Wierd error with gateways

[Thor the Bassist]

Well I'm testing out some features on my WIP Helms Deep map for Middle Earth Total War and most of it is going swimmingly. The Deeping Wall is fully assaultable, all the custom walls can be walked on. I then have one thing left - the gate. So I increase the gate height to the one that fits my gateway, I move the gate slightly and it all fits. Then I test it by attacking it only to find that the battering ram cannot attack the gate - it simply says "this unit cannot attack towers" even though it describes the gate as "Wooden Gate".

This is really wierd as the gate isn't a new gate it is the bog standard gate used in all gateways and I have already used the same battering ram in other maps with different gateways. The only different thing is the gateway but this still means I should be able to attack the gate.

The worst I was expecting for was that I would be able to tell the unit to attack and then it would not move like it does if you try to tell it to move somewhere it cannot but I was never expecting it to tell me the unit couldn't attack the gate.

This really has me vexed so any help would be appreciated.

[Makanyane]

For everyone else's amusement - we had an intervening conversation about this, because I had a similar though not quite same error with EodII new walls (based off Blue Lotus items and adapted), I also had extra one that if you assaulted walls with ladders and tried to 'capture' gate from above you couldn't.

Couldn't remember what fixed it - which wasn't particularly helpful.

Have been trying to get one set of the walls into mod-folder so someone else can use them but without overwriting existing wall set - we overwrote greek for EodII, which doesn't matter for BI mod.... mod-folder re-named version all works fine except ^^^ problem is back.


Any inspiration still appreciated, failing that hopefully I might stumble over same fix for my problem again eventually....... this time I'll write it down.

[Thor the Bassist]

How come the mod-foldering doesn't work? My main problem was with the bpi file. Also what gets overwritten? The items, the bpi or the descr_walls.txt?

[Makanyane]

EoDII was a BI mod-folder so mod-foldering isn't inherently the problem.

We ended up with our barbarians using 'GREEK_TOWN_GATEWAY.ITEM' etc which was bit of hang-over from using some of the BL items even though a lot of them were re-made... that didn't matter to us as no-one else was using greek items. I'm trying to extract it properly so things are called 'somethingelse_town_gateway.item' so it can get used as base in RTW mod which still I think needs greek walls kept as separate set.

Models are obviously the same, and I was trying to keep same coding with just names changed from greek = somethingelse..... but I must be messing up something in coding / db generation!

[Thor the Bassist]

Oh I think I stumbled on this. For the items etc if it's not in the vanilla folders then you have to put ../ to get the folder path in descr_building_battle.txt to go up a step. This means things like ../../bi/eod2/items/your_item.item or something.

[Makanyane]

yep the ../../ thing applies to entries in desc_items
I found my problem finally....
the vanilla version I had been copying things off had

greek_town_gateway
{
full_health 40
localised_name gateway
level
{
min_health 0
battle_stats flammability_none impact_damage_low
item greek_town_gateway
physical_info info_walls/info_greek_town_gateway.cas

in greek walls

it seems that info_greek_town_gateway.cas
either didn't work properly initially anyway - not sure how much of greek walls are used in vanilla - or certainly doesn't work with models I'm trying to use.

switch to
info_walls/info_roman_town_gateway.cas
seems to fix the problem

(must remember to write things down or post them as they occur in future - would save lot of time!!!)

[Thor the Bassist]

Yeah I basically found with gateways and walls that the collision info must be vanilla originals or you cannot attack them which is a shame as this would really open up the game to modding interesting settlement design.