Specialized building decals

[LordGood]

more experimenting is needed but here's a test. Some private farmlands and road extensions would also be interesting to play with. These would pair very nicely with floral props , but much like with floral propping alone, environmental context may or may not cause visual discrepancies.

[Stan`]

Nice we definitely need new decals. Having normal/ parallax maps for those would be nice. Not sure about the stones? around the building.

[LordGood]

they're normalmapped, I'm still experimenting a bit, drainage, footpaths and such that cant show up in terrain paint

maybe each civ should have its own that blends from its structural pack to the terrain through alpha

[LordGood]

added benefit of civic city tile decals is that building civic structures on uneven terrain looks slightly less stupid

[Stan`]

18 minutes ago, LordGood said:

maybe each civ should have its own that blends from its structural pack to the terrain through alpha

Sounds fair. The art task thread should probably list that stuff. Also foundation

1 minute ago, LordGood said:

added benefit of civic city tile decals is that building civic structures on uneven terrain looks slightly less stupid

Indeed though I really wish we had terrain flattening and could get rid of all that nonsense.

[Sundiata]

@LordGood, you know I'm your biggest fan, right?!

Wouldn't it be nice to have a "faded" version of these decals remain after the structure is destroyed (for a considerable time after the rubble has disappeared, unless overbuilt)? Like a faint ruin, leaving an impression on the terrain where buildings once stood. It's one of my big wishes, to be able to see the remains of once thriving towns in the wake of an enemy army passing through. It's also nice to be able to make out where an enemy settlement once stood, even if that enemy was wiped out before you passed through their former land. Call them ghosts of the past..

Spoiler

 

 

[Sundiata]

6 hours ago, LordGood said:

environmental context may or may not cause visual discrepancies.

I think as long as you just use a neutral "dirt" texture like the one shown, it's almost always going to look better by default

 

4 hours ago, LordGood said:

maybe each civ should have its own that blends from its structural pack to the terrain through alpha

Or for each "group" of civs, like Greco-Roman, African/Middle-Eastern, "Barbarian" and Oriental".

[LordGood]

I been playing too much kingdom come recently lol

the whole map got a staggering amount of tlc from the looks of it

[LordGood]

I look forward to seeing what the mapmakers can do with these. I'll be making standalone footpath actors as well for them.

[Stan`]

Sweeet. 

I thought we ruled chimneys out ?

[LordGood]

already there

[Stan`]

10 minutes ago, LordGood said:

already there

Haha Anyway it looks gorgeous. How do you make the decals ?

[LordGood]

I used the spartan plaster and stone textures and made a mess, then i chiseled them into paths/patches with a textured eraser and multiply darkened the edges closest to alpha. I brought it into Blender afterwards, slightly -bumpmapped them with the native texture and then sculpted multires ditches for the normal bake.

thanks! I like how these are coming along actually, i might be spread a bit thin if i dont optimize this process though

[Stan`]

Yeah I know the feeling. The more we do stuff like sculpting and such the more we tend to keep working on details and the less content we produce :/ but its of higher quality so...

[LordGood]

normals havent been dug for the footpaths or fortress decals yet

[LordGood]

normals dug

[elexis]

6 hours ago, LordGood said:

Player built cities won't look like that as long as they can't place trees, fences and paths, have only square fields and rarely rotate buildings beautifully (there'd have to be some auto align or prebuilt paths to be aligned with).

It is also tough for procedural maps since these paths are smaller than one tile and algorithms have a really hard time to not waste space between entities. (Just look at how crappy in comparison that oppidum map looks that also wanted to have paths and fences near things)

But that composition looks exactly how maps with prebuilt settlements should be.

[LordGood]

I made Skalitz from Kingdom Come to see if i could. Dont really have high medieval castle bits do we, haha

[LordGood]

@elexis Would it be possible to make 'settlement components' assigned to a coordinate instead of placing everything individually? In American Conquest (and i assume Cossacks) more in depth detail terrain features and settlements could be pasted in from a select menu instead of having to build them on-site which was a huge boon to mapmaking efficiency

[elexis]

I didn't get the question, can you elaborate?

[LordGood]

uuuuuuuuuuuuh can i elaborate

instead of the random map algorithm placing individual actors and entities, assign the actors and entities to a separate variable by some strange programmy magic the so algorithm can place clusters instead of individual things and not have to think so hard about it?

so the actors in relation to eachother in the above screenshot can be assigned as a 'spartan village' and the algorithm can place these 'spartan villages' instead of each actor in the village

[elexis]

Entities on random maps are most commonly placed as a SimpleGroup consisting of a specified minCount, maxCount, minAngle, maxAngle.

So the result is random angles, but we need specific angles. The fences and walls seen on your screenshot are always parallel to the tangent of the encompassing area, so it needs an algorithm computing exactly that. (The dock placement ingame and on the Hellas random map computes the tangent angle by computing the angle to the geometric average of the encompassed area. That in turn is really slow resulting in 10s of seconds of loading screen time. It's faster to determine angles and then place with more hardcoded offsets.). (Besides angles, locations also need to be perfect, just being off by 0.5 leaves very ugly artifacts.)

Visual actors, especially the eyecandy/ ones are often combined into a new visual actor that can be placed as a sole actor entity. For example the fields players can build, or check "campaign_city_test" in the atlas editor. But there everything is fixed, so it always looks the same / repetitive, which is the same downside to atlas maps. One could create multiple visual actors that are compositions of fields, paths and fences and then just place these composites. It's a tradeoff between the disadvantage of repetition and the disadvantage of placement coding.

But your palisades are also much nicer than the one on the oppidum map, because they aren't perfectly circular and there are some random offsets between the palisade and the bordering path. Another aspect is that you have two levels of elevation, while I had to work with a plane because there was supposed to be water. Basically everything is a bag of possible but timeconsuming TODOs.

[elexis]

Can you upload the according atlas files? I'd like to know the actor density. One problem with placing bushes on random maps is that some of them are tiny (so multiple ones fit on one tile) and others are big (need a distance of two tiles to the next actor). (Then one changes one number and has to wait a minute for the loading screen to see if the new number is better, in atlas one can fix instantly, but once per entity)

[LordGood]

The spartan screenie was only built for the screenshot, but i have the Skalitz map

skalitz.zip

uuuh but it uses the new decals so I'm not sure it's going to look as nice. also probably going to throw lotsa errors

[elexis]

Do you have some plans for that oppidum? It looks like it should be bundled into a scenario/skirmish map.

Some practices that I saw utilized here and elsewhere that are problematic for released maps but can be remedied:

• Stacking buildings inside each other repeatedly. For instance there were like 15 towers in the upper fortified section above, or some temples stacked inside each other on the Napata reconstruction map.
  • The first problem is that each building is selectable separately, has a separate production queue, garrisonholder, auras et cetera.
  • The second problem is that half of the polygons of the mesh are invisible or incorrectly overlapping.
  • The remedy is to introduce a new actor based on that composition, remove the invisible and unintended faces.
• There are 2-3 briton buildings but the rest is gaulish. At least when selecting the building it becomes apparent and breaks immersion a bit. Can be remedied by introducing a new template, possibly with the color / texture that the other gaul buildings use.
• There are some archery ranges, but they are stylized as farmsteads.

Rebuilding that with code would be interesting, challenging, painful and benefitial (in that order). Whether or not such detail can be achieved with random maps will determine whether it will be feasible to create the campaigns with code or atlas. I recall Skhorn building many similarly candyful maps too and his thought to get into random map coding in order to save the work with manual optimization of entity placement (as possibly thousands of entities have to be fine tuned with multiple clicks in atlas often). Perhaps it'd also make sense to create the oppidum in atlas and load it from scripts if it's too inefficient to code.

About the original topic, the path actors you added are like 4 times smaller than the smallest path that we can currently create with terrain textures. Doesn't seem right to have to place actors to create a terrain texture, but it seems unlikely that we want to increase the resolution by a factor of 4² or even 2². So we might need the paths at least for atlas editors.