Guide to the ETW map

[ForteS]

Just a question, what does the "passable" in the image do?

[taw]

Just a question, what does the "passable" in the image do?

Just what it says - if flag is <yes/>, units can pass.
If flag is <no/>, units cannot pass.

[ForteS]

Just what it says - if flag is <yes/>, units can pass.
If flag is <no/>, units cannot pass.

Does that mean that i can make fleets pass trough the Atlantic Ocean in my World Map Mod?

[taw]

Does that mean that i can make fleets pass trough the Atlantic Ocean in my World Map Mod?

World map is blocked by some extra stuff, but pretty much yeah, that should be doable with some effort.
(why haven't we tried that one yet?).

This flag might make it possible to pass through random mountains and rivers on map, Amazonia, Arabia, possibly with ships through various small islands etc. I don't think they are many extra flags in addition to this one.

Would you like to try and tell us if it worked? ;-)

[ForteS]

I'm working on it

Edit: I've changed all 'no's to 'yes' to Atlantic and Arabia but they still impassable.
Also I've tried with Portugal but it still the same.

[taw]

I'm working on it

Edit: I've changed all 'no's to 'yes' to Atlantic and Arabia but they still impassable.
Also I've tried with Portugal but it still the same.

Damn, and it could have been so simple :-/

[ForteS]

I've seen something that as called my attention, if that entry is supposed to decide if is passable or not, why are all "unexplorable" areas set to "yes"?

[ForteS]

This wasn't possible in vanilla, right?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Edit: Guess it was, never mind.

[PietroMicca]

CONFIRMED
Fortes in vanilla version it's impossible to do that
great work

[ForteS]

CONFIRMED
Fortes in vanilla version it's impossible to do that
great work

Are you sure about that?

[PietroMicca]

Are you sure about that?

yes
when you pass your mouse on that island you cannot select it
I try also to move near a navy, but I cannot let off my army

I am also waiting for other confirmations, but I'm quite sure

[taw]

yes
when you pass your mouse on that island you cannot select it
I try also to move near a navy, but I cannot let off my army

I am also waiting for other confirmations, but I'm quite sure

Was this changed by only changing passable flag or something?

[ForteS]

That i remember only changing the flag, but i know that I've also changed some "outlines" entries but i don't believe that to have interfered, btw something important my campaign as started crashing when passing the first turn after do that change, I've no idea of what caused that.

[ForteS]

Definitively it was possible to go to those tiny islands using vanilla (I've used my backup to test it), in the meanwhile I've been trying to make the mountain in Portugal passable, but no luck until now all seems equal to the passable area but still not working.
What is the "unknown id"?

[PietroMicca]

What makes mountain impassable is in Mountain_Data. If you wanna remove a mountain you have to delete from Mountain_Data and then re-define boundaries.

[uanime5]

The unknown id is the Area ID. It's used so the AI can tell which land mass it's on and so ETW can easily separate the passable and impassible areas of the map.

I believe the reason why units can't walk on the impassible regions is because these regions haven't been assigned any grids in the pathfinding.esf. So as far as ETW is concerned you can't walk in these regions because there isn't anywhere to walk on.

[PietroMicca]

Continuing research on global map is too long for me and sometimes is also impossible go on because there's a limit of 255 series on excel. So I have chosen a smaller map that has all interesting features (trade nodes, rivers, mountains and trade_routes). I have chosen Spanish Campaign from NTW. Napoleon's maps are almost equal to ETW (settlements are different) and so we can apply safely what I discovered on Empire's maps.

My next steps in research are faces and trade routes (I believed to finish this research, but there's something wrong in my speculations). A faces is present in each area in regions.esf.



A faces contains coordinates of boundaries and coordinates of a grid that widen all map.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

This grid crosses all regions and we can definitively say is not accidental.

What this grid do? Why it's needed?
Any suggestion is well accepted.

[taw]

I changed esf2xml to aggressively split regions.esf into pieces, and to annotate all faces and outlines with coordinates, like this:

  <rec type="outlines">
   <yes/>
   <v2 x="229.33397" y="245.7662"/>
   <v2 x="245.90195" y="253.99687"/>
   <u4_ary>
    6847 <!-- 244.99997 253.81815-->
    1187 <!-- 240.82263 252.18843-->
    2574 <!-- 239.99957 252.05429-->
    56958 <!-- 238.27261 251.62997-->
    12012 <!-- 234.99998 251.4875-->
    15239 <!-- 234.59294 251.62144-->
    14924 <!-- 234.25427 251.50999-->
    57223 <!-- 234.32225 250.57121-->
    56622 <!-- 233.916 250.00014-->
    5067 <!-- 233.53239 249.81136-->
    6029 <!-- 233.28357 249.99992-->
    4865 <!-- 232.85545 250.32562-->
    1621 <!-- 231.90701 250.3477-->
    1594 <!-- 231.54608 250.00014-->
    10770 <!-- 231.25232 249.83383-->
    7367 <!-- 231.18436 249.49847-->
    8319 <!-- 230.23669 249.29747-->
    10123 <!-- 229.99998 249.49828-->
    8986 <!-- 229.5824 249.56555-->
    10914 <!-- 229.33397 249.23019-->
    10565 <!-- 229.78552 248.63206-->
    12328 <!-- 229.8078 248.24722-->
    13736 <!-- 229.99959 247.8671-->
    14969 <!-- 230.59764 247.75505-->
    12879 <!-- 230.73358 246.95079-->
    60153 <!-- 231.79413 246.68271-->
    56700 <!-- 232.78748 246.21341-->
    58071 <!-- 233.21599 246.2357-->
    58200 <!-- 233.53162 246.57104-->
    3973 <!-- 234.16405 246.34737-->
    45265 <!-- 234.7285 245.7662-->
    49137 <!-- 234.99959 245.92265-->
    1964 <!-- 235.55869 246.49323-->
    2059 <!-- 235.90233 246.79457-->
    9921 <!-- 237.00818 246.86143-->
    13468 <!-- 239.33318 247.73296-->
    12370 <!-- 239.3781 248.42574-->
    11278 <!-- 239.46834 248.73843-->
    6705 <!-- 239.99997 248.85027-->
    8224 <!-- 241.0031 248.5374-->
    4055 <!-- 241.45503 248.67194-->
    2068 <!-- 242.53864 248.82816-->
    1628 <!-- 242.44803 249.07396-->
    6335 <!-- 241.74879 249.56577-->
    1369 <!-- 241.65779 249.76677-->
    2309 <!-- 241.22928 249.99992-->
    2747 <!-- 241.46394 250.45979-->
    2420 <!-- 242.25378 250.81723-->
    16868 <!-- 244.99997 252.8956-->
    8042 <!-- 245.90195 253.5659-->
    8157 <!-- 245.63084 253.99687-->
   </u4_ary>
   <ary type="connectivity">
    <connectivity mask="00300000" from="0" to="50"/>
   </ary>
  </rec>

The content is actually identical if you ignore comments like xml2esf.

Hopefully this should make it a lot easier to analyze the map, even if not change it just yet.

[uanime5]

It's possible that the faces contains all the coordinates for this area so that ETW knows which area every coordinate belongs to.

[PietroMicca]

continuation of post #393

so now we know enough about land regions. There are just few deferences in a sea region. In fact now the boot is simply on the other foot. In a sea regions the main area inside the boundary (third Boolean "true") is water. I say water just because also rivers and lakes are generically sea regions. Also in a sea regions can be more than one boundary and more than one outline. Rules are always the same: more outlines inside an area mean that there are outlines completely contained inside the first one. Separated area (third boolean "false") in a sea region are holes for islands. So a hole in a sea region can be only a land region (not compulsory to be passable). That's all.

But there's something more we need to know to define areas and outlines of a regions: connectivity.



An outline can be compound by one or more connectivities. A connectivity is defined by 3 integers. The first one is simply an ID. The others are starting point and end point of the connectivity. An explanation is needed. As we know an outlines is defined by a Binary48 entry (or u4_ary) that contains a list of integers that point to coordinates inside vertices numbered from 0. Now if we do the same with coordinates inside an outline we will obtain separated section of a line. And so end point of the last connectivity is exactly the number of the last numbered coordinate in the outline. Part of a little example from England areas #1 - outline #1 in the following image.



What can we state now? Why separate an outline in several sections is needed? What definitively a connectivity is? A graphic will help us.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I have used a different colour for each connectivity. We can notice that only the main outline is split in several connectivities. Why? Just because this outline has in common some vertices with other outlines. In fact if we take a look in English_Channel, Scotland, Irish_Sea and other regions, we will find outlines and connectivities that coincide perfectly with England. And so definitively we have to indicate in how many part is divided our outline and how is compound this split line. Obviously if there is an only connectivity, this means that this outline has no vertices in common with others. But we have to indicate anyway simply with a starting point=0 and an end point=n-1.

EDIT: All I know about wind maps, climate maps and trade_routes in my next posts.