Changing coastline visuals?

[Yaitz331]

I live in Israel, so I'm working on a small mod for myself to create an alternate history where I can add some flavor for my own playthrough. One of the things I'm doing is modifying the province map, which isn't that good around the southern Levant. Specifically, the lakes are really off; the shape of the Dead Sea is REALLY bizarre (it's like over two times as wide as it should be, and way too far north), and the Sea of Galilee just isn't on the map. Changing the province map works fine, and I followed a Steam guide on how to use the map_editor tool to get the settlements to be in the right places. However, while changing the land provinces is unproblematic, changing coastlines just isn't showing up on the map. If I hover over the areas then it says "Lake", if I zoom out the lakes show up, but when I zoom in, it just looks the same as before. How can I get the map visuals to follow my changes to the coastline? The same problem occurs if I try to change the Mediterranean coastline, so it's not just something with lakes, it's with the visuals of water appearing on the zoomed-in map in general.

 

[CaesarVincens]

Did you edit the heightmap at all? I'd guess that'd be the cause, as the zoomed in map is 3D while the zoomed out map isn't

 

[Yaitz331]

Did you edit the heightmap at all? I'd guess that'd be the cause, as the zoomed in map is 3D while the zoomed out map isn't

Editing the heightmap PNG doesn't help. Neither does changing anything in gfx\map\water. I think it might be something I'd do with the map_editor, but I can't figure out how to use that to change coastlines.

 

[CaesarVincens]

Fair enough, I've only just started looking at the map editor myself, but I have similar experience with map editing in other PDX games.

 

[crownsteler]

Do i understand correctly that you want to edit the 3d map of the game? You will have to go into the map editor and modify the terrain in there using the heightmap editor. Have you tried that? You might also need to increase the resolution of that section of the heightmap in the editor if you cant get the terrain to look the way you d like.

 

[Yaitz331]

Do i understand correctly that you want to edit the 3d map of the game? You will have to go into the map editor and modify the terrain in there using the heightmap editor. Have you tried that? You might also need to increase the resolution of that section of the heightmap in the editor if you cant get the terrain to look the way you d like.

Is there no way to get the heightmap to match the modified coastlines of the province map? Adjusting the heightmap has to be done manually in the map editor?

 

[CaesarVincens]

Is there no way to get the heightmap to match the modified coastlines of the province map? Adjusting the heightmap has to be done manually in the map editor?

I don't know about any automatic method, but you could also use an external image editor, which - depending on your familiarity with such - might be easier or harder than the map editor tool.

 

[Yaitz331]

I don't know about any automatic method, but you could also use an external image editor, which - depending on your familiarity with such - might be easier or harder than the map editor tool.

Modifying the heightmap in paint.net didn't work though. Modifying the heightmap through the map editor did work, so presumably there are supplemental files that the map_editor creates automatically that are necessary for the visuals to change.

 

[CaesarVincens]

Modifying the heightmap in paint.net didn't work though. Modifying the heightmap through the map editor did work, so presumably there are supplemental files that the map_editor creates automatically that are necessary for the visuals to change.

True, it does appear to be more complex that previous games in that regard, there are two related files, indirection_heightmap and packed_heightmap, and they are not obviously related to the main heightmap (e.g. not simply scaled down).