 would be impossible. Once again, congratulations and thank you!

[FireFreak111]

I have a question. When you save a worldpkg, you can save it as an ambient settlement. My question is how you place it on the strat-map. The campaign map loads .wfc files, so how do you convert to that format? How is it that in Third Age 3 you can edit the Argonath files in the settlements/Unique_Settlements folder and have it reflect on the campaign map without touching the .wfc file?

[makanyane]

The .wfc file is created by the M2TW Battle Editor

You can make the worldpkgdesc for ambient settlement or settlement or techtree or anything that can be placed with the battle editor.

Load the map co-ordinates for your location in the Editor - place your ambient where you want it - and save the battle. That'll give you a descr_battle.txt, editor_log.txt and map.wfc in your world/maps/custom folder. You need to copy the map.wfc and rename it (assuming you want more than one custom tile) - put the .wfc in world/maps/campaign/imperial_campaign/custom_tiles - add it's name and location into custom_tiles_db.txt - regenerate your map.rwm

that'll give you the ambient turning up at that location on the strat map... once you've done that you can delete the worldpkgdesc to stop it appearing anywhere else by mistake.


the only thing about the ambient that the .wfc stores is the position and the path to the .world file - that's why any changes you make to the settlement/ambient .world etc show up without altering the .wfc

[leo.civil.uefs]

1 - Light Emitting, and Night Effect, whats the function of these parameters? How it works?

2 - Its possible to set the light effect to be on even during the day?

The effect_set light, wich I was testing, got no results. Vanilla settlements has braziers and light effects in the same object and there is the light effect enlighting buildings at night. The same setup simply does not work on my custom settlements! Exactly the same setup.

The descr_burning_building.txt has some interesting entries, but none worked for me, lets see:

effect burning_building_light_large
{
    type light
    {
        fade_in_time    20.0
        fade_out_time    2.0
            
        keyframe_colour
        {
                0.05,     240, 100, 0
                0.1,     240, 130, 0
                0.15,     240, 80, 0
                0.2,     240, 140, 0
                0.25,     240, 70, 0
                0.3,     240, 120, 0
        }
            
        keyframe_radius
        {
                0.05,     100
                0.1,     98
                0.15,     102
        }
        offset    0,    15,    0
    }
}


effect_set burning_large_building_set
{
    lod 1000
    {
        burning_building_smoke9
        burning_building_smoke10
        burning_building_smoke11
        burning_building_smoke12 
        burning_building_light_large
        burning_building_sound_large
        fire_flare_sound
    }
}

Notice the values in the effect itself, this one has values to be edited. Yet, it does not work for me anyway. Actually, I was never able to make any light effect to work! Edited or not!

[makanyane]

1 - Light Emitting, and Night Effect, whats the function of these parameters? How it works?

lights and flames should be put in as "light emitting" that's using "1" not 0 in the drop down box

if you only want it to come on at night then put "1" in the Night Effect box

if you want it night and day put "0" - also check the .txt file entry for the effect some of them have 'time of day = night' type entry so only show in night battles anyway.

The effect_set light, wich I was testing, got no results. Vanilla settlements has braziers and light effects in the same object and there is the light effect enlighting buildings at night. The same setup simply does not work on my custom settlements! Exactly the same setup.

normal light and brazier thingy was working for me in your settlement... but the bit that in vanilla looks like light on the buildings seems to be more just the 'glow' part of the brazier effect being seen in front of the building. I've made rather a mess of your settlement whilst experimenting... will try and sort out a clean version with the light and brazier in and send back.

effect burning_building_light_large

I tried playing with that one and got a very large area of floor illuminated with flickery light... didn't do anything for the structures though so not very useful

[leo.civil.uefs]

Its really a mistery.

The first picture shows a brazier with the glow thing, this thing dont really shines, its just a static 3d model wich mimics light.
The second picture shows real light! This is the one I want, its not a glow arround the flame but real light rays expanding and hitting the house, and it flicks!

In this example, both models got exactly the same effects in the settlement (a vanilla city).
So, there must be something more than just adding the effect itself...

Forgive me if Im being redundant and annoyinf about this thing.




See the final results of erebor in my thread. No light

[makanyane]

OK - have had another look - if you run an existing settlement through IWTE (just load and save and replace files) then that flickery reflection of the light does disappear



VANILLA STONE FORT C



AFTER SAVING WITH IWTE



has taken a while to remember what does this... there's two sections of 'quads' in the file which aren't editable or save-able via milkshape, there's one quad 4 byte section for each vertex of the model... so 100's of 1000's of the things for large settlements - the first section of them was used by CA to preset some lightness/darkness settings which meant that bits using the same texture could appear a bit lighter or darker than other parts (eg for internal corners) - that was the bit I was playing with when we discussed via pm and it obviously didn't do anything to help your problem


the second section however does seem to be the bit that sets the 'does it reflect light' type thing - code of that sort of section converted to text looks like this, except much, much longer!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

83 0 0 0
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so what's happening on the first pic above that looks like it's reflecting the light source isn't that the light is behaving logically and extending a certain distance in a straight line from the source... the vertexes of the bits of object that they wanted to look lit (like the overhanging part of the roof) have been set with certain numbers to adjust the brightness of the light shown

there isn't really any way I can see of doing that sort of individual setting for new structures - so WD hardcoded that to go back as 0 0 0 0 for all the vertexes to stop lit bits turning up where there wasn't actually a light!

I'm trying to see if there's any other sort of standardised setting that would work to give a bit of general illumination for your settlement

trying standard settings on the vanilla fort give quite odd results:



which seems to be related to some other oddities in the file about how it decides which effect is within the bounding box area to affect each complex... as you've done your settlement as one complex only though we might be able to find a default setting that gives a bit of illumination without doing anything to weird to it. If - very big IF - I can get to anything that looks promising for your city wilddog can add an option to IWTE to allow a different default setting for those quads

[wilddog]

Gave up for the moment on those damn rotations in the .anim files. For most of the settlement animations I wanted I didn't really need them so need to see if I need them at all. e.g. for gates I probably just wanted some that open less which I should be able to handle. About to start testing adding some effects into the animation (that's the dust clouds and bursts when something hits etc). Assuming that works OK, I plan to try some of the object replacement parts as I really just wanted to get to a thinner stone wall with an animation (even if the animation may be a bit basic).

[leo.civil.uefs]

My gondorian settlements are just vanilla settlements with different textures and deleted techtress where I placed osgiliath buildings.
I got to include the new animations for all towers and walls, they are ok.

What about the animations for houses when they are destroyed?

[makanyane]

erm, most of the houses don't have any animations in vanilla anyway... within settlements some of the buildings with 'bell tower' type things might have an animation just for that bit

if you're using a different texture for buildings that include those then you'd just do the same sort of thing for those as you did for the proper towers and walls.


If you load your files in IWTE and then look at the list available in "update animation paths" you can see which animations are actually being used somewhere in the settlement.

[FireFreak111]

IWTE has a vegetation_db editor, so I am wondering, how do I stop grass generating in Gondor (mediterranean climate) when its winter? Its the only place in winter that does it, and it looks 100% off. I just dont get it. Lorien wont generate grass in winter, but Mediterranean will? This could reveal the key to enabling/disabling grass generation in certain climates.
Here's my db files (first is geog, second is vege)
http://www.mediafire.com/?dd2lhuods1ckhau
http://www.mediafire.com/?jb4jh7g4ap1f2l3

[makanyane]

according to your veg.db - you haven't got any texture areas defined for winter grass for the mediterranean climate - that should be in the section under
settings for climate 0
if you convert the .db to text
groundtype 0 to 14 are the summer versions and 15 to 29 are the winter ones
all the winter ones have
0 nvariants
that nvariant bit has to be populated to get grass... so... I suspect what your mediterranean climate is doing is reading the summer section even though you're loading a 'winter' battle

has your descr_climates.txt definitely got the 'winter' entry for mediterranean?

[FireFreak111]

@makanyane
Definetely. Well, I someone fixed it, I have no idea how but there is no more grass in winter.

Another issue, in the G-Hardness_To_BGT table, you can't select shrub_dense or forest_sparse/dense. Real problem when trying to make one climate another. Is there some sort of option you could make, which gives one climate the same settings as another? Trying to convert highland into alpine and tropical, so tedious without this option. Thankyou for exposing this though, saves alot of time.

[leo.civil.uefs]

So mak any news on the lights?

[makanyane]

So mak any news on the lights?

I did think I had a setting which wasn't too bad at one stage... but then realised I was testing it with a revised (lighter) version of your .texture - I went back to trying with your texture and it then turned into a mess which either glowed bright emerald green when looked at from above or absolute black when looked at horizontally

am still experimenting to try and understand it a bit more, but it's not looking promising...


EDIT: actually it wasn't the texture causing the problem - just retried with the ammended texture and it's still bright green... must be something else I did differently. Aaargh!

[wilddog]

So mak any news on the lights?

nope, the tool sets them all the same as I explained earlier. Mak hasn't spotted anything yet and I'm still tied to the .anim file changes. I doubt there is any sensible 'common' value you can use. You probably have to select the relevant vertex and set the values individually but no idea how you would sensibly do that.

[wilddog]

Another issue, in the G-Hardness_To_BGT table, you can't select shrub_dense or forest_sparse/dense. Real problem when trying to make one climate another. Is there some sort of option you could make, which gives one climate the same settings as another? Trying to convert highland into alpine and tropical, so tedious without this option. Thankyou for exposing this though, saves alot of time.

Thanks for spotting that issue. The validations were not loading the full list so the last two or three couldn't be selected. Minor fix so I'll get that out in the next day or two.

Yes I had planned to allow a copy of one climate or season from one to the other. I just forgot as I was fiddling with the .anim files. I'll try and get that sorted out I should be able to add that in quite quickly and may also have the .anim effects all sorted out (not really that useful though).

Thanks for the feedback.

[FireFreak111]

Hey, got a strange bug. Erebor from this submod http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...official-patch can't be rotated. If I do, the entire battle-map becomes 'Obstructed'. Its the three core files with the world vector rotation that is causing the issue (tested all files rotated, just the core three, just the terrain file. Its the core three files creating the issue). Any idea of what could be happening?