development feedback

[GeoModder]

The main work is done, as you can see on the screenshots. The first screenshot is ruins only, the second ruins with a fury road settlement in the centre. I think the scaling comes pretty close, if not perfect.
I did some last-minute adjustments after the screenshots so all ruins should be within their tile borders now and won't overlap with adjacent ruins.

The problem now is that the "cellars" of the buildings don't go below groundlevel.
The only quick solution I can offer for flatland tiles is to remove the shadows of the cityset, so they won't look to 'float' so offen.

For hill ruins, I wonder if you could adapt the mapscript so that hill ruins link to another artfile? I could try to adapt the ruins so that they are on different 'levels' in respect to their position (higher in the centre, lower on the edges).
Essentially, two ruins features then. One for flatlands, one for hills. Possible?

I made a cleaned-up Civ4CityLSystem.xml file too. Might be handier for you in the future if you want to add more buildings or so.

The Civ4PlotLSystem.xml file I still have to do.

 

[Deon]

These look very nice.
Am I wrong or do buildings in the city look smaller than in ruins? I'd suggest to make surrounding non-city ruins to be smaller too and maybe a bit darker, I think that a settlement should look more noticeable than surrounding tiles.

Also as far as I remember the game does not place trees on rivers. Can you use the same script for your ruins? Or does the game simply use the "nif with a river" for forests to avoid trees on rivers?

 

[GeoModder]

It's a fixed .nif file, no script involved so the run of the river can't be taken into account.
The buildings in the city look smaller because there's a problem with the game engine regarding the 'subterranean' parts of the ruins. In any case, the overal size of the ruins can still be tinkered with in the CIV4ArtDefines_Feature.xml file.
Retexturing of the ruins has to be done by an artist, which I'm not. I only used existing art and put in in a new .nif file.

 

[Deon]

Ah, now I see it. There are various slopes under the buildings which should be underground, right?
I didn't notice them for the first time.

 

[GeoModder]

DavidLallen,

I figured out how to adjust the height on which the nif file 'floats' over the terrain. Seems like the main problem was that I mixed 2 citysets in 1 file.
In my opinion it looks fairly good on flat land. It's still possible to tinker with individual buildings so there's absolutely no subterranean parts of the building showing up on completely flat land. But that will be a time-consuming job because of the need to fire up the mod, check ingame, get out of the game, tinker in the niffile until the right building is found and adjust the right subnode of it. Is it worth the effort?
On coastal/hilly edges there always will be floating buildings. Nothing I can do to avoid that.

This niffile doesn't work for hill ruins, if you can create in xml/python a new hill ruin feature and adjust the mapscript to take it into account I can adjust the niffile so that central buildings are higher positioned then buildings on the edge of a hill tile. Just waiting to hear from you before I start on that.

You just need to unrar the assets attachment and drop it in your mod folder in order to let it work. Say "yes" to any overwrite popups and have a look ingame.
the attachment includes a trimmed down CityLSystem.xml, the adjusted artdefines_features.xml, and of course the ruins.nif files.

 

[davidlallen]

This is looking pretty interesting.

One unexpected result is that the buildings don't "avoid" rivers and roads like forest does. Does anybody know why trees never appear on rivers and roads, so we could get the same effect with ruins?

Regarding a separate ruin feature for hills, that is possible. It is easy to handle in the mapscript, one line of extra code. One possible complication is the bonuses and improvements. Presently many of the bonuses and improvements are restricted to only appear with the ruin feature.

Is it possible to use the "FeatureVariety" keyword for this? That is, could the nif for "hill feature" be treated as a variety of ruin instead of a different feature? I am not sure exactly how that works, but in the text WBS file you can see the variety keyword used to select pine forest vs general forest, for example. Otherwise I would have to go through and find all the places where something is restricted to the ruin feature, and then put duplicate tags to also allow them on the hill ruin feature.

Does anybody know why trees, and other improvements allowed on hills, do not have this problem of their basements showing?

 

[Deon]

One unexpected result is that the buildings don't "avoid" rivers and roads like forest does. Does anybody know why trees never appear on rivers and roads, so we could get the same effect with ruins?

I actually asked this in the post # 62 and GeoModder doesn't know how to handle this.
I'm a noob too in everything but XML/2d art/some python so let's hope that some great mind will help us with it.

 

[GeoModder]

This is looking pretty interesting.

One unexpected result is that the buildings don't "avoid" rivers and roads like forest does. Does anybody know why trees never appear on rivers and roads, so we could get the same effect with ruins?

My guess is that the game engine "reads" the river during map generation and places an appropriate forest/jungle .nif. Something that isn't possible here since the game engine only wants to read the first ruins niffile I link it to. One of those things I suspect are hardcoded in the engine.

Regarding a separate ruin feature for hills, that is possible. It is easy to handle in the mapscript, one line of extra code. One possible complication is the bonuses and improvements. Presently many of the bonuses and improvements are restricted to only appear with the ruin feature.

It's easy to test. Add the extra line in the mapscript, add an entry for a hill ruins feature (use whatever graphic you want to) in the artdefines_feature and see if both the feature graphic and the bonuses/improvements show up when the necessary tech is researched.

Is it possible to use the "FeatureVariety" keyword for this? That is, could the nif for "hill feature" be treated as a variety of ruin instead of a different feature? I am not sure exactly how that works, but in the text WBS file you can see the variety keyword used to select pine forest vs general forest, for example. Otherwise I would have to go through and find all the places where something is restricted to the ruin feature, and then put duplicate tags to also allow them on the hill ruin feature.

I think this is also hardcoded for the game engine. At least, only the forest feature seems to use it for the appropriate climate areas for trees.

 

[davidlallen]

Asked broader audience at this thread.

 

[davidlallen]

My guess is that the game engine "reads" the river during map generation and places an appropriate forest/jungle .nif.

I am not an expert, but I think there is more to it. We have agreed that the set of forest nif's is based on which corners are touching other plots of the same type. I do not think there are additional *nifs* for each possible location of a river and/or road. I think something in the engine must delete individual trees out of the nif, if it is on a river or road. I have asked on the general customization forum, let us see if some higher level wizard knows the answer.

Actually, you had mentioned about tree cutting in this post, I guess I thought that was related to avoiding trees on top of rivers. Does that only apply to improvements?

I think [FeatureVariety] is also hardcoded for the game engine. At least, only the forest feature seems to use it for the appropriate climate areas for trees.

Could you try an experiment? If you put two different versions of the nif into different FeatureVarieties, you could use notepad to edit a WBS file. Put variety #0 into one plot and put variety #1 into an adjacent plot. If that works, it would save a lot of redundant coding in the bonus/improvement xml.

 

[GeoModder]

Will be for tomorrow or the day after. Have to call it the day.

 

[Refar]

The engine does cut trees on roads, some improvements and maybe rivers. However no one seem to have the slightest idea on how it is working.

 

[Randomness]

The ruins on rivers/roads graphic glitch is a pain, but it isn't really that bad. It isn't that noticable unless you're zoomed way in. Good luck fixing it anyways.

 

[davidlallen]

@ geomodder, maybe refar: please see the new, long discussion in this thread about feature nifs.

 

[GeoModder]

Most of that explanation is beyond me, davidlallen.

 

[davidlallen]

I guess the bottom line is, unless a 3d artist rebuilds that nif from scratch, we cannot have the ruins buildings avoid rivers.

 

[GeoModder]

What's needed? 15 nifs which stay within the outline of the 15 forest/jungle nifs?

The mentioning of that slowdown of his system is probably because the ruin nif is 2 merged citysets, making the nif well over a megabyte large.

 

[davidlallen]

A few more details from that thread -- I took your ruins nif and one vanilla tree related nif, and put them into an identical XML framework. The tree one respects roads, and the ruins one doesn't. So the only possible difference is in the nif itself. Unfortunately the two nifs have completely different internal structures. What would be required is to study the tree nif and understand its structures better, and then rebuild the ruins nif from scratch so it "looks like that". I think only a 3d artist could do it. Even though it doesn't involve any new art, it involves much deeper understanding of the nif structure than I have, anyway.

 

[GeoModder]

Well yes, the tree nifs are a single entity. I joined two cityset nifs (twice the same one), and rotated half the buildings for variation. Also, citynifs keep the buildings as separate entities since that is needed for putting them in nodes for the cottages and cities ingame.

I had a quick look in nifscope but couldn't find an option to join different nodes together. But I don't know how such an option would be named either, so that's hardly definite.

 

[Deon]

Sorry for breaking into the current discussion of the feature, but while the main thread is about general development feedback I'd like to point here because there're not tech ideas only but many others, mostly about civics and the direction of the research/actions after the apocalypse.
I ask this here too because I want to know the davidlallen's comments on this and to have a permission to do a "playtesting tech modmod" to use that techtree and new civics (not vanilla); I don't see a massive civic discussion yet so this may be a nice start.
I want to make it because I have a free time for a week or two and it may be helpful with new ideas to develop your perfect mod further (and to playtest techtree combinations).