Settlement lighting, maybe?

[4zumi]

Hello,

I tried to port the Kingdoms settlements (battlemap) into my Grand Campaign mod.
They work fine, but there seems to be an issue with the lighting, were some parts of the settlements buildings seem to be constantly in the shade.

I have these issues with the Native American Tipi settlement, the Aztec Wooden Wall settlements and the Red Brick Castles.

Here is an example with the Red Brick Castle

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I would be glad if someone could help me. I have a wild guess it has something to do with the blockset files, but i have not really an idea, what I am doing.
And one last thing to mention, I have given the eastern europoean factions (russia, poland, hungary, lithuania) the red brick castles, following the guide by Ishan.
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...nd-battle-maps

Thanks in advance
cheers
zumi

[makanyane]

That's, erm, very weird...

if it's anything to do with the 'blockset' textures it'd be that you're missing the _normal.texture version of the texture files did you copy them over from the Kingdoms folder?

Note Ishan's explanation they need to be copied from;
medieval 2\teutonic\data\blockset\textures\faction_variations\teutonic_order
to;
medieval 2\mods\your_mod\data\blockset\textures\faction_variations\your_faction
(otherwise you'll overwrite a lot of stuff for the standard settlements that you don't want to!)

[4zumi]

I copied everything over like it was told, but I may have made a mistake here. I will double check or just recopy all the files and try that out.
Could be, that I am using the wrong "normal" files.

Thanks for your help

[4zumi]

I took a while, but I checked everything but could not find anything amiss.

Then I thought about trying to see, if it is the same in the expansion titles aka americas and teutonic. And behold, there were the same strange "shadows".
This would mean it is not my mistake, and rather a base game fault or a fault in my system setup.

For example, it is the same in the wooden wall, wooden pallisade, native village and every teutonic brick castle.

Her some pics:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Now the big question for me is. Is it just me or can anyone else reproduce this lighting/texture/ whatever thing?

Thanks

[Gigantus]

My first thought is 'shader' or else some graphic card setting. The perplexing issue is that there are areas that use the same texture but aren't affected, best seen in the red brick castle pic.

I do feel reminded of the 'zebra' stripes on the campaign map when map_fog is present in the imperial_campaign folder as well as the (correct) base folder.

[makanyane]

It looks a bit like it might be 'complexes' within the .world displaying differently - but not quite square enough for that unless there's a mix up with the higher/lower level ones that means an odd bit of wall is in a different level complex. And even if it is that it doesn't explain why you seem to be the only one with the problem...

Roughly what is your set-up? Anything unusual about it Linux/Mac etc.?

Steam but not patched to current version? There's a comment about textures here

[4zumi]

Thanks for trying to help

I use the Steam version (Definitve Edition) so it should be the latest version.

My setup is:

Windows 10 Home 64bit
i7 4790K @ 4.4GHz
32 GB DDR @ 933 MHz (9-10-11-27)
MSI Z78-GD65 Motherboard
GeForce GTX 980 Ti (MSI)
3 Samsung SSD's & 1 WD HD

2K Asus Monitor

Latest Nvidia Drivers

So, I think there is nothing unusual. Rather a bit better than most setups, even if a little bit old...

Edit:
I played around with the video setting (shader v2 to v1; high details, low details, shadows, etc.), but this seems to have no effects on the issue.

[xHolyCrusader]

Its not specific to your setup 4zumi, the ligthing issues have been introduced with the steam version of Med2/Kingdoms. Just looked it up again and these two castles from the Crusades campaign show it too: https://i.imgur.com/NImn7hp.jpg
More examples (a Britannia campaign castle and the hill-fort from Teutonics) can be found in this thread http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...-Total-War-bug
Havent tested it yet, but pretty sure the fix I suggested to just copy the "settlements" folder from unpacked retail-version kingdoms files into the steam install should work.
Am kind of worried it would break something else though, as mak already observed it seems to even be an issue on structure not complex level of the settlements, so unless these were individually edited I have no idea how such an isssue could even be introduced in the first place.

[Gigantus]

Just tried my Steam version 'americas' with a native american village attack - exactly as described.

More reason to stick with the disk version.

[makanyane]

Thanks xHolyCrusader, I missed that or forgot! I do remember explaining at some point that the 'darker bone' thing is just an IWTE invention to get the vertex lighting data into and out of milkshape without losing it. The in-game files don't have bones in the settlement data.


Gig' could you test your steam version with the Americas settlement folder pasted in to see if the fix works? If it does we can debate whether we can re-post the vanilla disc versions for people as a 'bug fix'.

Alternatively if someone could pm me one of the steam settlements (.world, .worldcollision & .animinstances files) I'd be curious to have a look and see what the differences are.

I'm hoping it's not a Steam .exe issue versus a disc .exe, but from an encoding point of view the Kingdoms disc additional settlements weren't different from the patched M2 disc ones (although they were drastically different from the original unpatched pre-Kingdoms M2 ones...)

[Gigantus]

I'll give it a shot.

Edit: I can confirm that using the disk's settlement folder works for Steam. I used the native american village as test - without the 'black' was prevalent, with everything was 'normal'.

I then ran the disk version with Steam's settlement folder and had the 'black' textures again. So it's definitely the files and not the exe.

[4zumi]

Thanks, Gig, Mak and Holy for the testing.

It would be very kind of someone, that is owning the disc version to upload all the red brick castles, and the native/meso settlements as a "bugfix" that I will gladly include in my mod.
Sadly I have no longer access to the disc version, or I would do it myself.

Happy Cookie Friday

[Gigantus]

Your wish is my command: Creating a World - Black Settlement Fix for Steam.

[4zumi]

Thanks Gig, have a rep

[Gigantus]

One is glad to be of service