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Thread: LBM file info.

  1. #31
    warning- plot loss in progress Senior Member barocca's Avatar
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    From Kraellin

    ok. that's pretty cool. so i could edit the map any old way i wanted to as far as shape and locations of land and sea masses, then alter the 'neighbor' fields to set border crossing abilities, and voila, new continent and seas. sweet :) thanks target

    one question though if: "We only use 100 land regions, and that's the limit for the game..." there are 108 alotted regions for land, why only 100 possible? 2x108=116+40=256. what happened to the other 8 regions?

    K.
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  2. #32
    warning- plot loss in progress Senior Member barocca's Avatar
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    From Target


    Yep, that's about the size of it. You'll need to find an application that'll output your adjusted lbm file in a compatible format. We've discovered that Paint SHop Pro says it will but it doesn't really - it tends to screw it up a little bit. You may get lucky and it may work OK. If I come up with anything really useful toolwise, I'll let you know but, as I've said before, all the tools we used for the Total War games are archaic and not exactly focused on user-friendliness.

    It'll probably only be 107 land regions because we use the colour in palette index 0 (which I think is the tasteful neon pink colour) as the colour to indicate the dead spots on the map, such as the breaks between sea borders, lakes and bits of unplayable regions that intrude on the map.

    There is a reason why there's only 100 regions available for modding. If I'm honest, it's probably down to short-sightedness by the programmer responsible, whoevert that was ... alright it was me.

    We've only got 100 land regions in the game because thats all the land regions in the game. We went up to 100 regions, saw it was working, said "Sweet, that's all we need then" and stopped. By we, I mean me.

    I'll check to see if anything gets affected if we fire up the last 8 regions and make them available even if we don't use them.
    ====
    OK. Had a quick look at the code and unfortunately, adding the tags for additional land regions will break quite a lot of the game. The most obvious ones will be any files your've saved (config files, savegames, etc) and we've tried very hard to make sure the changes we've made so far in the patch don't require you to trash your existing saves. So it looks like it won't happen. Sorry.

    If this will help you calculate your new port, castle and origin positions, screen co-ordinates are 16x bigger than those of lukmap.lbm and 8x bigger than those of lukmap2.lbm.
    (referring to SetPort and SetCastle co-ords)
    ========
    barocca
    Thank You very much Target,

    i had been puzzling over HOW did the game know which region was scotland...

    Knowing those SETPORT:: co-ordinates are the games own co-ordinates is quite usefull,
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  3. #33
    warning- plot loss in progress Senior Member barocca's Avatar
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    from Target


    You still have 100 land regions and 40 sea regions to play with, so there shouldn't be a problem with your 51 land region map - unless you're planning to do something particularly crazy.
    The winds that blows -
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    will be next to go.

  4. #34
    warning- plot loss in progress Senior Member barocca's Avatar
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    From Giskard

    Looks like most of the info you posted was as I had guessed it would but. The only thing you didnt mention that I noticed is colour zero.

    I found in my tests that the sea/land border (that purple pink line) must use colour zero or the map doesnt work. Can you confirm this ? I also noticed that the actual colour doesnt matter which would seem to contradict the region rules you outlined above.

    Can you clear this up for me please ?

    Im currently half way through the setborder numbers on my own campaign having done exactly what you wrote above already. Is it save to simply paste in a lot of random numbers and know they will be ignored or even better leave them out entirely ?

    As you know those numbers are a pain. I have 25 land regions and 15 sea regions. Each region has an average of 4 borders. Im sure everybody can work out how many entries that adds up to
    The winds that blows -
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  5. #35
    warning- plot loss in progress Senior Member barocca's Avatar
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    From Wellingotn

    Quote Originally Posted by [b
    Quote[/b] ]
    Originally posted by Andersson:
    It's certainly informative. Some of it is a bit confusing to me (such as how exactly a new region get recognised - just down to colours I think).
    If your creating a new region then you have to create a new lukmap.lbm (literally the lookup map) and your new region will have to have 2 colours associated with it - region colour and region-border colour.

    Scotland has number 2 in the 256 colour palette. Therefore the identifier ID_SCOTLAND can be associated with the number 2 (and the colour that represents number 2) - likewise ID_WALES equates to the number 8 etc:

    The key thing with all this is to recognise there are 40 sea regions (that have 1 colour associated with them) and 100 land regions (that have 2 colours). Therefore don't make a map and try to create > 40 sea or > 100 land regions, else the hardcoded lookup table will fail for some. Also, don't use a sea region for a land region (or visa versa) - or the table lookup will similarly fail.


    Quote Originally Posted by [b
    Quote[/b] ]Originally posted by Andersson:
    Also not sure if you have to change an existing region into your own, but keep the original ID in the campaign txt eg. Change name of province in map to Andersson , but keep it's ID as ID_WESSEX).
    Absolutely. You gave to retain the region Id's that the game provides - but these are only identifiers. If your buildinmg a map of the USA you may decide to use the colour 8 for the state of Utah. In that case, the game would associate your new province of Utah with the identifier ID_WALES.
    The winds that blows -
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  6. #36
    warning- plot loss in progress Senior Member barocca's Avatar
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    OK
    thats everything i could find,
    go for your lives
    The winds that blows -
    ask them, which leaf on the tree
    will be next to go.

  7. #37
    Senior Member Senior Member Kraellin's Avatar
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    thanks bar,

    very nice :)

    K.

  8. #38
    Member Member PanthaPower's Avatar
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    Thanks That really helps I want to start modding my own map and I am reading through all the documentation but I have have one question though. What are the two LukMap.lbm and lukmap2.lbm for? I know that it's for the borders but I don't understand why there is a compressed version and a large version. Is the small map for resolution till 800x600 for instance and the larger resolutions for the big lukmap2.lbm?

  9. #39
    Senior Member Senior Member Kraellin's Avatar
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    target,

    when you take the palette as your table and do that calculation, are you taking the rgb values and adding them up or something or just taking them like wellington said and assigning values to the colors in the palette on the basis of first come, first serve?

    if you're taking them first come, first serve, and assigning them that value in the order that they come, they wouldnt it be possible to use ANY rgb's as the values and not just the values of the original lukmap palette for one's colors?

    also, are there any restrictions on the size of the lukmaps? do they have to be a fixed X by Y as the originals or can we use other values for the size, providing, of course, that we maintain the other rules for provinces?

    K.

  10. #40
    Member Member PanthaPower's Avatar
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    Kraellin,

    I started nmodding yesterday but I found the exact colour table that is used by CA. I have to test it still but can only do that this evening. The colour table looks very organised and yes, the table is fixed. I will upload a screenshot in a few hours. I also started writing down the RGB code for every country, border and sea. Here's a part which I've done till now:

    Slot Description R G B
    0 Sea Border 255 0 255
    1 NOT USED 143 63 63
    2 Scotland Main 147 67 67
    3 Scotland Border 155 71 71
    4 Northumbria Main 163 79 79
    5 Northumbria Border 171 83 83
    6 Mercia Main 179 91 91
    7 Mercia Border 187 99 99
    8 Wales Main 195 103 103
    9 Wales Border 199 111 111
    10 Wessex Main 207 119 119
    11 Wessex Border 215 123 123
    12 Ireland Main 223 131 131
    13 Ireland Border 231 139 139
    14 Norway Main 239 147 147
    15 Norway Border 247 155 155
    16 Sweden Main 123 111 91
    17 Sweden Border 127 115 95
    18 Denmark Main 135 123 103
    19 Denmark Border 143 131 111
    20 Finland Main 151 139 119
    21 Finland Border 159 143 123
    22 Novgorod Main 167 151 131
    23 Novgorod Border 175 159 139
    24 Muscovy Main 183 167 147
    25 Muscovy Border 187 171 155
    26 Livonia Main 195 179 163
    27 Livonia Border 203 187 167

    I will upload the full table plus graphic image of the colour table this evening.

  11. #41
    Member Member PanthaPower's Avatar
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    Hmmm, I did some more checking and I now know that Ultimate Paint totally screws up the pallette which CA uses. As stated in earlier posts, the pink color HAS to be in slot 0. So I kept looking for a tool which has the pink color in slot 0. I bumped into a tool called Irfanview and then the palette which is in the original LukMap.lbm makes any sense. I attached a picture in the link below so that you can see it for yourself. On the left is the original palette from the LBM file that CA ships. On the right is how the palette looks like after just loading and saving the lukmap.lbm in Ultimate Paint. As you can see, it totally screws up the order defined by CA just by loading and saving WITHOUT modding.

    Palette colors:
    http://www.motor-forum.nl/forum/misc/9140

    I haven't figured out yet how to use the correct palette but I'm on the right track I think. I already have the correct palette exported and I tried to import in into Ultimate Paint which unfortunately didn't work.

    I'll keep you posted about my progress.

  12. #42
    Member Member PanthaPower's Avatar
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    Hmmm, I did some more investigation and my guess is that MTW only looks at the colour in the current Slot and compares that colour to it's hardcoded region_id. In other words, if you put a black colour in slot 0 and replace all Sea borders with the black colour, everything will work fine as long as you don't use that same colour elswhere on the map.

    Currently I'm writing down every slot, region_id and it's current palette colour. After I finished this, I can start testing making a new LukMap.lbm. I will do this in Ultimate Paint and I'll just fill in the colours in the according slots for that region. I hope my tests will go fine because I just started modding and the txt files are still not 100% clear to me.

    For changing the current LukMap.lbm, that will be harder because the moment you load the LukMap, the palette changes and the colours don't match the place in the slot anymore. So it would probably require to set all 256 colours manually in the palette used by Ultimate Paint and then everything should work fine when modding the map. The information sheet that I'm currently making with slot, region_id and RGB should make this work quite easy.

    I hope I can run a few tests this evening and see how it goes.

  13. #43
    Member Member PanthaPower's Avatar
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    Well, my test didn't work out. But to keep all the LBM info in this post I would like to give note of a new tool which was made by Mithel. It gives a possibility to change the colors in the palette slots.

    Check it out:
    http://www.mnstarfire.com/download/ImageConverter.html

    The full post is at:
    http://www.totalwar.org/cgi-bin....;t=2641




  14. #44

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    On my campaign map i simple painted the sea borders with colour zero. The map worked then. The exact colour doesnt seem important. Colour zero seemed to be used to mark out where the land meets the sea.

    Giskard

  15. #45
    Member Member Lion King's Avatar
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    same thing from my experiments...
    we need someone who is not busy or lazy like me to find out which province corresponds to each pallete slot
    e.g:
    1- sea border
    2- scotland
    3...
    and so on, as giving RGB values is no good

  16. #46
    Bored Avid Gamer Member Alrowan's Avatar
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    im tempted to make a list very soon, im nearly all the way through making my new map, so i will have to change a lot of names and such in the text files.

    just out of curiosity, im going to need to know how to place the castle locations and the gathering points in proviences
    Llew Cadeyrn/Alrowan - Chieftain of Clan Raven

  17. #47
    Member Member Lion King's Avatar
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    easy as a pie, boring as hell...
    ok, if you have photoshop or something like that, you put your mouse over the place you want your castle/port/origin to be, then you get the coordinates IN PIXELS and then multiply this number by 8 in the Hi-res map, or 16 in the Low-res one.

  18. #48
    Bored Avid Gamer Member Alrowan's Avatar
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    thanks... looks like my chrissy holidays will be over in a flash
    Llew Cadeyrn/Alrowan - Chieftain of Clan Raven

  19. #49
    Member Member Grell's Avatar
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    OK I am having a go at editing the existing Europe LukMap. I want to add in Achea, and some of the crusader cities as regions. When i use the ImageConverter the Colour Table is empty, i dont have to manually go through and assign each one do i?

    And is it possible to add in 8 more regions (which is the limit given the 256 color limit) to my understanding there is a hardcoded table somewhere that assigns which region uses which colour in the palette. i.e. Scotland uses the colour in poistion 2 of the palette. So any new colours/regions will not be recognisable by the game. Thus making it impossible to go beyond the current 100 regions. I am considering using ID_AFRICA as Achea, but am still faced with the empty colour table problem in the ImageConverter any help would be appreciated

  20. #50
    Member Member Grell's Avatar
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    OK I figured out the missing colour table problem (I just had to load an exisiting one and save it).

    In paintshop I edited the palette adding in 2 new colours and used these (0 211 211 and 0 222 222) to colour in the island of Achea and its border, assuming that all of the information (such as declare region, border info, origin, port co ords, etc) in the campaign startpos file are correct, there is no way that the game can recognise these new colours and assign them to the new region ID_ACHEA, is there?? If someone knows that this is hardcoded please tell me and save me hours/days of experitmenting and testing.

  21. #51
    Member Member Grell's Avatar
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    Success Horrahh

    I successfully removed Peraslsvyl and used its colours (n36 and n37) edited the LukMaps and startpos info and made Dalmatia (off the coast of Croatia and Venice). I will take ID_AFRICA and its colours and also make Achea (Greek island) and make Venice and Genoa into small towns as the where historically, this will allow HRE to play more of an active role in the area as they did historically.

    I still havent managed to add in competely new land regions - if anyone can tell me how to do this (and what colours they used for the border and main area) i would appreciate it. As technically there is room for another 7 or 8 land regions.

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