To improve the overall look of the game I have started a new terrain experiment. A number of useless tiles were addapted to be able to compose new village and city shapes with the appropriate objects on them. The picture shows 3 new tiles and a default city tile combined into one of perhaps hundreds of new villages. The ammount of villages depend on the number of tiles which can be addapted to this new approach but all city tiles can allready be incorporated in this method.
This will obviously not work with current terrainsets but I'm sure they can easily be addapted to fit a new and more interesting EAW world. This is a long term project as the entire stock terrainmap has to be addapted to these new tiles and may take about a year to finnish but at least it's a start.





VonBeerhofen

VonBeerhofen

Nice work Von,

one thing I did for SAW was to make one of the village tiles fit the road net by adding a feature that linked to the road in the road tiles but could also be used off the roads... so the villages could be placed on the road net...







since most villages are built on the road net rather than in the middle of nowhere..


just a thought...


cheers,



Pobs

Good idea Pobs,

I may do something simmilar after I converted all the added villages to 4 tiles and moved em within the field boundaries. There are many more possible improvements, for instance with the coastal towns which are also kind of boring.
Ofcourse this is also a possibillaty with the new or default tiles:



VBH

Pobs
May i ask what scenery set that is? I'd like to use it for my EAW set.

Hi RW,

that is the Spanish Air War terrain ... available from Sandbaggers in the SAW auto-installer...


cheers,


Pobs

Hmmmm, that went a lot faster then I imagined. All 6.500 previously added + default villages converted to 4 or more tiles in the EAW.TM. All stock cities and villages were given the benefit of these 3 extra border tiles and their borders were randomised.
Here's a picture of one of em (still using the default terrain and the above 3 modified village tiles).



Mind you, these new tiles aren't representative for how it can look, they were simply needed so the tilemap could be addapted and were just a rush job to get on with it. The main exercise of this is to get approximately 256 new basic village shapes and add some extra variants to cities too.
Additional changes to the EAW_TTD will eventually add village type suburbs to cities also and make villages look even better because of the different object compositions on these tiles (each village tile can have up to 64 objects of it's own resulting in a minimum of 256 for each village).

VonBeerhofen

Two more to give you a better idea:



VonBeerhofen

Update:

added 147 randomly placed ponds throughout the EAW world. How it will look with other terrainsets depends on the tiletexture for BNRIVRND.TER.



VonBeerhofen

Experiment with a new transitional tile which would allow me to add parklike layouts to the game.
Drawback is that the tile has to be stolen from somewhere els but it would allow for some very nice additional city/village features:



VonBeerhofen