Custom Terrain bldgs, irrigation, roads and rails. Need tips!

[Civinator]

LKendter since a long time uses something similar for his roads and railroads in the reports about his part in the CCM succession games.

Spoiler :

Screenshots from the current CCM3 succession game with Scandinavia:

 

[ajb]

I redid the railroad pcx tile numbering but this time in order from left to right. I then tested each layer against tile #1 and turned off any tile that wasnt near the cluster of 1s. We can now begin to see some patterns emerging. Still scrambled but it might be something more workable for texture editing. I highlighted 2 of the patterns of #1 but there are plenty. I think this is it. With this I can create varied railroad textures once I refine the pattern. It's probably going to be a crap load of trial and error from this point.

Thank you for these details, I think this will help with some of my terrain conversions. Quite the pattern there.

 

[ZergMazter]

@ajb
I settled for a pattern less busy at the moment. The tiles I chose allow for clusters and some scattered tiles for variation. This has worked great so far. The pattern is tiles 1/2/6/15 on row 17 &&& tile 16 on row 16 in the railroad.pcx. This also depends on your graphics. If you have smaller bldgs or anything then it might not look as full as mine did. Mine is designed to work with my bigger cities with multiple districts. I'm planning to edit all the edges of the railroads file so that to edges build large train tracks with the occasional train showing. It can be difficult if you add too much since you will have to shrink your color palette for each unique texture in an effort so make all the textures look as good as possible with as many colors as possible that fit the 256 palette. Here is the pic for reference:

 

[ZergMazter]

The road pcx file acts very weird when you draw outside of the purple squares. NE & NW of a purple tile (Green) act as a hard cover and will overlap any textures in the way including cities. SE & SW (Green) will act as a soft cover and will be overlapped by any textures that make contact. This seems to be the same for other textures such as terrainBuildings.

In the case of the roads.pcx the very last square on the bottom right is the only one that is used when a square is surrounded by roads, making it the lone repeating square in a map/section FULL of roads (except for the edges). With careful drawing I managed draw irrigations that will be exposed only when roads are present, duck behind hills, mountains, forests, and cities, and be overlapped by the irrigation improvement in a way that resembles the civ2 irrigation upgrade from irrigation to farm. Compared to my previous screenshot (pre-railroads) it greatly cleaned up the map view in a satisfying way where you can see the 2 textures "stacked". It's an illusion after all:

NOTE: I should mention this matters because my irrigations are part of the roads.pcx and roads cover EVERYTHING. I drew roads with irrigation that would have looked silly if the irrigation was on top of a mountain peak.

 

[ZergMazter]

I was trying to make a mine that didnt look so repetitive but ironically I had to add more buildings to add variation, and making use of the green (out of bounds tiles) in the pcx file. If you know the limits it actually works and the extras will duck accordingly. It's not perfect and it has its issues specially with roads but it looks decent for all ages. Here is a sample where you get mines, roads, rails, and farms each added 1 at a time and it blends ok even with the limitations:

 

[ZergMazter]

Bah I thought they still looked too crowded and made more plain. Now they fit perfect with mountains and hills while plains/grass look less busy, and fit with my other textures:

 

[ZergMazter]

Another update:

I wanna break up some repetition for the big industrial building by adding another smaller bldg and maybe resizing it too. Cities will be updated soon. I wanna break up repetition with the farms as well and maybe even find a way to add highways. I compiled some bldgs from the community modified then, recolored, shaded, added shadows and I'm hoping they fit all better together now. I feel that this is still easy to look at. I found the vanilla resource texture not matching my textures is an advantage because they stick out making them stand out and easier to find than modded ones.

 

[ZergMazter]

I hit another milestone. I manage to scale the city pcx to allow for bigger city textures. I was just messing around but the result was quite nice. I might even keep this mixture of industrial style buildings for my cities during the industrial age. I do want to update the industry tile to the right of each city. I dont think this is overwhelming to look at but I dont know. Any thoughts?

 

[ZergMazter]

And of course those are the metros. The smaller cities will have less buildings.

 

[ZergMazter]

Last update of the night. I played around with some of Balthazar's (Rest in peace) buildings and came up with this. Still need proper placement, clean up, fix shading being on the wrong side after flipping the bldg. I think it's pretty sweet. A proper late industrial city:

 

[ZergMazter]

One step further. This time tiles have railroads, tile bldgs are a bit more complex, adjusted church-windmill-houses colors to match the general theme (10 to 12% more vibrant) and city/metro update. Cities will be slightly modified to match some of the metro's new bldgs, but not too big as it's not a metro after all. This will be the canvas on which the modern era cities/metros will be built as an upgrade of the existing model and not an entirely new one as in vanilla. Take a look at New York for example. It's a city with modern bldgs and industrial style architecture left over from the industrial age. I'm following a similar path:

 

[ZergMazter]

Made pollution into a see through mist (yes it works in game) that looks more like polluted air or unhealthiness. In my game I will try to rename pollution unhealthiness and use this graphic. I will also redefine pollution into unhealthiness and apply "pollution" to some vanilla bldgs and the pollution reducing effect to some others like hospitals. In this screenshot I manage to make the capital city of Rome able to show pollution in the controlled tiles unlike my old prototypes surrounding it. I will eventually apply this to all cities of all sizes. One downside is coastal cities will now show water, but I had to choose between looks and functionality. Pollution that you cant see because a city is covering the tile would be a pain in the butt:

And of course it's not final. I gotta round off the edges and apply other effects so that it's more organic and not blocky: