Zwollenaer

Join Date 10/2012

Changing the default tiles

Hello everyone! I'm new to this forum. I continue to be amazed at the game, and have very recently started trying to mod it as well. Actually, it's more swapping some pictures and altering a few tiles in the workshop than actual modding.

I'm a big fan of the game's art direction. The whole game looks beautiful and very believable for a fantasy world. However, i never liked the look of the default "outposts". Instead of seeing only large cities with a huge amount of glorified watchtowers to fill in the gaps in between them I want the world to feel like it has small country villages as well as fortresses and big cities. The outposts should start as small trading posts, and when fully developed they should look more like small villages. I know that outposts aren't supposed to represent big population centers, but this way my kingdoms will look a little more interesting and believable when I browse over the map.

A starting outpost is little more than a trading post connecting nearby raw materials to the Kingdom:

A fully developed outpost would look like a small village:

The buildings were easy enough to create (and great fun!). I thought it would be a simple matter as I found all of the tiles that I need to replace in the workshop:

Strangely though, I wasn't able to find the default files in the folder: FallenEnchantress\Tiles. However any tiles I create or edit myself are added to that folder. I redid all the tiles and made replacements for:

K_Outpost_Base_01

K_Outpost_Armory_01

K_Outpost_Abbey_01

K_Outpost_Caltrops_01

K_Outpost_Consulate_01

K_Outpost_Fortify_01

K_Outpost_High_Tower_01

K_Outpost_Stables_01

K_Outpost_Warden_01

So far so good! I tested it in the game, and it seemed to work as intended:

Succes! My trading post works in-game!

....

However... on the next time I restart the game the following happens:

Bah! The default tower somehow got copied over my replacement... The same goes for all add-ons to the outpost.

When I investigate in the tile workshop I find it confirmed as well:

I've ran several tests, each time with the same result: for some reason my game will add in the default tile graphics into any manually altered tile at every restart of the game.

Has anyone else ran into this problem? Or am I overlooking something?

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JSchoeck

Heavenfall

Join Date 07/2008

+441

I have no idea what's going on, I haven't modded any of this. But generally speaking, XML only gets read in at game restart. So what you see when you restart is the "proper" version.

I honestly can't use the tile designer because all the existing tiles are sorted in a non-alphabetical order...

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DsRaider

Join Date 11/2008

+70

You are saving new tile designs over old ones of the same internal name? I would suggest saving the new designs with new names and changing the xml so the improvements use the new art instead.

go to \Stardock Games\FallenEnchantress\data\English\Core Improvements, copy the art defs you want into the mod folder, and change them to use the new art.

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Heavenfall

Join Date 07/2008

+441

I agree, that seems to be the best solution. Remember to change the artdef in the improvementtype as well, ex:

    <ImprovementType InternalName="Academy">
        <ArtDef>yourveryspecial_artdef</ArtDef>
    </ImprovementType>

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Thank you DsRaider and Heavenfall! This was very helpful and made me figure out exactly what I was doing wrong. You were right! We can't change the default tiles. If we do so the game simply copies the default versions right over your own creations on restart. But it will still work if you save the tiles under a different name and make sure you alter the Artimprovements file in the data folder so that it uses your new files.

And I also discovered something new on the way! It turns out that outposts have the same "under construction" graphics that the city improvements have. Except it seems that even though the option was always there, the "under construction" tiles were never made for the default versions of the outposts. Instead the "under construction" and "completed" tiles were set to use the same graphics. That is why the improvement to the default outpost look like they are already completed immediately after you queue them for construction.

Now I was able to create a <ConstructionTileDesign> for every <TileDesign> as well! Making it even more fun

Below you can see my hardworking townsfolk building the armory and fortifications

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Oh goody I hope you release this as a mod of some kind at some point would love to have developing outposts.

Keep up the good work :)

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