SetNumCastleMapGroups Function

[thefirstoneill]

Hi there
I want to add additional castle maps to my campaign. I understand the naming convention on the files. The game comes with 5 castle maps with various tech levels. If I name m new maps castleflat06_1_0, castleflat06_1_2, castleflat06_2_, etc, will the campaign automatically pick them up or do I need to alter SetNumCastleMapGroups:::::4 command in the startpos file, Im not really clear what this command is doing

many thanks

[EatYerGreens]

I checked out the thread barocca pointed to...

now here is a little thread about castle maps

but the basic idea is the same

...and I also looked in the Viking Era-file, for comparison, but it is also set at "4".

Now, I've still never played a Viking campaign, so I have no idea how many castle levels are possible or what they look like (and I cannot imagine large stone-built fortresses and such being appropriate for that era!). So I was puzzled to see no difference in this setting, for the Viking campaign.

My initial thought had been that 4 meant "0 to 4", hence 5 possible numbers, representing the 5 main (medieval) castle types, selected by an algorithm like {1 + RANDOM(4)} but this doesn't make sense if the more advanced castles don't appear in the Viking campaign. (*)

"Flat", "Plains" and "Hilly" is only three terrain types, so it can't be connected to that, either. Or so it would seem.


* - on the other hand, maybe the Viking tech tree limits you to building only the most basic wooden forts and they never saw reason to amend the SetNum... thing?


So I have, similarly, drawn a blank on this one, so far. You've probably thought through most of what I've just said already but I thought I'd add it to the thread, to save other people the bother of mentioning it.


Just for ease of reference, here's the note from the Era file

//========================================
//Castle Map Groups
//specifies the number of castle map groups
//available to this start pos. 
//This is needed for determining which
//castle maps are to be used for each region
//in siege battles.
//========================================

Hmmm... those battlemap inf files all start with something like this :-

Terrains:: LUSH ARID ROCK_DES TEMPERATE

That's four items...

(note: SAND_DES only ever seems to appear in the Architecture:: entries in those files)

[barocca]

that was intended to be a flag that could be set to tell the game which group of castlemaps it could use

originally there was going to be only ONE architecture folder, with numbers differentiating the architecture type (0-western 1-southern 2-islamic and so on)

CA decided it would be far simpler to put each architecture into its own folder

the SetNumCastleMapGroups Function can be ignored