Dune Wars Art Thread

[davidlallen]

I agree that the building art is all mixed up. A number of new buildings were added by cut/pasting original buildings. I believe the courthouse artwork is used for 5-10 different entries. Unscrambling this and putting matching building art is a good project which would only affect one file (xml/art/civ4artdefines_buildings.xml).

 

[Deliverator]

Got a bit sidetracked today into looking at city styles. I've been playing with the ability to mix two citystyles simultaneously. Here's a set I quite like made using the Medieval Egyptian and Renaissance Arabic sets from Cultural Citystyles. I have retextured them a bit to fit the Dune landscape and try and mask the original use a bit. I'm going to refine these a bit more before release. In other news, I've started animating the Worm Rider, may be done by the end of the weekend.

 

[davidlallen]

I like them. Do you think we should aim for two eras of buildings, with the existing mud huts as the early era, then switching to these? Or should we just have one?

 

[Deliverator]

Worm Rider

I've put together a basic set of animations for the worm rider. I'm sure they can be improved, but I think it's OK to release now. You might want to play with the fBattleDistance a bit.

XML:

Spoiler :

		<UnitArtInfo>
			<Type>ART_DEF_UNIT_WORMRIDER</Type>
			<Button>Art/interface/units/sandworm.dds</Button>
			<fScale>0.9</fScale>
			<fInterfaceScale>0.65</fInterfaceScale>
			<bActAsLand>0</bActAsLand>
			<bActAsAir>0</bActAsAir>
			<NIF>Art/Units/worm_rider/worm_rider.nif</NIF>
			<KFM>Art/Units/worm_rider/worm_rider.kfm</KFM>
			<SHADERNIF>Art/Units/worm_rider/worm_rider.nif</SHADERNIF>
			<ShadowDef>
				<ShadowNIF>Art/Units/01_UnitShadows/UnitShadow.nif</ShadowNIF>
				<ShadowAttachNode>Bone</ShadowAttachNode>
				<fShadowScale>1.0</fShadowScale>
			</ShadowDef>
			<fBattleDistance>1.15</fBattleDistance>
			<fRangedDeathTime>0.31</fRangedDeathTime>
			<bActAsRanged>0</bActAsRanged>
			<TrainSound>AS2D_UNIT_BUILD_UNIT</TrainSound>
			<AudioRunSounds>
				<AudioRunTypeLoop>LOOPSTEP_DREAD</AudioRunTypeLoop>
				<AudioRunTypeEnd>ENDSTEP_DREAD</AudioRunTypeEnd>
			</AudioRunSounds>
			<SelectionSound>AS3D_WORMLIONFIDC</SelectionSound>
			<ActionSound>AS3D_WORMLIONATTKC</ActionSound>
		</UnitArtInfo>

 

[davidlallen]

Cool! This reopens the discussion about art flipping. Today there is a unit called Worm Rider which is a mid-level melee unit. It can move on land terrain and specializes in city attack. We also have some Fremen UU which get a free promotion to allow double move in deserts. We have discussed making these UU invisible in desert, but that will be a little hard to do (terrain specific invisibility).

Since the big discussion in June about disallowing sandworms on land, it seems clear we should not simply use this art for the Worm Rider unit. One possibility would be to do unit art flipping, and allow a set of units to switch over to this graphic when they move on desert. When I have done this before in Fury Road, it requires one "fake" unit for each unit which can flip; to make 8 units have unit flipping, we need 8 fake units added.

If we do get terrain invisibility working, it will be sad to make this cool unit art invisible.

So, how should we use this new art?

 

[Deliverator]

The art flipping sounds good. I guess you could have some Fremen units that are invisible in desert and some that ride the worms. You're not particular invisible if you're riding a worm. I suppose we need to decide whether the Fremen should have units that are both quick in desert and invisible in desert.

We could also revisit the worm-as-ship-of-the-desert idea, but that would require us being able to build them in true coastal cities, and I know you're not fond of worms in cities anyway.

 

[davidlallen]

I was not the one complaining about worms in cities. I think that was everybody else *but* me. What I object to is the concept of "coastal" cities. Why should I be able to do one thing in a city which is next to a desert, and another thing in a city which is not next to a desert?

Assuming that invisibility will come later or never, I can flip Fremen scouts, workers, settlers, and soldiers, and flip the Worm Rider and Fedaykin units regardless of who owns them. Any other units which should flip? Any objection to this flipping?

 

[Ahriman]

I am fine with art-flipping, like occurs in Planetfall; when infantry units move onto coastal tiles, they change art into a naval transport unit. Here, when fremen move onto the desert they convert to a worm rider tile. Ideally though if there are multiple units that do this, they need to have slightly different worm-rider graphics.

I am also fine with the idea of having some Worm units as desert only transports, buildable only in coastal cities.
I do not understand why you have a problem to this; you can have Worms buildable only in coastal cities for the same reason that you can build ships only in coastal cities in vanilla.
Worms live in the desert, they really don't like going on rock, and won't do so over any significant distance. So you can't recruit worms away from the desert; there aren't any worms there to recruit.
The scene from the David Lynch movie of worms attacking the city is horribly uncanon. In the book they just use worms as transport in the desert to get near the city. They blow open the shield wall to let the storm in, and then attack as infantry.

The main argument was also about barbarian sandworms being able to enter non-desert tiles. There was one patch where you fixed the barbarian worms not being able to enter cultural borders, but still had them able to enter land tiles, and this was truly horrible. Worms would just walk around your empire killing your stuff, stopping you from building imrpovements and pillaging. That was no fun to play at all.

It also seems like building worms in coastal only cities is possible, if we decide to go that way, despite having removed the idea of a "coastal city" from the mod:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=332066&page=2
Take a look at posts 31 and 34.
It turns out that it is possible to have buildings that are not buildable in landlocked cities (discovered by accident through bug). So it would be a simple matter to have desert-only units require such a building, and to have this building be very cheap.

 

[keldath]

awesome worm art!

 

[davidlallen]

It also seems like building worms in coastal only cities is possible, if we decide to go that way, despite having removed the idea of a "coastal city" from the mod:

I think you misunderstood the bug. The flag iMinAreaSize is normally -1. For some buildings, such as the drydock or the customs house, it is set to a small nonzero value like 10. This means an island of less than that size, cannot build the building. It happens that some of the DW buildings such as the landing stage (which is a copy/paste of the customs house) had this set to 10. Somewhere in the game is a check which disallows building these on a landlocked city. However, the same check disallows building on a small island.

If we rely on this behavior to prevent some things happening in landlocked cities, they will also be prevented on small islands. I do not think this is really what you want.

We have been over the discussion of worms as transport several times in the worm rider mechanics thread. It may be worthwhile to reread the thread. The right solution is one I do not know how to teach the AI: go into the desert to recruit a worm. One solution which I feel is wrong is to allow recruiting worms only at cities which happen to touch a desert. So I would prefer not to have worms as transport.

Instead we can have them magically appear when certain units move into the desert, and disappear when they leave. I will work on the unit swapping to enable that.

 

[Ahriman]

One solution which I feel is wrong is to allow recruiting worms only at cities which happen to touch a desert.

Well, I still don't understand why you feel this is wrong. But I think its irrelevant, since we are both happy with the art-swapping desert moving infantry solution, which will work well.

And I agree that if it rules it out on small islands then this also wouldn't work well (unless you also got the effect with MinSize=3 or 4, but I wouldn't be surprised if 10 was a magic number as being 1 more than a 3x3 grid with the city in the center).

 

[Ajidica]

I'll have to re-dl the mod soon, the art is looking awsome! A few things I've noticed on the art:
>The new sardaukar look amazing!
>house shields: Did the books ever say what color the shields were? IIRC they were transparent. There might also be a slight blue-shift in the light as the light bends slightly around the object because the shields are electromagneticaly derived. (At least according to the Legends of Dune books)

 

[God-Emperor]

I don't think iMinAreaSize does exactly what you think it does, although the net effect is similar.

From what I can see, via the documentation at the civ4.wikidot.com site (which still has some info not in the Modiki), it applies to the size of adjacent bodies of water, not island size. It prevents building things if the body of water adjacent to the city is smaller than the given number of tiles. If the city is not adjacent to a body of water at all, then it is evidently the same as being adjacent to a body of water of size 0, so any number > 0 prevents a building (or unit, they have this tag too) from being build in a non-coastal city. (The smallest chunk of land that can have a non-coastal city is size 9.)

It is clear that small islands are not prevented from building lighthouses - you can build one of those on a size 1 island. The lighthouse has this value set to 10.

 

[Ahriman]

Blue shifted shields sound cool.

Interesting, so it appears we *could* use iMinAreaSize to block buildings from being built in landlocked cities, as in my initial guess.
Nonetheless I am still happy to go with art-swapping infantry.

 

[The_J]

I don't think iMinAreaSize does exactly what you think it does, although the net effect is similar.

From what I can see, via the documentation at the civ4.wikidot.com site (which still has some info not in the Modiki), it applies to the size of adjacent bodies of water, not island size. It prevents building things if the body of water adjacent to the city is smaller than the given number of tiles. If the city is not adjacent to a body of water at all, then it is evidently the same as being adjacent to a body of water of size 0, so any number > 0 prevents a building (or unit, they have this tag too) from being build in a non-coastal city. (The smallest chunk of land that can have a non-coastal city is size 9.)

It is clear that small islands are not prevented from building lighthouses - you can build one of those on a size 1 island. The lighthouse has this value set to 10.

Yes, that is, what the tag does.
Interesting side effect: If the unit is DOMAIN_LAND/the building doesn't need water, and you set iMinAreaSize, you need the mentioned number of land plots.

edit: Sorry, haven't seen, that Davidlallen has already mentioned it.

 

[God-Emperor]

Interesting side effect: If the unit is DOMAIN_LAND/the building doesn't need water, and you set iMinAreaSize, you need the mentioned number of land plots.

That's interesting.

So the earlier poster was correct, for buildings that don't have bWater set to true. There is no building in regular BtS that has the combination of bWater == 0 and iMinAreaSize != -1.

 

[koma13]

I just want to point out that we edited cvcity::waterarea() to always return the biggest area available on map.

 

[Lord Tirian]

I did some texturing on the harvester. I'm not 100% happy with the texture, I was a bit at a loss how to texture the back bits of the harvester (the smokestack and the structure around it), but I'm rather I'm fairly happy with the look of the main body, the wheels, the "funnel" at the front and the cockpit (and the sense of scale it gives you).

@Deliverator: You may want to tweak the back a bit more and you'll probably need to rotate the model, as I moved it around a bit to get the wheels closer to the main body. This will, of course, obscure the back of the model as well, which is probably good, as the front looks better.

EDIT: I may do a bit on the texture again, but right now, I wanted to get it out for now, as it's presentable, I think. Plus, I deviated a bit from the reference shot, mainly to get it look "good" (which is subjective), so if I come back to it later, I'd add in some details from the reference shot.

Cheers, LT.

 

[keldath]

Lord Tirian,

its nice art,

but i think deliverators art is more loyale to dune 1984 and the games.

 

[Lord Tirian]

Lord Tirian,

its nice art,

but i think deliverators art is more loyale to dune 1984 and the games.

Well, it's still Deliverator's model, just a different texture - but you're right, that's why I want to redo parts of it later.

Plus, I think I have a little different idea of style for dune - if you look at the wind trap and the ornithopter, you'll see that in my "vision", Dune tech is less "techy" - more stone-like surfaces (instead of gleaming metal) and if possible a slight hint of ornate elements (I actually removed some of these from the harvester already) and gold - hence the different look from the "original" harvester.

Well, let's wait for Deliverator's response, perhaps he can tweak it more again (and perhaps I can then do a bit more on it afterwards, I had the idea of making the surface more metal-like and adding a gloss map, like the stealth destroyer has in BtS). Hopefully, we'll get a harvester everybody likes!

Cheers, LT.