Reworking Hell

the grubs look too dense. maybe a little bit more spare?

Click to expand...

i could make them more sparse with blocking out some parts via alpha channel, but i really like how they look currently.

Any chance of a forest-type feature? Lots of spikes, mushrooms, etc.

Click to expand...

i can make new models, i just retexture stuff, so perhaps. i have to see what is possible. the burned trees look fine on broken lands i think, so there is no real need for more plant stuff imho. i have something different planned for fields of perdition, but it will take time.

Eh. In this case it's more of a mechanical need; I'd like a hellish forest variant, so that the Elves don't get obliterated by hell.

Burned forests look great on hell terrain, imo - they work as a Hell Forest. A more Jungle-esque hell feature would be neat, though.

tesb said:

there is the same problem with water than with rivers afaik. i could make a different terrain graphic, but is only the water on ground afaik. there is still the shadered blue water on top of it. i may try and see what is possible.

Click to expand...

would probably be weird if lava sea has the same coast like normal ocean. Would it be possible with normal terrain? Or maybe we should steal the ocean from dunewars even their "water" fits hell more than blue stuff imho.

would probably be weird if lava sea has the same coast like normal ocean. Would it be possible with normal terrain? Or maybe we should steal the ocean from dunewars even their "water" fits hell more than blue stuff imho.

Click to expand...

dune wars has no water and they got rid of it by giving the shadered water completely opaque textures (the only thing you can actually change) and also changing the hight maps (else units would walk in the air where the the water would be).

in short: it is not possible to have water on erebus and no water in hell. if you get rid of the blue stuff, you will do so in regular terrain as well.

JujZe said:

FF and RiFE has hellish blackwater, maybe borrow that art?

Click to expand...

tesb, maybe take a look at FF/RiFE's blackwater, and see what you can do?

can you send me the terrain textures please, i don't have those mods?

edit: art/terrain/textures

Eh. In this case it's more of a mechanical need; I'd like a hellish forest variant, so that the Elves don't get obliterated by hell.

Click to expand...

that is your fault!



have not made them tileable yet.

Ooooh! Lovely trees!

I don't have FF/RiFE, so I can't send you the texture. Sorry

Hmm, funny.. am I blind but I cannot find terrain (folder) anywhere in RifE installation folder.
Maybe Valkrionn helps..

it is in the fpk i guess

tesb said:

Spoiler :

that is your fault!



have not made them tileable yet.

Click to expand...

Awesome.

And yeah, the hell water textures are in the fpak. IIRC, they don't blend too well with OTHER water, but then, I don't see that as much of an issue... Wouldn't imagine Hell and Erebus SHOULD blend well.

I'm at work atm, can post them later on tonight... About 6.5 hours from now.

I think these are it - Blighted Coast and Blackwater textures, from the art/terrain/textures in the fPak.

Would in fact be them, according to the artdefs on sourceforge.

thank you. i looked at them and will try them out later. by the first looks of it they just look darker, perhaps i switch away from lava as a coast and go more into warcraft 2 (orc lands) type of coast.

tesb said:

thank you. i looked at them and will try them out later. by the first looks of it they just look darker, perhaps i switch away from lava as a coast and go more into warcraft 2 (orc lands) type of coast.

Click to expand...

PAE IV by Pie_at has some fog, it looks green-yellowish and would fit to cover the seas/coastal tiles of hell terrain, but I don't know if this is defined as "improvement", "terrain type" or climate effect... I looked into the files but found nothing (what a surprise, same outcome if you put a gorilla to develop new financial products - what they do, if I think of it twice). Maybe just pm Pie_at, tesb, you can use the civforum.de too.

He has some nice plagues like locusts hordes (destroy improvements) and tile-bound-pestilence (20% harm on this tile for units) etc. ... could be sideeffect, if hell terrain is spreading near your non affected tiles.

Greez,

Tschuggi

Awesome.

Click to expand...

valkrionn i will not make those tress tilable or use them at all, because they are not fitting my purposes (they look too distracting). however if you want to use them i can send your the texture and give you advice on how to make the other 14 nifs, so you have tileable trees that look like in this screenshot


i used the nebula from final frontier gave it a new texture and upped every mesh, so you can see them on land and hills. i will use this as a tileable fire feature for the fields of perdition:


i wrote somewhere earlier that tiling removes animations, even texture transform animations. this not entirely true, only tree tiling removes them, the half tiling can still use texture transform nodes. what that means: the fiery fields are animated!

If you would, that would be great.

And that looks like a very good replacement for the fire... should be less cpu intensive too.

there are two files in the attached zip:

1. the model of the trees (BrokenTrees15_01_backup.nif)
2. the texture (helltrees_1024.dds)


What you have to do:
get evergreen01_01 up to evergreen14_01 found in the unpacked assets fpk of civilization IV. The path is: art/terrain/features/treeevergreen

now you have to repeat the following steps for every *.nif (14 times in total):
1.) select the trees and scale vertices: z = 1.5 (only do that if you want the trees taller than normal, else you have to scale the trees of BrokenTrees15_01_backup by z = 0.67)
2.) change the texture, so the trees as well as the shadows use helltrees_1024.dds (this needs only one texture change because both meshes refer to the same texture property)
3.) copy the the branch of the shadow mesh and paste it back on the scene root node
4.) change the UV map of the new shadow mesh and simply drag the the square over the shadow to the bright spot in the bottom right of the texture
5.) adjust the position (x,y coordinates) of the new shadow mesh so the bright spots are where the tree bases are.
6.) set the alpha property of the new shadow mesh to 4097


this sounds perhaps a bit much, but it should not take you longer than 1 to 3 minutes per *.nif. if you have questions feel free to ask. also you may adjust the uv maps a bit, because the firaxis guys have chosen them poorly when they did their trees (for example some branches overlap with the bole, thus giving you some weird artifacts at the edges of the branches). You can simply compare the UV maps of the nif in the zip to see where is fixed stuff, for comparison. Finally you should probably rename the BrokenTrees15_01_backup.nif to NameOfYourTrees15_01.nif

i was experimenting with the coasts a bit. here are some results:

1.) decent looking normal coast, perhaps as a replacement for the current one?



2.) another decent looking normal coast, but it is better than 1?




3.) a possible hell coast?




4.) another hell coast?



the problem that i have with those options, that they extend a bit too far into the sea for my tastes, but there is nothing i can do to fix this



edit:
personally i would go with 1 and 4, for regular coast and hell coast respectively.