Map Modding & Map Editor 101

[Carlberg]

I've only dabbled with small personal mods before, and never map modded before. How technical is it to simply add Scandinavia to the game, and put some tribes up there? Is it a ton of work, or is it fairly simple?

It'd be out of bounds for the base texture, if you aim to still keep the rest of the map it'd be hard.
You could increase the height but then you'd need to:

a. Wait for us to fix the defines so you can increase the size of the map.
b. Go over the size we support (we're not going to support going over 8x4k maps, it's at your own risk)
c. Probably need to re-adjust every single map object in the world since the coordinates would be a bit off.

It wouldn't be impossible, just a lot more work than one could expect at a glance. Adding the actual tribes would probably be the speediest bit.

 

[Thornado86]

It wouldn't be impossible, just a lot more work than one could expect at a glance. Adding the actual tribes would probably be the speediest bit.

Sounds too complicated for me. It should've been added by you during the developement. I suppose it will never happen. Thanks for the explaining tho.

 

[Svanley]

Hey, been trying to make a clear slate for a map including the provinces, countries etc and getting stuck at loading on MapPostRead. Can't find any information on what MapPostRead is and no error message gets produced (doesn't crash just stuck). Just loading the map with new heightmap, province.bmp is fine. It's when i replace all the other files, definitions, province_names, setup etc that i get stuck on loading. Been trying to find a fix for a while now.

I guess it helps if I list all the files I've swapped in case I've just forgot one:
adjacencies, areas, climate, default.map, definition, heightmap, heightmap.heightmap, indirection_heightmap, packed_heightmap, ports, provinces.bmp, regions, rivers.bmp, terrain.bmp, (localization) province_names_l_english, (common) character_setup, post_character_setup, province_setup, setup, (province_terrain) 00_province_terrain, in province_names folder i added all the groups but emptied them except for roman which I kept province 1, rome.

For most of the files I've just cleared them out of the old data but kept some stuff where it made sense, for example "countries = { } ".

Thanks for the help!

Edit: Changed the map objects tied to provinces in gfx/map aswell, still MapPostRead though.

 

[Carlberg]

Hey, been trying to make a clear slate for a map including the provinces, countries etc and getting stuck at loading on MapPostRead. Can't find any information on what MapPostRead is and no error message gets produced (doesn't crash just stuck). Just loading the map with new heightmap, province.bmp is fine. It's when i replace all the other files, definitions, province_names, setup etc that i get stuck on loading. Been trying to find a fix for a while now.

I guess it helps if I list all the files I've swapped in case I've just forgot one:
adjacencies, areas, climate, default.map, definition, heightmap, heightmap.heightmap, indirection_heightmap, packed_heightmap, ports, provinces.bmp, regions, rivers.bmp, terrain.bmp, (localization) province_names_l_english, (common) character_setup, post_character_setup, province_setup, setup, (province_terrain) 00_province_terrain, in province_names folder i added all the groups but emptied them except for roman which I kept province 1, rome.

For most of the files I've just cleared them out of the old data but kept some stuff where it made sense, for example "countries = { } ".

Thanks for the help!

Edit: Changed the map objects tied to provinces in gfx/map aswell, still MapPostRead though.

That sounds odd, not entirely sure what might be causing that. I'd suggest troubleshooting the individual changes, removing the ones that arent dependent on eachother and eliminating what might be causing it. Any of those files that are within the common/defines are however currently not working for mods, as they're being overwritten. We're working on a fix for that in the future.

 

[Comrade Stalin13]

I’ve found the .bmp files but how do I open the rivers file to edit it

 

[Carlberg]

I’ve found the .bmp files but how do I open the rivers file to edit it

Open it in Photoshop, Gimp or Paint and use the data colors to create rivers. There's instructions on how the river bmp work in the original post.

 

[Svanley]

That sounds odd, not entirely sure what might be causing that. I'd suggest troubleshooting the individual changes, removing the ones that arent dependent on eachother and eliminating what might be causing it. Any of those files that are within the common/defines are however currently not working for mods, as they're being overwritten. We're working on a fix for that in the future.

Thanks for the help. Yea should be able to find it.

 

[Arthyn]

Are there any rules for the province map? Because it's not working for me.

 

[mechl]

Are there any rules for the province map? Because it's not working for me.

Define 'not working' since it works exactly like the province file of all the other games.

 

[Comrade Stalin13]

Open it in Photoshop, Gimp or Paint and use the data colors to create rivers. There's instructions on how the river bmp work in the original post.

Thanks

 

[Licarious]

What file defines the texture of the paper map for the farthest zoom distances?
When I edit gfx/map/textures/flatmap.dds at the transition point to the paper map the edits start off partly faded out and original map will fade in as I continue to zoom out.

 

[arktky]

I've edited the surround mask but it appears cutoff ingame/editor. Any ideas as to why?

 

[Carlberg]

I've edited the surround mask but it appears cutoff ingame/editor. Any ideas as to why?View attachment 477486

Added instructions about this to the bottom of the original post. Essentially there's a square in the center of the map which prevents the cloud rendering, since it was only meant to be at the edges this exclusion zone means it doesnt have to render at all times across the map.

Changing this requires a change to the graphic defines, which currently isn't possible since it will be overwritten by the game, we're working on a fix for this. For testing purposes until fixed though, it's possible to force it by editing the game files.

What file defines the texture of the paper map for the farthest zoom distances?
When I edit gfx/map/textures/flatmap.dds at the transition point to the paper map the edits start off partly faded out and original map will fade in as I continue to zoom out.

That sounds quite odd, did you save a new .dds file of the same format? Did you make sure it created a new mip-map set?

 

[Licarious]

That sounds quite odd, did you save a new .dds file of the same format? Did you make sure it created a new mip-map set?

Mip-map, that's what I was doing wrong.
Thank you.

 

[Arthyn]

Define 'not working' since it works exactly like the province file of all the other games.

First off, I never modded the province map of all the other games, so I don't know how it works yet. I tried making a custom province map and it crashes the game immediatly after starting it up. I tried figuring out what the game liked or didn't like by changing the provinces on the base map and that all worked, so I understand even less why it crashes on mine.

 

[Svanley]

(Not sure if this is the best place for map editor bug reports)

Got an interesting crash, I changed the map size to 10240x4096, everything works fine as I've changed all the files to that size.
The crash is when I paint with the "Material Brush" on the part that is outside the original map zone. The odd thing is that the "mixed brush" and heightmap drawer works fine.

It's kind of obscure and as the mixed brush works can be circumvented.

I added the crash folder.

 

[Carlberg]

(Not sure if this is the best place for map editor bug reports)

Got an interesting crash, I changed the map size to 10240x4096, everything works fine as I've changed all the files to that size.
The crash is when I paint with the "Material Brush" on the part that is outside the original map zone. The odd thing is that the "mixed brush" and heightmap drawer works fine.

It's kind of obscure and as the mixed brush works can be circumvented.

I added the crash folder.

It's fine to report bugs here, but we currently do not support resolutions exceeding 8192 x 4096. While it may "partially work", it may have unforeseen bugs which we artists know little about and will probably not get fix priority due to being out of the scope of support.

 

[Ariphaos]

The base is a mercator projected heightmap from Nasa, but it's been stretched and curved on it's eastern half to make Arabia, Persia and India less squished. Thusly, india points a but more eastward on the actual heightmap.

I've found that two-hemisphere Azimuthal Equal Area projection (from G.Projector) makes for very similar results.

 

[FairlySadPanda]

I blanked out all of the map files I could find and got to sculpting a map this past week.

It'd be nice to see one of the artists show off good ways of painting nice-looking terrain. I've had issues getting terrain textures to blend together nicely.

Otherwise, I'm thinking that using Photoshop to kitbash heightmaps together is going to produce nicer results for a base mesh than doing everything inside the editor? E.g. getting a height map of the French Alps and taking bits of it to use as mountains, or taking hilly bits of England to use as hilly regions in my map.

My other issue has been a persistant blue hue over the terrain when zoomed in. I'm thinking it's the PBR lighting being screwball with a blank abedo map, which is what I am assuming that colour map hidden in the gfx folders is for?

Oh, one final thing. I imported a height map and the entire map was above the water line until I forcefully increased the entire map's vertex count by one step. Not sure what I did wrong there.

 

[Carlberg]

I blanked out all of the map files I could find and got to sculpting a map this past week.

It'd be nice to see one of the artists show off good ways of painting nice-looking terrain. I've had issues getting terrain textures to blend together nicely.

It's takes a bit of practice. I think we'll be doing more modding streams in the future, hopefully we can go more in-depth on how the different systems like that work
You can also experiment by tweaking the material textures or adding your own ones.

Otherwise, I'm thinking that using Photoshop to kitbash heightmaps together is going to produce nicer results for a base mesh than doing everything inside the editor? E.g. getting a height map of the French Alps and taking bits of it to use as mountains, or taking hilly bits of England to use as hilly regions in my map.

Taking pieces from a real world heightmap can give some good natural noise to a region that is very hard to make up on your own. So I think that's a good approach when creating a fictional environment.

My other issue has been a persistant blue hue over the terrain when zoomed in. I'm thinking it's the PBR lighting being screwball with a blank abedo map, which is what I am assuming that colour map hidden in the gfx folders is for?

Could be, would depend on what hue that is. Either it's the distance fog which is handled in the environment.txt file, for post effects. Or it could be colors from the color map like you mentioned, the color map acts like a layer in Photoshop set to overlay, a good way to add color variances to the world map.

Oh, one final thing. I imported a height map and the entire map was above the water line until I forcefully increased the entire map's vertex count by one step. Not sure what I did wrong there.

Not sure either! Changing of the resolution can be fickle, and I believe if you go out of bounds with resolution it will give you a faulty calculation. Right now the system counts on some provinces being of lower resolution and some of higher. If all are the highest the system cant calculate it accurately, thus flattening or raising all. I'd usually recommend saving before editing resolution to make sure those bugs dont sneak in, as a restart is usually needed.