!#% terrain-graphics in 1.9.2

[doofus-01]

Hi,

What is the reason for line 554 in terrain-graphics.cfg of BfW 1.9.2? It must be for some transitions, but it is not clear when exactly.

The most noticeable effect I see is: "Suck it, UMC creators!" It draws human castles over any other castle that isn't mainline. One could "just" change the terrain codes to something that doesn't use the C* style terrain code, but that would: 1. break old saves; 2. require editing every map; and 3. require rebuilding some transition rules such as chasm/castle transition. All for what purpose?

[zookeeper]

I haven't looked at it in-depth yet, but I'm guessing it doesn't really need to work like that.

[Eleazar]

If you wonder what a line is for, all you have to do is:

• load a map with plenty of relevant terrains
  comment out the line
  press CTRL + F5 in the editor
  and watch what changes

In this case it is part of the multi-type castle conversion.

For reasons not fully understood by me, the macros ahead of this line, can't quite figure out what type of castle to use in all intersections. There needs to be a catch-all, line otherwise bits of the wall will filled with whatever castle is last in terrain-graphics.cfg (IIRC). This line fills any previously unfilled spaces with human castle (as the most generic type of castle), unless it is a dwarvish castle (which isn't part of the mix and match), or an encampment. Otherwise encampment would get used to join castles when encampment wasn't even on the map.

Obviously overwriting UMC castles is a bad and unintended side-effect.

[doofus-01]

load a map with plenty of relevant terrains

It looked like the castles mixed with each other fine without that line, but I must not have explored the relevant combo. There has to be some way to not use that.

If it has to do with the north and south walls split in the middle, I think I can get that changed.

[doofus-01]

Now I've seen where the encampment shows up without that line, it looks like it is for the ruins. I know the ruins were a special case in the past because they were intended to mix with regular human castles, while nothing else did. But do they still need to be a special case? If, say an orc castle can mix with human castle, and not need an encampment or line 554, why do the ruins? (Not rhetorical, I find the rotating little ascii maps confusing.)

[Eleazar]

The whole thing is pretty confusing. I made it work as much by trial and error as logic.

I believe if that line was removed encampments would instead be drawn over the UMC castles.

So i can test it without downloading all add-ons, what add-on actually has custom castles?

[doofus-01]

I'm not sure how many add-ons have them, but at least Archaic Era has non-dwarf castles in the editor (some of which may look familiar, it was an easy way to test them). I've tested it without the line, and the encampments do not show up, everything seems fine.

This didn't occur to me earlier, but the Archaic Era castles still use the old WALL_TRANSITION, rather than the NEW:WALL macros. I should have tested whether that changed anything before posting, I'll do that this evening.

[Eleazar]

Oddly enough the extra encampment pieces only occur next to a ruin. Which is good enough, even if not intended or understood.
Line removed from trunk.