Custom new world

[Derrickmoore]

I enjoy making worlds.

And I've made some progress on modifying the game map.

I'll share what I've discovered so far.

The topology of the world seems to come from a large 16 bit .tiff file in the land/data, it's called "fullmap" or something like that. There's alot of image files that tie into that map, but no idea how they work so far.

But, I loaded up that 16bit .tff fullmap file, changed the image mode to 8 greyscale, so I could modify it. Then when I was done, I had to return to 16bit image mode and save as a .tff.

I can change the map, but not the texture on the map yet, AND any vanilla items from the game want to transfer over---- I need to figure out how to make them go away, AND you can't navigate the map, I think I found the files that control that, but have no idea what they actually do.

So, I'm going to be experimenting, I love modding in new game maps. I've done it before, I did ALOT of stuff for Crusader Kings 2 involving the map (but since Ck2, nothing has really caught my modding interests...)

I am figuring that a small map can be made, not too difficultly, mostly barren and empty (I kinda liked that about the old Kenshi map) so it can be a good place for people to build some custom mods on.

I dontl know how to add a new map as a mod, so for now, I can only mod the actual game files, so my next two steps are 1, starting a nice greyscale topology map and 2, figuring out how to disable the vanilla map in favor of the new matrix. Step 3 is going to be asking for help from someone with more scripting in Kenshi than I know who would also like a brand new custom map.

so, I'd like some suggestions for a new world, maybe some map features , etc. All I got so far, as far as ideas for a map is... someting cold, bleak and artic.... with a mile high wall of ice as a border somewhere.. Also, should this small-scaled world be just an Island, or have bordered edges.... if I had my way the edges of the map would be just empty barrren terrain with no reason to go there unless you gotta hide from people.

I also need ot remove all the vanilla clutter... i mean decorations and props from the map

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =662344527

I'll post a screenshot if I can figure out how.

[Derrickmoore]

Well my first attempts at modifying that greyscale topology tiff map went well. If I changed too much, I would get a crash, no idea why.
If changed anything at all, it would mess up buildings, trees, etc. so I deleted all that stuff from my mod file... (it's nice all the vanilla stuff I deleted in the FCS is still there, just ghosted out, and does not show up in the game... This lets me remove everything, and then go back and un-remove ("remove changes" in the editor) stuff like trees if i want to.

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... 02DF213B7/

and a custom mountain I've tried to super-impose over the vanilla terrain.. I'm still getting alot of "step" effects from the 8bit to 16bit conversion, I think, but for the most part the new map is navigable...

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =662522004

so, next step is identifying what part of the world I'm in, as far as the colourmap4.something and overlay maps go and what exactly the colurmap and overlay maps do.


(oh, and find out xactly how the roads are done... if I can find out how the road textures are applied, that will do a long way. I'm assuming the colourmap files do exactly the same thing as they did in CK2, basically colour the terrain..

[Derrickmoore]

Ok, so I did some work, and managed to get a new (kinda) working terrain in the game..

I've checked out about 3% of the total area, but it's a work in progress.

Next step is to see about changing the textures to look more, I dont know, artic or something.

I'm kinda proud of the mountains, they are well out of the playable area, and make up the edges of the map, the peaks are right at the edge of the world.

I have this vision of a cold dark world, where you would probably get most of your food from meat rather than farming. So alot of ice.. becasue ice and snow are easy to blend and look good in games. (and that's all I got as far as ideas go, so if anyone has a better use for a new world, let me know)



So here is the link, I'll add it to the top later. Test it out please and let me know if it works.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1kk6ycplmy49 ... G41-a?dl=0

Installtion, there are only 2 files in the zip, the Chloros mod file and the map, which is 500 megs uncompressed. The map is a .tiff image and should go in \Kenshilatest\data\newland\land


There is only 1 town. Nothing else... all the roads and textures and stuff are the same, I've just been working on topography. but, I think it looks pretty good. I'll try and get some screenshots. It's just a test-map, I'll make a better one if I can the game to do what I want.

[Derrickmoore]

but, I think it looks pretty good
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =662721569

the crazy thing is, most of the world isn't actually broken by these changes. I mean, it's as playable as it was on the vanilla map.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =662721578


and this is my favorite one

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =662721555

and the above map is available if anyone want to check it out in my dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1kk6ycplmy49 ... G41-a?dl=0

[Derrickmoore]

Its comming along nicely, but I'm getting some serious banding issues.

I THINK it's because my contrast is too high in my fullmap.tif file. It seems that if I lower the contrast the bands go from vertical walls to angled walls, that at least the squads can navigate.

so, if anyone else is getting a wierd "banding" issue with terraced walls that you cannot move across, lower the contrast in your tif imahe alot.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =663368008

Most textures seem to be based on the angle of the terrain, so cliff textures and automatically put on impassable cliffs and ground textures are based on the biome, I'm assuming... havn't tested any biomes yet.

I'm looking at the "overlay" and "colourmaps" and I'm pretty sure that the overlays have something to do with the roads, and that colourmaps give a colour tint to an area. (both those kinds of files are broken up grid-bits of the map instead of one very very large file like the terrain fullmap.tif

[Derrickmoore]

and I'm pretty sure that I've discovered the cause of the banding. When I load up the vanilla map and convert that from 16bit to 8bit per channel so that I can modify it.... photoshop adds a bunch of very subtle artfacting... so solution, dont build off of the vanilla map and start from scratch with a brand new image file.

Nope, it's actually definatly a thing related to the contrast and brightness of the image... I'm guessing there are only a certain number of available elevation "steps" in the game engine.

[Derrickmoore]

Or it could be the brightness and contrast of the fullmap image... I've noticed some subtle "banding" in the vanilla map, so maybe it's not a photoshop issue at all.


Also, becasuse it's good to take a break, I'm taking 2 days off from modding the map.

I'm looking into the Biomes, very very powerful tool in the FCS. I"m tying to eliminate some of the "clutter" like the huge boulders and some other map items I think look silly. In the Biomes, under foliage, I'm able to add or remove some of this clutter, BUT, some of the boulders and stuff seem to have been placed by hand into the gamedata, rather rather than be auto-generated according to the Biome.

So, I'm looking to find a way to remove all those placed items AND not have the game crash.... What I really need is a gamedata with ZERO atuff added, no cities, no giant boulders, etc.

Anyone know how to get a "blank" map?

While, I'm taking a break from the map, I'm still going to try modding some easier stuff

[Derrickmoore]

For the life of me, I can't seem to solve that banding issue.

I've done every test that I can think of, and I come to 2 conclusions. 1, there's some sort of imbedded graphics info in the default .tif file that I just dont understand, OR, 2, There's a glitch in my photoshop, which I know is glitchy because whenever I try to do a gaussian blur on the 16bit greyscale .tif file I get strange dark lines evenly spaced across the image.

My personal goal is to make a wintry-artic world, full of snow and ice, and very very cold water (so that swimming causes damage, I mean, I live in Seattle, where if you fall off the ferry boat- they stop looking for after 5 minuetes, because that's how long you can survive in the water.

So, I'm putting the landscape on the back burner and am conventraiting on biomes.

Biomes seem to be defined by the biomemap.png. I've edited this image and made the whole world one biome.... (I"m after 2 or 3 biomes total, ice, snow, rock, to keep it simple)

I'm getting a crash, but I'm not sure if it's becasue I created a brand new "snow" texture and put it in a mod folder... or if it's crashing becasue Kenshi is unstable. working on it.

but that banding on the landscape is killing me. Even if I load the vanilla map into photoshop, and only change the 16bit mode to 8bit and back again, I still get that banding, which is why I think there's something embedded in the .tif image that I am not seeing.

Also, I have the bare-est idea of the difference in 16-bit vs 8-bit greyscale image... only that I seem unable to edit an image in 16-bit mode.

[someone]

Hmm, perhaps I should help you out a bit.
The issue you are having is because you are converting the image to 8bit which is destroying half the data. You can only work on that image in 16bit greyscale mode.
Photoshop should do it, or gimp 2.9.2

[Derrickmoore]

DOH! (imagine a "DOH!" that can be heard on the other side of the planet in, like, Sweden.)

Yes, the problem with the banding was my 17 year old copy of Photoshop 7.0 (in some countries my photoshop is above the age of consent... I love my photoshop that much)

HAHHA, actually it feels good, opportunity/crisis... I learned alot about how the game works, trying everything to fix that banding.

So, I went over to the adobe shop, and downloaded the trial version of the latest photoshop. WOW. things have changed, yet everything is the same in Photohop.

So, I did test with the landscape, and now it's acting exactly like it should.

Since, I dont yet know how to start a new empty world from scratch yet, I'm right now, just modifying the vanilla terrain to make it look as it an ice age was just beginning.... So, I took the vanilla landscape and gave it a Guassian blur of about 22 or so, to "soften" everything to make it look, snow-covered. Then I did a selection of just the whitest parts of the vanilla map, and copied them onto the blurred landscape (this is so that the "ridges" and mesas poke out of the snow, same height and shape as vanilla... but the landscape near any cliff will still look snowy)

I can modify an existing texture map in the game (say the "sand" I can re-pain to make look like snow), but when I try to create a new custom map and add it to n existing biome in the FCS, I get a crash.... (that could also be releated to me using the 17 year old version of photoshop. )

I want to create some new textures, right now they are stored in a new directory under the Kenshi/data/newland folder, I'll test to see if being in that new directory is the problem, or if the game doesnt know to look in there becasue I havnt' added my mod to my mods.cfg file. (which would explain why new textures work, if I just modify an existing texture.


So, in the\Kenshi\data\newland\land\overlaymaps are a bunch of files called "colourmap" and "new overlay"
The colour maps correspond to various rectangular sections of the map, and provides "colour" info, so the colour map adds/multiplies the imapges' colur info to the ground texture map. There's a grid system there, I'm trying to figure out, but you can guess what goes where on the map by matching up terrain features and guesstimating,

the "new overlay" maps are the roads, I'm not sure how they are drawn, but both the colur maps and new overlay maps can be deleted without the game crashing. It makes the world look more bland and less detailed (which Is what I want for an "Artic wasteland)

There's a large map, called just "new_overlay", I'm not sure what that does, if it's all the roads togther and the game doesn't actually use that file, or maybe it's the rivers? I havn't tested that one yet.

The "ambiant light" does just that. I recoloured the whole image green (for Chloros, the green moon that I want to add to the artic wasteland, if that's possible. ) and doing so gave the whole world a nice green glow.


Oh, and when I said "rock" a few posts back, I meant "mud" becasue I want mud-people wearing mud-men masks. (I did a study of mud-masks, they are basically weaved plant-stuff like the straw-hats... weaved into a head-shape, then covered with mud, so it's alot lighter than it actualy looks... also, it's really clay, not mud.)

[Derrickmoore]

So I made a test map, with some mountain/islands. They are all the exact same mountain, but different XY scales... all of them are the same height. (which makes the smallest ones on the map look like strange ethereal Magic the Gathering Islands. )

So, a good HSV value for land right up against the ocean level is 0,0,2 and for RGB is 4,4,4, I did alot of experimenting to come up with that value, it's not exactl, but pretty close to sea-level with out going under.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ylif90rt9h4fd ... 1.zip?dl=0]]

here's a link to that test map, if anyone wants to check it out. Mostly it's a test for scaling, how large I want to make various bits of the map.... tresting out a good island size, thats not too large, and not too small..... I'd like a few different islands all in view, etc.

Nothing has been detailed. I've not chanegd the overlays or roads, I think I know how to change all that but right now everything has it's vanilla details which dont match this test map.

On that test map are some single white pixels jutting up from tha landscape, this is to give me a scale of about how big a pixel is on the map, but it looks like each pixel is an elongated hexagon shape, 1.5 to 2.5 meters long, as a guestimate, the map is about 16,400 pixels square so the map equals about so that make the map about 5 leagues square (I'm just guessing but 15 square miles is a very large area. So, the area I want to represent in teh game is about 90 miles squared, which is not bad, so my "scale factor" is 4, I'm going to shrink mountains from their actual width to 1/4th and then they should meld/mesh into the landscape and look right.

heres a pic of that single white dot on the map
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =670369210


My steam is acting up right now, but when it's back to normal, I'll post some screenshots of the strange ethereal islands.

Oh, and that test map, while it runs, is ugly and full of vanilla cities and quite useless really to anyone not interested in looking at making a new map.

I'm still hoping there's some modders out there who would like a new world, maybe something I can make to thier specifications... until then I'm just messing around with stuff.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =670348923

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =670348931

I just really like that mountain's shape, even though its entirely unrealistic. So each of the mountains in these screens are different width, but all have the same exact height.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =670348887

and I *THINK* I know how to remove that "placed floating clutter" that's currently floating above the landscape. Some boulders/trees are placed according to the Biomes information, but some, I think were hand placed like the vanilla cities, and I'll hopefull eventually find an easy solution to removing all that and not causing a crash.

you know, I am really impressed with Kenshi's world engine and pathfinding.

[Derrickmoore]

For the colour maps, if you want to edit those. Colormap 3.2 and colormap 2.3 are going to be your friends.

you can line those 2 images on top of the fullmap.til and this will give you a really good grid set up.

Colormap 3.2 is colum 3, row 2 and similar fo colormap 2.3, in fact they are diaganally adjacent to each other. AND they have a nice distinctive feature that you can line up with a distinctive valley in the full map.

I'm pretty sure that will change though, they way the gameworld uses those overlay and covermaps. I'll check back later on, when there's a bit more of the world that can be moved around in, and check back to see if anyone wants to work on a new world.

I'm a little frustrated in how small the game word is, I was expecting some really huge game world, where I could make some nice to scale mountains. Then, I limited my scope, and did the math and figured out that I could have maybe 1 nice mountain in the game world.

[PTTG]

Awesome work!

I've been playing with worldmachine and this would be an interesting place to put it to work.