Islands [Archive]

Catiline

09-08-2001, 00:04

Oh master map makers....

I've been trying to make a rivermap with an island in the river. Easy enough. The question is is there any wau y to make this land usable. As it stands I effectively built one bridge then hid the centre of it with the island. This gave me some desirable real estate with two acces pointsa, but the troops won't move in as it were. The AI regards the island as being unaccessible so you can't send troops to it. if you make them cross the bridge they will cross the island in a smart column. If hovever you order them to halt they then will spread out into their real formation on the island but not do any other manouevers. i've tried tricking the AI by leaving land beneath the bridge but i can't get it flat enough or straight enough to go beneath the bridge and not be visible.whilst still giving enough access to hte island. All the time I'm thinking that this would have been easier in the demo editor http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/rolleyes.gif Anyway, any thoughts lads? It'd be nice to make this work

Also does anyone know what size the maps from STW work out as, I'm guessing medium but i'm not sure

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Oderint dum metuant

Kraellin

09-08-2001, 02:22

hi cat,

what you're trying to do amounts to one of the no-no's in the readme file. making an island like yer trying is essentially a river 'that wraps around or twists back on itself' and this is a no-no according to the program.

the way the program allows bridges is quite weird and i hope they change it in the future, but for a small explanation of what you're attempting, let me explain it a bit. if you were to make 2 separate rivers running east/west across a map and they never joined anywhere...just 2 'horizontal' rivers, and then you attempted to put a bridge on one of those rivers, the bridge you placed actually runs the entire length of the map north/south. you may not see it, but it is there. so, that bridge actually goes thru your other river as well. depending on some unknowns it may actually display this bridge over the 2nd river or not and i've even done this with 3 horizontal rivers and gotten 3 bridges displyaed by just placing one bridge. the thing is, though, it's really only one bridge. and if you look at this stuff from underwater you can actually see that there is one loooooong bridge running all the way from the north edge to the south edge. now, that's the way it was in the old editor. i'm not sure it still displays this in the new like that.

so, what happens is that the program, for the sake of moving units, still thinks there is just one bridge and all sorts of weird things can start to happen. i've never seen another editor treat water and bridges like this one does and i dont really understand why they made them like this, but it does mean that islands would be very hard to do.

there is a way, though, but not with bridges. if you look at my notes in the tips and tricks thread you'll see that there are 2 ways to do water...impassable and passable. you could easily do an island using passable water. and, you could even do an island with impassable.

for the passable, just read my notes in the other thread. for the impassable i'll just explain. you would need to use one of the listed methods in the readme for making a river or coast. placing any other water on that map makes that water impassable. so, let's say you dont want a coast or a river showing in your map, or at least not a river that cant be forded or bridged. place a VERY narrow coast along either the east or west edge and hide it with some hills or mountains. you dont have to hide it, but you can. then, make your island surrounded by water, but DONT extend it all the way out to any edge of the map, as this will most likely be taken to be a river. you wont be able to use bridges, most likely, because of what i said before, but, you can make fords across the water to the island. since this is not a true river and you already have a coast, the water is just impassable but not a river and thus can have land crossing it.

i've done this sort of thing already in one test map, so, i know it works. and the biggest drawback is playing the ai army on it. he gets very stupid about moving around these impassable zones and tends to get hung up on them quite easily. if it werent for this fact i'd do a lot more maps with various impassable zones on them.

now, if you really want your river that isnt a river to look like a river, extend it almost all the way to the edge of the map, but leave a tiny bit of land right at the edge, as if it were just another ford across the river. it's far from perfect, but that's about the only way i currently know to do what yer trying to do. this would also work for castle moats and things like that.

also, from what i've seen so far, you can put a bridge on passable water in the editor, but when you save, exit, and reload, the bridge will be gone. so, apparently, the water must be impassable for a bridge to be saved on it, which is why i devised the other method using impassable water. if the river is passable, apparently the dev guys figured you didnt need a bridge; just wade across it.

the stw maps were 20x20 which works out to be a small map in we/mi. see my notes for the actual map sizes.

i'm sure that's all clear as mud (in both passable and impassable water :) but i hope it helps.

K.

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I'm sorry, but i never apologize.