Capturing Villages changes Graphic

[Bad_Dog]

Well I mostly lurk here watching the incredible and amazing art development, and I've never had an idea that I thought might be worth considering, but here goes...

What if when capturing an enemy or neutral village the village graphic changed to one that represents the race of the capturer? For example, an orc captures an enemy village, and now it looks like a ramshackle hut rather than the nice, pristine elvish village that it was. Suitable for orc living!

Some of my thoughts about this:
- It would look cool to have a graphical representation of your power as you take control of area on the map.
- It may seem odd to change the look of a village suddenly - it's not really a very realistic representation, it would only be for flavor.
- Perhaps not all races have a graphical representation suitable for every village location. I.e. undead, drakes, and what about underwater villages?
- It may take something away from the look and feel of a map that was designed in by the mapmaker.

Despite that, I felt it worth posting. What do you think, sirs?

[thespaceinvader]

This is what faction flags are for.

[norbert]

This is what faction flags are for.

I tried saying "faction flags sesame" and "go go faction flags", but nothing changed.

[thespaceinvader]

Get 1.9.0 I'm not sure they've been implemented for default multiplayer yet, however.

But tbh, this doesn't make a lot of sense. There are drake villages, orc villages, underwater villages, elf villages, dwarf villages, human villages. They're all completely different. How do they change when a random soldier comes to them?

[Bad_Dog]

I was thinking they'd only change on capture. If another soldier from the same side occupies, nothing.

[thespaceinvader]

But why do they change at all?

When an occupying soldier occupies a location, he doesn't rebuild it from the ground up in his own style, he just occupies it. Bear in mind each turn is 1/6 of a day...

[Zarel]

Do villages get teamcolor, aside from the flags? That would be nice to have.

[Sangel]

Do villages get teamcolor, aside from the flags? That would be nice to have.

Interesting thought, but I'd be inclined to say that the flag offers enough team-colour for identification purposes. Faction-specific flags will be a definite plus, however.

[Alink]

Funny that you ask now, because I recently planned to try that. I just improved code of the unused terrain [variant] which allow to use different images depending of the time of day. The main example should be light behind window for village at night. Other possibilities are special mushrooms in underground ToD or luminescent things like firefly. But one limitation is that there is no smooth transition between ToD states (even if 1.9.0 has smooth transitions of ToD lights). So, the probable use of [variant] is limited to one-hex thing (like a village) or to a whole area (like make all the hills snowy at night, or even use ToD to simulate seasons).

Anyway the new code is done in a way making easier to add other filters than ToD in [variant]. And I planned to try "owned" (smoke from chimney?) and maybe "occupied" (water circles around a unit?). But for the moment, I am working on more important stuff in this area (random terrain variation), and I first need to check performance cost, since that means that every hex/images should check if there is a (owned)village or unit etc.. The info is already known but need to be passed efficiently. Note that the one-hex limitation is more a problem here for big village, since only the village hex will be owned. But if out-of-hex parts are compatible, then it should be ok.

I also wanted since a long time to try team-coloring owned villages, but that's a bit more complicated. The good news is that 1.9.0 terrain images now support image path functions (like ~TC), so it's maybe already possible with some WML tricks. I am mainly thinking about small colored banner or a flag placed at another place than the standard pole (BTW did you noticed that the flag pole looks a bit weird for water village)

PS: All of that are just features that I wish to try coding. Depending of the work needed (for me and for the cpu) I will probably need artist's opinion to see if it's worth it. Unless it's really fast, then providing it to UMC may be enough.