Modding the map

[Camara]

I have sucessfully moded the map of Europa Universalis III, and I wanted to do the same for Rome.

The ones in the map folder seem similar to EU III so I think I can deal with theam with no problem.

However, there's two files I find weird, in the terrain folder:

colormap_hires and colormap_water

The second one I think the problem is the alpha channel, as when I try to edit in Photoshop it says error, too many channels (?).

The first one I don't know how to work with it, as it has that weird shading.

EXAMPLE: I tried to resize all the map to be 1/4 of its size (the dimensions of the frame are the same: just Europe is in the first quarter with the scaling). I sucessfully did it with provinces, topology, rivers and terrain in the map folder, and I have erased everything from positions.txt.

I tried to do the same with the two terrain folder files, however it crashes in the Initializing maplogic.

Do anyone knows how to solve it?

BTW what are colourmap.txt and colormap_time (the second one seems to have no extension )

Thanks

 

[Kaigon]

I think colormap_time is a timestamp file but I have no idea how it's used. IIRC, it's recreated if you delete it. There's a similar file cache/time as well.

colormap.txt tells the game to load terrain/colormap_hires.bmp as a texturefile with a scale it by 4 (this way, 1x1 pixel according to the province.bmp file will have a texture of 4x4 pixels to cover it, simply makes the map look more hi-resolution than it is).

I don't see how changing terrain/colormap_hires.bmp could cause a problem, try deleting the colormap_time and see if it helps.

As for terrain/colormap_water.dds, I deleted the alpha layer and it worked for me. (Just make sure to save it as a dds file without alpha).

I'd recommend to try one step at a time and see if you can isolate the problem to either of those files.

 

[unmerged(100910)]

the position file tells the game where things are so nothing in the position file with correct coordinates will make it fail to load

 

[Camara]

Oh it was a very stupid error: I named the file positions.txt, but the show of extensions were off, so the file was positions.txt.txt :rofl:

The game now loads perfectly, the only thing I noticed is that the borders seems "dragged" to a corner:

Do you know why?

BTW what are the weird shadings (layers) in colormap_hires?

My idea is to add India and China, with this scaling european the provinces are definitively playable, so the rest is just add things. But colormap_hires is more tricky as I don't know what those shadings are.

 

[Descartes]

Cool!
I know certain angles mess up the borders, but I can't explain the weird shadings.
Btw, what is happening to EUR modding? T&E, Unknown world and now...a guy who says he's going to add India and China! Awesome.

 

[vanin]

If I remember correctly, the reason for those graphic bugs turning up is because the border between two provinces is too small. Guess you will need to do some province editing if you want those to disappear.

Still, very, very interesting goal you have there. India is certainly an interesting place to see, and them Greco-Bactrians and Indo-Greeks would finally be available. I have been waiting for those two ever since RIMP announced that they extended the map, still waiting for it to be done though. :wacko:

A big good luck with this, definately hope you can pull it off.

 

[Camara]

Oh no

Reducing Europe is essential otherwise I can't put India and China... that means Europe will have small provinces.

The other way is increasing the map size, something I doubt is possible to a certain degree (increasing 10% may work, but a 300 % increase it surely too much )

PS: One solution is eliminating the borders...

 

[vanin]

I think you can manage anyway, you just have to edit the provinces a little. I don't know for sure, but as long as you have around 5 pixels in every border it should not be any problem. The provinces might end up a little square but that is better than what it looks like now. Also, having a spot where the borders of 4 provinces meet looks fine too, you will be sending your armies in circles around that single spot but it still looks OK.

 

[Camara]

My borders are bigger than 5 pixels.

These drags only go away if I delete the alpha channel of the border.dds, but when I do that the borders between provinces also disappear...

The sea borders have the same problem.

These lines seem to merge in the bottom left corner of the map (Europe is in the first quarter of the map).

 

[Hardradi]

Sorry, cant help out much with the map but I can add my support.

Best of luck with project, adding India would be great, China even better.

 

[Camara]

This is the only problem I see with my scaling, but if I remove the borders (annoying but not game breaker) everything is fine.

Adding India or India+China is the same (aside from more work), the only thing I need is to distort them a bit and voilá. But add them is the easy part.

 

[Kaigon]

I've seen the border problem before and the only solution I had to fix it was to redraw provinces. I found no particular way to avoid it so I just redrew all of affected borders (and tried to make them bigger than 5px) and the next time I started about half of them were gone. So I started again...

(and finally I got rid of all of them)

 

[Camara]

There is a lot of provinces affected... but well, I will try to correct them one by one, afterall I really want Maurya and Han rampaging things...

 

[Camara]

I'm correcting the problem by changing the borders, that is working, thanks for the help!

Sometimes some borders are indeed smaller than 5 pixels, other times the borders are diagonal and the game doesn't like it!

But as the problem is being solved, the project will go on! If you're interested keep an eye on it. I will create a thread when I have fancy things to show (shouldn't take long )

Thanks for the help!

PS: If you want to help anyway you can start by doing sprites and person images for indian and chinese guys, as I'm more a map guy!