Map Modding & Map Editor 101

[Snow Crystal]

Snow Crystal, please give information about road modding (file roads.roads.).

Sure.

So to generate a roads.roads file (which it uses to understand where all the potential roads in the game should be), you enter the game in debug mode and write "Roads.GenerateAssets" in the console. Then the game will start working on generating the file, which will take quite a bit of time, and you need to wait until the white barely readable text in the top left corner disappears and the game looks a bit like this:

Simply close the game, and a new file will have been generated in your documents folder, and you simply grab that and put it into the right folder in your mod folder. If you want to check that it worked, you can re-open the game and try the console command "Roads.AllRoadsLeadToRome", this will immediately build every potential road in the game, and you can see if your new province have roads or not.

If you want to define specific roads on startup, you can open the setup.txt file, go down to "road_network", and define a road between province IDs.

 

[rivtaldm]

@Carlberg I see that the formerly white outer reaches of the map now have their own province colors and are designated as wasteland seas. I also see that those areas are broken up into multiple provinces instead of a single one; is this because there is some pixel limit to the maximum province size? If so, what is the limit (even rough idea would help)? Does the limit apply only to these sea wastelands or all provinces generally (I have a massive land wasteland as well)? I think this is the reason a map that works in 1.2 without errors won't open in 1.3 because I used a single province for a massive sea wasteland.

 

[Snow Crystal]

@Carlberg I see that the formerly white outer reaches of the map now have their own province colors and are designated as wasteland seas. I also see that those areas are broken up into multiple provinces instead of a single one; is this because there is some pixel limit to the maximum province size? If so, what is the limit (even rough idea would help)? Does the limit apply only to these sea wastelands or all provinces generally (I have a massive land wasteland as well)? I think this is the reason a map that works in 1.2 without errors won't open in 1.3 because I used a single province for a massive sea wasteland.

The reason it was done was because all of it counted as one province. Which meant that everyone who was in the top left or bottom right corners of the map would be considered close for the sake of things like colonization, which was fairly awkward.

 

[Harbinger1992]

Hi folks. Can you give me a hand (I really do not know if smb has asked about it before me)? I am interested why when you enable the "Fill in impassable terrain" option not all of these pieces get recoloured properly even if you do own all land around them (like, for example, in Bengalia, one province almost in the middle of India, large parts of Arabia, parts of Egypt etc.) and just remain white. This is not aesthetical, you know). And I wonder how it can be changed (ideally without using the map editor), maybe there is a file where I can found information and understand whether impassable terrain will be filled in or not?

 

[Undead Martyr]

So I'm sort of at wit's end here. Why does the map insist on painting a major river like a lake? Doesn't matter if I edit by hand or in the editor, it just won't let me lower the terrain inside a river without causing a massive crater in the vicinity.

 

[Alfonso Barbossa]

Increase the map tessellation for the squares you're working in.

 

[MechaShadowV2]

Where would I find out how to add provinces? I don't to do any complicated map editing, just adding provinces (mostly by replacing passable with habitable) terrain, like in ck2 or something.

 

[Arthyn]

Does anyone know how to add a custom model into the game and onto the map?

 

[Cmushi]

I am trying to create a world map using this the attached heightmap.

I created a mod folder via the launcher, placed the heightmap inside a folder map_data, openned the map editor and now I cannot figure out how to open the new heightmap.

Note that the map can act weird at first when creating a new one from scratch. Put in your own heightmap in heightmap.bmp, then do an export, restart the editor, that should create a new set of files and align everything.

Do i need to replace the heightmap of the vanilla folder? Wouldn't that break the game?

 

[Carlberg]

I am trying to create a world map using this the attached heightmap.

I created a mod folder via the launcher, placed the heightmap inside a folder map_data, openned the map editor and now I cannot figure out how to open the new heightmap.

Do i need to replace the heightmap of the vanilla folder? Wouldn't that break the game?

Replacing the heightmap would change it in the editor, so keep a copy of the original file (or just re-verify game cache if you're using steam and it'll reset)
The game itself uses the packed heightmap and indirection heightmap files. You can temporarily replace the heightmap in the base game, then use the "save as" button in the top left to designate the new area for the heightmap to end up (your mod folders).

When loading a new heightmap odds are it'll not look correctly, but its usually because the editor is seeing both old and new data. By saving it (and possibly doing a heightmap resolution repack under the heightmap resolution tool) it should get a fresh set of data to work from. So after saving, reboot the game/editor and it should have the new data.

 

[Musculus Maximus]

what i am doing wrong with this error?
[pdx_gui_shortcut_manager.cpp:213]: Failed finding shortcutname 'map_editor'

 

[kinkx]

Hello lads,

thank you for all the support on modding the map. Its all super easy to understand and modify.

Im just having on minor issue when adding a new province.

Any new province is displayed as: PROV7908_hellenic on the map instead of the name I assigned in the ImperatorRome\game\common\province_names file.

Can you help me?

Thanks in advance

 

[Snow Crystal]

Hello lads,

thank you for all the support on modding the map. Its all super easy to understand and modify.

Im just having on minor issue when adding a new province.

Any new province is displayed as: PROV7908_hellenic on the map instead of the name I assigned in the ImperatorRome\game\common\province_names file.

Can you help me?

Thanks in advance

Go to Imperator\game\localization\english\provincenames_l_english.yml, here you can see how we have localized all the province names in the game. Just add your new entry to the list somewhere, and it should be shown in-game.

 

[kinkx]

Thanks! Did not know I could open .yml files with the editor!

 

[Sute]{h]

I want to change the dimensions of the map to another shape
Currently mods cannot overwrite define files which needs to be changed for the engine to comprehend this. It can be forced, but we're still looking into making this moddable.

Is this still the case?

 

[Carlberg]

Is this still the case?

That should be fixed to the best of my knowledge. I will amend the statement

 

[Skipper1931]

So I'm working on completely replacing the vanilla map with my own and I've sort of hit a roadblock with the rivers. As you can see below the entire bottom half of the map doesn't appear for some reason.

If it isn't there than the bottom of the map shows up fine. error.log spits out a bunch of stuff about it being too short/circular, which leads me to believe that I put too many adjacent pixels somewhere. There's a pair of numbers to the side of each log entry which I assume are the co-ordinates of where the bad pixel is, but I have no idea how to find the location on the image that matches those cords.

Any help is appreciated!

PS: I tried posting this with screenshots of the half-rendered map and the river in rivers.bmp, but I think the spam filter flagged it since this is my first post. (I made my account to ask about this issue actually)

 

[Figus]

Hi, I'm working on a mod that completely replaces the map. Presently the map can load into the map editor for 1.3.2 but crashes when ran in 1.4. I was curious if anyone knows of any likely culprits as to why this is happening?

 

[crownsteler]

It took a day for me to figure out why my mod was crashing:

Every single province, both defined and undefined, needs to have an entry somewhere in the \setup\provinces folder. A single stray pixel will send your game crashing.

@Snow Crystal:
Could you guys look into this? In 1.3 a province without a history file would generate an empty province rather than crash. It would be great if we could get back to that. That made map modding a lot less sensitive and frustrating.

 

[Carlberg]

So I'm working on completely replacing the vanilla map with my own and I've sort of hit a roadblock with the rivers. As you can see below the entire bottom half of the map doesn't appear for some reason.

If it isn't there than the bottom of the map shows up fine. error.log spits out a bunch of stuff about it being too short/circular, which leads me to believe that I put too many adjacent pixels somewhere. There's a pair of numbers to the side of each log entry which I assume are the co-ordinates of where the bad pixel is, but I have no idea how to find the location on the image that matches those cords.

Any help is appreciated!

PS: I tried posting this with screenshots of the half-rendered map and the river in rivers.bmp, but I think the spam filter flagged it since this is my first post. (I made my account to ask about this issue actually)

it's most probably that the river system either has too many adjacent pixels, or you've tried splitting off a river and then reconnecting it. That will cause the river to fail. Also, a river system can only have one river which has a green starting dot, all others need to have connecting or splitting off pixels.

If you use Photoshop you can go to window>info, that window will tell you the coordinate you're pointing at on the canvas ( X Y )