Updated graphics for certain towns and villages?

[caldur]

One of the things that always bugged me about certain civs in FFH was that some civs would have villages that almost directly matched the housing buildings from there cities. Is there anything about maybe changing some of these in FF? It just gets a little annoying when I look at my Elohim with their blue an gray buildings in town and then a bunch of wooden shacks out in the county, while the Calabim have the same dark gothic architecture spread throughout their entire kingdom. And then some of the civs don't even have villages that match at all! I mean, the Bannor have the default Arabian architecture for their towns and villages, and I personally think it would be really cool if the Clan's villages really were nothing but tents and stuff as well.

 

[WarKirby]

I wasn't aware this is even possible?

In fact, I distinctly remember several people asking the question, and being told it wasn't.
Are you sure?

 

[xienwolf]

Calabim were probably following AV, so it just happened to match nicely. Improvement art is set by Era, which is set by religion. City art is set by Civ (of the initial founder)

 

[caldur]

Ah, I bet I understand then. So then each religion has it's own look for all the outlying buildings? My mistake was probably with the Kuriotes and the Luichirp and the Runes of Kilomorph then too (as that one, if it does have a look, also matches up quite nicely with those civ's buildings).

Sorry about that then, I obviously hadn't been paying as much attention as I should have! Still, is it at all possible or something to change the towns and villages to better reflect a civ's city buildings (so long as that civ doesn't follow a religion, of course)? Or is Warkirby right and that's not likely to happen? I've been browsing some of the most likely looking topics, but I couldn't seem to find any of the posts he was talking about.

Or maybe I'm the only one interested in making my cities seem a lot bigger than they actually are and that sorta funsy-stuff.

 

[WarKirby]

It depends on how many eras the system can handle. I wonder if there's a limit to that.

If there's no limit, it oculd theoretically be possible to create a unique era for every faction, and give them their own art. It's an awfully roundabout, hacky way of doing things in general, though,

 

[Ahwaric]

Still, is it at all possible or something to change the towns and villages to better reflect a civ's city buildings (so long as that civ doesn't follow a religion, of course)?

It is possible and quite easy. Also, it has already been done - Varietas Delectat (I think) has it for BtS and I have recently done it for Orbis.
The only problem so far is that unowned cottages etc. get the same art as that of the first player, which is usually human. Not a big deal. Also, it is not affected by religion, but city art isn't either now.

The only thing that has to be done is to define town improvements art for every civ and make it ignore eras.

An example of the code from CIV4PlotLSystem.xml:

		<ArtRef Name="art:building">
			<Attribute Class="Era">ERA_ALL</Attribute>
			<Attribute Class="Artstyle">ARTSTYLE_DOVIELLO</Attribute>
			<Attribute Class="Scalar">NIF:Art/Structures/Cities/an_doviello.nif::1x1x1_01</Attribute>
			<Attribute Class="Improvement">IMPROVEMENT_COTTAGE,IMPROVEMENT_HAMLET,IMPROVEMENT_VILLAGE,IMPROVEMENT_TOWN</Attribute>
			<Attribute Class="Scalar">szForceContourNode:BUILDING</Attribute>
			<Attribute Class="Scalar">szBatchGroup:buildings_an_eu</Attribute>
			<Scale>0.35</Scale>
		</ArtRef>

 

[xienwolf]

Well the DLL already prevents automatic Era shifting based on Technologies, so you could use an OnGameStart to assign everyone to the Era appropriate to their Civilization (I would add a tag to CivilizationInfos which indicates this), and you could even go REALLY overboard and define a specific era to each civ for each religion, then have Python shift each player to the appropriate religion+Civ based era upon changing.

 

[Hawkwood]

Calabim were probably following AV, so it just happened to match nicely. Improvement art is set by Era, which is set by religion. City art is set by Civ (of the initial founder)

But the new Calabim city art doesn't match AV improvements. Does this mean that FF never updated to the new Calabim city art?

 

[xienwolf]

Probably. Vehem was the first to do City Art, and did quite a bit of it (so we might not want what base FfH has as it might already be used elsewhere or somesuch). I vaguely remember one patch had some new city art submissions from the big Art Boys a while back, but I know that I personally haven't touched City art and would likely break things if I attempted to So if it did get new art, didn't get imported in the last big art-push, then I guess not.

 

[deadliver]

Probably. Vehem was the first to do City Art, and did quite a bit of it (so we might not want what base FfH has as it might already be used elsewhere or somesuch). I vaguely remember one patch had some new city art submissions from the big Art Boys a while back, but I know that I personally haven't touched City art and would likely break things if I attempted to So if it did get new art, didn't get imported in the last big art-push, then I guess not.

Yeah Vehem's city art was transferred into FFH2 if I remember correctly.