Requirements for a fully-functioning custom map?

[Dan]

I just put together a first test of a custom map in the terrain editor... just to check things were working, I used a heightmap (16-bit-per-channel-greyscale png, working beautifully without stepping), generated some rock on inclines, and tree scatter. I chucked down a single medium customs point on a soviet border, and a single foreign electric connection, saved and went to start it as a custom game... and a bunch of the higher difficulty options were greyed out (Citizen Reactions: Small/Great, Energy Management: Buildings and Vehicles, Fires: Frequent, Global Events: Serious, Day/night: Moving sun and Vehicle Availability: Lock to year) - all say "This setting is not allowed for this map".

Is this because I've neglected to add/set something to the map in the terrain editor, or are these options locked by something else?

[tonechild]

I Had the same issue, and finally solved it after a few hours of fiddling.

When you create the map, the game creates a folder with your map files in it, There is a file you can delete and this will resolve the issue, I'm not sure why it's there by default....

**FIRST back up your folder just in case.

for example: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\SovietRepublic\media_soviet\save_terraineditor\23714 - My Cool Map\settinglock.ini

you can also edit the settinglock.ini file but I dont know all values. Changing the values MIN and MAX changes the difficulty lock.

delete the file and you won't have any restrictions.

[Dan]

Cheers, that got it! Strange default to have :-)

Whole lot of other possibilities in there I see... the resource deposits seem to be defined by texture files... so I can potentially work that into a procedural generation pipeline instead of needing to paint them by hand. That'd be neat!

[tonechild]

Originally posted by Dan:

Cheers, that got it! Strange default to have :-)

Whole lot of other possibilities in there I see... the resource deposits seem to be defined by texture files... so I can potentially work that into a procedural generation pipeline instead of needing to paint them by hand. That'd be neat!

Ohh that sounds awesome.. Here's hoping you post that pipeline on github (or similar) :D

I'd love to have the resource deposits be randomized without me knowing where they are, but play a map I made.

[Dan]

Originally posted by tonechild:

Originally posted by Dan:

Cheers, that got it! Strange default to have :-)

Whole lot of other possibilities in there I see... the resource deposits seem to be defined by texture files... so I can potentially work that into a procedural generation pipeline instead of needing to paint them by hand. That'd be neat!

Ohh that sounds awesome.. Here's hoping you post that pipeline on github (or similar) :D

I'd love to have the resource deposits be randomized without me knowing where they are, but play a map I made.

I'd do it all through Houdini, as I use that for pretty much everything day-job related (although I might have to work out how to use an intermediary tool to write .dds files in the correct format, as I think its .dds support may be hardwired to something incompatible).

But yep, that's the hope - that I can work in some kind of deposit-placer that puts them in sensible spots, then play a self-generated map without knowing where they are.

If I can get it to work, it might be possible to export the necessary files from the free "Apprentice" version of Houdini... in which case I could post it up for others.

[Oz]

Do the borders at the default 2km or weird stuff will happen, some calculations are not working.

[Dan]

Originally posted by Oz:

Do the borders at the default 2km or weird stuff will happen, some calculations are not working.

Ohoh? What sort of things? I have tweaked them quite a bit on my test map so far.

[Oz]

Originally posted by Dan:

Originally posted by Oz:

Do the borders at the default 2km or weird stuff will happen, some calculations are not working.

Ohoh? What sort of things? I have tweaked them quite a bit on my test map so far.

The train traffic and signals don't work properly,specially the end stations. You will thank me for that.

[Dan]

Originally posted by Oz:

Originally posted by Dan:

Ohoh? What sort of things? I have tweaked them quite a bit on my test map so far.

The train traffic and signals don't work properly,specially the end stations. You will thank me for that.

Do you know specific triggers? Seems like something that we should put together some clear reproduction steps for a bug report if it's true... even the base-game maps make heavy use of shifted borders.

[bspawn]

Originally posted by Dan:

Cheers, that got it! Strange default to have :-)

Whole lot of other possibilities in there I see... the resource deposits seem to be defined by texture files... so I can potentially work that into a procedural generation pipeline

The game's built-in random map generator would be a lot more useful if it would have options to adjust the size range of landscape features, including resource deposits. As it is, we can only have more or fewer small hills, lakes, resource spots.
So if one goes the procedural route for custom resource deposits, one might go the same route for the entire custom map.

Although many of the custom maps looks beautiful and are no doubt worth playing, i personally like the idea of a completely new challenge (different map, not knowing where the resources are) every time, but i find the game's random map generator a bit underwhelming.

[Dan]

Originally posted by bspawn:

Originally posted by Dan:

Cheers, that got it! Strange default to have :-)

Whole lot of other possibilities in there I see... the resource deposits seem to be defined by texture files... so I can potentially work that into a procedural generation pipeline

The game's built-in random map generator would be a lot more useful if it would have options to adjust the size range of landscape features, including resource deposits. As it is, we can only have more or fewer small hills, lakes, resource spots.
So if one goes the procedural route for custom resource deposits, one might go the same route for the entire custom map.

Although many of the custom maps looks beautiful and are no doubt worth playing, i personally like the idea of a completely new challenge (different map, not knowing where the resources are) every time, but i find the game's random map generator a bit underwhelming.

Well, if I can get it working in a way that's straightforward enough to put in a tutorial, that's what SideFX Houdini could provide - I've already got a cobbled-together setup for generating a landscape from a seeded noise-function then automatically applying hydraulic/thermal erosion. If I can work out a way to output into the correct .dds format, I could potentially get somewhere close to an automatic map generator... you'd still need to add customs posts by hand, and use the terrain editor's tree generator (it'd be nice if there was an option to generate trees from an input weight-mask texture or something). Height, rock-mapping and resource distribution is all defined in 2k texture files, so that's all potentially doable.

I think I'd need to work out how to write to an image file (ideally straight to the correct dds format) using a python script... otherwise the free "Apprentice" edition would watermark the output images, and limit the res to 720p (which is no use for a 2k heightmap).

It's a pipedream at this point to get it near-fully automated, but I'll certainly post it up if I eventually get to that point.