Tutorial: creating new vegetation for battlemaps

[PROMETHEUS]

DJ what u think of the new trees of MTW2 ? do they look like the RTW ones in way of construction or something better? may be they can be improved later with ur technique?

[wlesmana]

Super mega ultimo thank you to Duke John for this tutorial. I have tried making new trees for a week now. This is the result:




It's not much yet since I still need to tweak them a lot and make more than one model, but looks better than vanilla so far. I would've been pretty much impossible for me to come up with something like without the tutorial. Thanks again.

[Geoffrey S]

Excellent tutorial! As you said it's a shame seeing so many beautiful models in so many great mods in contrast to the rather poor vegitation and landscapes of RTW; thanks to this tutorial I look forward to seeing many mods using this technique and looking all the better for it.

I presume these new trees also have a noticeable effect on formations, such as phalanxes? Should be rather good for gameplay, making terrain more important than in regular RTW.

[Encaitar]

Prometheus: the trees in that screenshot look identical to the trees from MTW (I spent quite a bit of time making maps with MTW, so I recognise the various models). Whether they're just placeholders for now or not, who knows (the look may well stay the same, but with a more 3-d model than the MTW ones).

[Prof]

when I try to test some stuff, I made (I just changed the texture) it says "error in reading scene file"

[Duke John]

I feared that already... to be honest I just collected my files and hoped that it still worked but apparently one cas file is corrupted, I guess the pine tree, right?

I shall upload tomorrow a new version that works.

[Prof]

yes...it is the pine tree...I can't load it in max either

[Teleklos Archelaou]

How does the whole "Tree_A"/"Tree_B" system work? If a group or set of models references a tree like "tree_A_palm", and the entry for that palm looks like this:

	tree_A_palm
	{
		stat_cat indestructable
		localised_name none
		level
		{
			min_health 0
			battle_stats
			item		tree_A_palm
			physical_info	info_tree_A.cas
		}
	}

How does it pull up a palm tree specifically when it looks at the cas file "info_tree_A.cas"? I thought one might just be able to look up all the palm types (4 apparently in vanilla), by looking for their CAS files, but there are only two that I can see, and I'm wondering where these other two come from, since they seem to be referencing CAS files like the one above. It is clear this same CAS file is used for other non-palms too:

	tree_A_deciduous_summer
	{
		stat_cat small_wooden
		localised_name none
		level
		{
			min_health 0
			battle_stats
			item		tree_A_deciduous_summer
			physical_info	info_tree_A.cas
		}
	}

What I'm really wondering I guess is is it possible to use these "Tree_A"/"Tree_B" trees on the battlefield outside of groups. As the trees referenced in descr_vegetation.txt.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Another question that I'm very curious about. Maybe someone has an idea on this.

Is there any chance at all of making the game recognize trees for climates like sandy_desert or swamp? Swamp has entries in descr_vegetation.txt, but they are blank. I referenced some trees there, and the sprites were created for the swamp trees then, but they didn't actually show up in game. It would be **tremendous** if we could get them to pull up trees (for example, vegetation swamp_dense_forest could populate the space with thick trees instead of the totally stupid flat ground it shows now; and vegetation sandy_desert_dense_forest could pull up the desert oasis trees where the desert does intersect with forest ground cover).

Any ideas about what other file needs changing to get these to work? These are not new climate types - but just attempts to specify the vegetation referenced when an existing climate type intersects with an existing ground cover type.

[shifty157]

As to your first post. The entries you pointed out direct the game to .ITEM files.

item           tree_A_palm

means

data/items/tree_A_palm.ITEM

.ITEM files are used in settlement plans. Every building is loaded from a .ITEM file.

The .CAS files that it points to arent actually .CAS files. They are .BPI files which are similar to .CAS files but the game uses them to create the physical data about an object so that troops cant walk through it and the camera gets bumped up by it. You can find those .BPI files in "data/models_building/INFO/" but they won't do any good.

What I actually did for our palm thing was open up these .ITEM files and resave the models in .CAS format.


As to your second post I can only make a guess as to what may be happening because i dont know enough about vegetation. Did you specify a layout texture for the entry to use? If not then it will come up empty.

[Asean]

Has any created a vegetation mod yet with this tutorial?

[kharshan]

Can someone release what they made with this tutorial? Or has Duke John uploaded a working version of what he made yet?