Major breakthrough: editing cities!

[eadingas]

NOW can we have someone try to make a settlement editor, please? We have all the info we need... just no programming skills :)

[Lord Adherbal]

NOW can we have someone try to make a settlement editor, please?

hopefully, but I think it'd be very hard - because it needs to be a sort of 3D modeller. Or atleast it should be able to read the dimensions of the battlemap models, and preferably allow the creation of pathfinding models.

[eadingas]

hopefully, but I think it'd be very hard - because it needs to be a sort of 3D modeller. Or atleast it should be able to read the dimensions of the battlemap models, and preferably allow the creation of pathfinding models.

The 3d modeling could be done in 3dMax, that part is (relatively) easy. The editor only would have to read this model into itself, without rendering or exporting.. the most important part is building coordinates, this needs to be made graphically, or else the work will take ages.

[SigniferOne]

Actually it's not as difficult as might seem at first. The most difficult ones to put are the initial buildings cos there are no reference points nearby. It took me 2 hours just to place the Temple of Jupiter and the Circus Maximus, and even there a lot of time was saved because I was doing both placings at the same time. But once this is done, placing the Curia nearby took 15 minutes, and everything after that will take even less time, considering the fact that I'll be placing many buildings at once, and so a lot of time will be saved on quitting/restarting RTW. In general, it's not as bad as you imagine, you can place the entire city in a day or two, if you put your mind to it.

[Lord Adherbal]

yes, but creating a pathfinding model in 3DSmax without seeing where you placed the buildings seems like an almost impossible job. I noticed there are flat square meshes on the overlay models that represent the location of buildings. Perhaps the easiest way to create a city is first creating an overlay model with building locations, then using those building coordinates to create the settlement plan, and then use that overlay model as a base to create the pathfinding model. Still sounds like a lot of work...

[SigniferOne]

Quoting from TWC:

Ok I couldn't resist so the first post has again an another update of the city. The administrative building was added to the Palatine Hill, as was the the shrine to Hercules Victor behind the hill (the actual size will be much bigger, but I haven't gotten to editing buildings yet so the existing models will have to suffice). And oh yeah, I changed the texture of the ground to be less green and more earthy.

[Richard2]

would this work with rtr?

[SigniferOne]

Sure.

[SigniferOne]

UPDATE (5/26):

The beta of the citadel on the Capitoline (a work in progress):



UPDATE (5/27):

I have created an introductory tutorial in the Tutorials subforum, explaining how to edit ground features which is the basic building block when creating custom cities. The tutorial can be found here:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=48365

In other news, with the creation of the first tutorial I would like to organize a group of modders together, people who are interested in creating new cities, to facilitate exchange of information and for collaboration and group work.

I am considering a few names for the name of the guild, such as The Crafters Guild or The Masons Guild. I would also like to think of some names that don't have the word "guild" which has medieval connotations. In any case, PM me if you would like to join and are following along the tutorial and are seriously interested in pursuing this.

[Dol Guldur]

Society, Order, Lodge, Fraternity, Bloc (no, not the basic building ones)...

The Mason's Bloc would be kind of witty! Though that could equally be said of the Mason's Lodge

[SigniferOne]

It's not going to be the Mason's Lodge, haha. But thanks :)

[eadingas]

Do I get an honorary membership badge for my old early discoveries? ;)

[SigniferOne]

Absolutely :) But then you have to help me think of a good name.

[SigniferOne]

eadingas, drop by http://www.twcenter.net/forums/index...howtopic=31866, join the discussion and maybe start something of your own (this applies to everyone else too, all are welcome)

[SigniferOne]

UPDATE (6/5):
Building the Servian Walls, the great, arduous, and incredibly daunting task:

[Greek_fire19]

Wow, I really can't wait to start seeing great cities like Rome, Athens, Syracuse, Alesia and carthage on the map!

[Divinus Arma]

Is this still breathing? I'd love to see this for EB.

[SigniferOne]

Well, I'm currently holding my breath for BI, hoping that it will have a settlement editor and make my job immeasurrably easier. Then we'll see what happens. I intend to see this through, though, no matter what.

[eadingas]

I wouldn't count on CA giving us any tools. They consistently repeat that "community is making better tools than we do", which is an excuse for them to do nothing at all...

[Lonely Soldier]

My first attempt to start a mod (see the bottom line of my sig) revolved around this idea of accurate cities...


Glad to see something about it now!

[SigniferOne]

The beginnings of a forum:



Working on the Palatine:



The south west corner was left empty for an important number of religious monuments (Romulus' spear thrown from the Aventine and now growing as a tree, the hut of Romulus and his adopted father Faustinus, etc). There will be more buildings in the north east corner (on the slope), such as the temple to Victoria and the shrine to Victoria Virgo.

You can walk through the buildings through the two passes in the middle, and the edges of the hill will be open for troops (archers) to take place on and rain arrows down from. It will be quite a joy to try taking Rome by siege...


How it was made possible:

[JeromeGrasdyke]

Well found. Just a note on multiple concentric sets of walls: the ai will not know how to defend them properly if you have them as walls with gates. Almost certainly it will not man them or assault them properly. If the interior walls have no gates, and so essentially function just as barriers which force troops to funnel through constricted spaces, it may defend them correctly.

[Dol Guldur]

Is it just me, but why do I just see blank spaces where there are clearly supposed to be images, such as with the forum, palatine etc. above?

[SigniferOne]

Don Guldur, make sure you don't have pictures disabled in your control panel for this forum (top left corner of the menu on top).

Hi Jerome, thanks for responding:

Just a note on multiple concentric sets of walls: the ai will not know how to defend them properly if you have them as walls with gates.

What does that mean, 'walls with gates'? The only way I have found for there to be functional gates is if that particular wall circuit belongs to the 'border' segment of the settlement plan (i.e. has upgradable walls, requires to be a complete circuit to work, can be 'captured', etc). Those walls are the walls that we are used to regularly seeing. Walls that are just placed explicitly as such and such wall segment, from such and such culture (i.e. roman_stone_wall or something like that) I've found to lose many of the 'border wall' aspects, such as they can be placed in chunks without forming a complete circumference or that they cannot be captured, while retaining some of the other wall aspects, such as that rams can attack them as usual, and soldiers are able to go up and inside them, even if it's just one small chunk of a wall standing all by its lonesome.

So anyhow, one of the things that I've found not to work like regular walls is that these explicitly defined walls have gates which are always open. I guess it makes sense, that if you don't have any faction associated with that gate (so if closed it can't automatically let that faction through) and it can't be captured (in order to allow this passing through), then the only thing that makes sense is for it to always be open.

So right now, what I have for the concentric walls setup is something like in this picture:



There's an explicitly defined wall circuit (it's not a 'border' segment and so doesn't have to be complete, but of course it looks better as complete), and there's a gate in the part where there's a pathway to that hill. This circuit works in many ways just like a regular wall would, in that it 1) impedes walking through and 2) it is mountable by the troops just like a regular wall. The only thing it cannot do, really, is have a closed gate, but that's a minor slight.

So given this set up, does it really matter if the wall circuit has a gate or not? What did you mean when you made a specific exception for walls with gates? You're not saying we can have a second border segment, are you?

Almost certainly it will not man them or assault them properly.

Well, since it's really impossible to bring up a ram up that steep hill, the only real way to take that segment of the city is force the way through the gate, so in the assault part we may be ok. But are you sure the defenders will not man these walls? Can we have pathfinding nodes leading from the ground onto the top of these walls?


EDIT: Is there any way we will be able to edit physical info data, and for example in walls be able to regulate where soldiers go when they enter a wall entry point that leads to the top of the wall? I imagine this could be all coding related, but am still hoping that text-files could come into the picture. If we can edit this information, maybe some things could be solved.