Facades

Okay, so facades are the most annoying things in the world...so I decided to make them a little bit nicer I would rearrange them...in doing so I found out some stuff about how they work, and found a facade that was missing, facade number 82. Apparently there are actually 2 elven tree bases...this one just didn't have a facwalk. It looks just like the other one, so don't get too excited. However, I have about half finished reorganizing the facades, I'll put the necessary files up for download when I'm done if anybody wants them.
Also, if someone wants to start figuring out how to do facades, apparently the art file contains all the little tiles, and the facwalk tells worlded how to put them together, where they go, which are blocked etcetera. The facwalk is associated according to a hex index and called facwalk.** (or ***) where ** is the hex number associated to the decimal number in the facades.mes.
So if anybody wants to make a new facade, that's based on an old one, just change the art file tile by tile with artview, and then change facades.mes to add your new facade name, and then make a copy of the appropriate facwalk. Now, that doesn't sound too bad does it?
(P.S. I may do this for my fixed up dernholm castle at some point, if I have the urge to put myself through a bunch of unnecessary pain, probably I'll just replace some object and tile block it in worlded.)
Anyways, thought I would share this, and see if anybody else has already rearranged all the facwalks, since that would probably still save me about an hour, maybe 2.

OK, so I've rearranged the facades and they work, and everything is great, except for one small problem...Now none of the original things with facades work...anybody have any ideas for how to get around this?
So, to clarify what's happening...In order to reorganize the facades, I reindexed them in facades.mes, and renamed all of the facwalks. I haven't seen if this has an effect in-game or not, I'll go ahead and check that in a minute...but it does have the effect of basically crashing worlded, whenever you open anything that uses facades placed using the old facade list. Let's see, it looks like WorldEd reindexes the art, but not the facwalk, and that's why it's crashing, as opposed to just giving bad art. WorldEd crashes whenever it tries to run facwalk on an art file without enough tiles. I ran into this problem several times already. So, what I would really like to do, but don't yet know how to do(or if it's even possible) is create a second facade list, and have worlded able to access both. Anyways, any suggestions for workarounds would be appreciated, This rearrangement would be pretty useless to anybody not starting a new module from scratch(and it may crash on mountains anyways, I'll check that too). If it would be useful to people starting a new module(or at least one without facades in it already) I'll post it, assuming there's interest. Otherwise at this point it seems pretty useless, except as an exercise to learn more about facades.

 

I know I'm double posting, but it's an intentional bump of the post as well.
So, yeah it crashes the game to reorganize facades, and it also breaks things like mountains...So it's pretty much useless to everybody.
Well anyways, if anybody has any ideas I'd like to hear them...
Additionally, the water under the various dock facades(except A,B,C,D) is the wrong color it seems for any water in the game...So, is this true? if not, I'm gonna look at changing the palette to make it look right(well, see if it's a simple palette change) if it's more than a palette change, well...we'll see if I can muster the courage to try to fix it.

 

In Dungeon Siege you had to write each and every item into the merchant by hand. If you had a general list you could pull them from a forum, but if you wanted a "special" merchant or something, you had to write in each and every item he would carry, and the odds that it would be there upon each visit within a certain amount of time.

 

If I understand this correctly, you went through the listing renumbering and renaming the facades so they'd be in a more logical order?

If that's the case it's no surprise that nothing works right anymore.

Here's how I understand this:
The modder and player sees the picture that is the facade but the game engine (and WorldEd) sees the number that's supposed to be in a given location and then reads the info encoded within the facade on how to display it.

Once the facade is placed and the map has been saved, this info gets "encoded" into the map. At location x:such-and-such by y:so-and-so is item number (X) with properties: xxxx, yyyyy, zzzzz.

By changing the numbers around, you're glitching the existing maps.

I would be really amazed if this was possible.

A while back I made small pics of the dock pieces for my own reference and just checked them. The color that was used is the same as what you see close the the ships' hull. It looks like the artist was going for a shallow, shadowed water look. It is slightly off for the areas furthest from shore, but tolerably so. I'd say leave them alone.

 

I had the urge to do this earlier as well. Of course, it wouldn't really take up that much space to use a string with the name of the file instead of the index line in a .mes, so obviously Troika's tools don't do this.

It just occured to me that you should at least be able to do the following, however:

as no one yet has added a completely new facade, it's unlikely that people will be passing around copies of facade.mes. So, you can rename the files and get rid of those damn spelling errors that make everyone want to commit ritual suicide while leafing through the facade list. Just make sure you don't include your edited version of this file, if you're including an "Arcanum#.dat" with your mod, or it will screw things up. I suggest not doing this with anything else, as new items have been added, especially by rroyo.

I actually disagree about the shore parts - I think these could use some touching up. Would the files really be too big? I don't think so.

I haven't had the chance to use it yet, but I think you can circumvent facades altogether by just using iscenery. The benefits of facades are few: changing the sound of walking on their unblocked tiles, making sure that they square with the nearby tile edges, and saving work of adding large objects by grouping very large pieces of art close together. You can just add new scenery, even though the pieces will probably be smaller, and make sure it lines up with nearby tiles, if that's what you're going for. You can toggle the scenery on and off (or click the "off" flag to make it translucent) to add the tiles underneath to generate the sound, as they'd be invisible anyway.

rroyo has already done this to some extent, with his hobbit holes and windmill.

I have a big facade I need to make, but it's about 6 or 8 months down the pipeline. I'd be interested to see if this works.

 

Small clarification: What I made is new scenery - not facades. All the blocking tiles and such had to be manually placed.
I call them fake facades.

 

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I really wanted to make my own facades for a long time, but if you can cause the same effects for the player but using things that people know how to do now, why not? Of course, I'm sure it would be a hell of a lot better to have those hobbit holes as facades, since you have to place so many of them.

Yeah, this is definitely a worthy area of study, regardless of the possibility of circumventing the problem in other ways. There are still a lot of things in Arcanum that haven't quite been figured out, but seem to be coming together now. If you make some more progress on this, I'll be glad to lend a hand in between projects.

 

So, I've been bouncing back and forth between all the different things I want to do. Anyways, I'm trying to decrypt the facwalks at the moment. Also, as I went through the art files, there are 3 facades that Troika made art for but never used, they're for small tracks in a cavern(like for mining cars). The straight line ones are easy enough to get to work(at the moment I have them blocking tiles, so I need to remove that) but the caverntrkx is a bit trickier. It's 25 tiles, but the only other 25 tile facade is layed out in a different order. I've figured out (by piecing it together like a puzzle) that caverntrkx spirals inward from tile 0 to 24, I haven't tried to figure out how caverndrt2 is assembled(just need to make a screenshot and puzzle the tiles onto it). Then I could rearrange the bitmaps within the caverntrkx.art file. OR I could figure out how facwalks work, and see if I can rearrange how the tiles go by using that. The difficulty there is figuring out how facwalks work. I'll share those 3 facades for anybody that might want them once I get them working. If anybody else has already done this, or feels like puzzling out facwalks(it does seem like an easier intro to hex-editing than weapon editing) before I get around to it, you're welcome to. I'll post here once I do figure things out, and if I do manage to figure out how facwalks work, I'll explain them(or type up some document explaining them) so that others will be free to make facades.

 

Sounds like some damn fine work. I can't believe I missed protos not in the index file!

Why do you have to figure out how these protos are mapped? Are they messed up and need fixing?

Why do you say that facwalks is the key? I figured it was a sort of prototype, pre-facade format that never got used. Maybe I could help out with this? I'm really getting into the art aspect.

 

Ok, let's see...First, reason to understand how they work: the facwalks control how the facade tiles are layed out as well as which tiles are blocked...So, if anybody wanted to create a new facade, and be able to block and unblock various tiles this would be necessary...Also if someone wanted to create a facade which followed a shape which none of the current facades followed.Oh, also caverntrkx doesn't lay out correctly using caverndrt2's facwalk. So not bugged(since it's unused content) but to get the unused content to work well, requires me to know at least how to unblock tiles.
Second, the reason I say that they're key, is that if you switch them around, you get facades that are built in the shape and blocking pattern of the other facades.
Now, here's what I've figured out so far...
Definite: the facwalk called facwalk.## (or ###) is associated the the facade in facadename.mes indexed with decimal number which is the same as the hex number ##.
Ex: facwalk.0E is associated to facade 14, DocShrLRSupports
Suppositions:
I use the hex# for address, since that's what my hex editor uses:
opening any of the facwalks in a hexeditor we get some commonality, that seems to suggest that these things are true:
the first 14 addresses(0-D) translate into facwalk v101 (with the 2 spaces at the end) address E is "usually" 00(most of the facwalks I've looked at have 00) but sometimes something else. I'm not sure what this means, I'm thinking they may have something to do with the format of the file, I'm only going to try to understand the 00 format files for the moment.
Note: Everything after the 14th address happens in 4-block chunks, I assume this is normal for hex-editing, but I've never done hex-editing before, so I don't know.(next three are 0s)
The next couple blocks are 1000, and 1000, "Always"(in my experience).
So that takes us up to address 1A. The next two blocks tell us how big the square that the facade occupies(I think) with 1A being number of tiles / that way, and 1E being number of tiles \ that way.
Finally address 22 is the total number of tiles in the art file. Starting at address 26 we begin the walk. 3 blocks per tile, and I assume that these 3 blocks give information about whether the tile is blocked or not, and which direction to go from the previous tile. I've looked at the docshrLLsupport, and docshrLRsupport ones, and gleaned a bit of information, I'm next going to look at voidpad and blimpjunk5, I went ahead and puzzled them together in gimp, so I know how they're layed out, blimpjunk5 should be particularly interesting as it's layed out:
0 5
1 2
3 4
in particular, 4 and 5 are not adjacent.
So anyways, that's what I've figured out so far, I've got to make an exam today, and give it tomorrow(probably also grade it) so I may not get to work on this much over the next few days...we'll see.

Side Note: fixing the dock facades is more than a palette change, also, I've managed to build a docks without using them(except A-D which are fine). So, it's moved a little ways down my list of priorities to fix them...I may even just remove them for my purposes, hmmm.... Okay I just thought of this, so I'm not sure how good of an idea it is, but it seems good, it's also questionable how well it will work.
So, one of the most annoying things about facades is that you have to scroll through all of the practically useless facades when you're building things. Like scrolling through elven treetops anytime you're not editing them(or anything else when you are editing them).
Here's the idea: The game doesn't display facades that are missing their facwalks.(ref. facade # 82, and facade#197). So, it seems to me, that you could move whatever facwalks you aren't using to another folder, disabling all facades that you aren't using. Just note that if a facade that doesn't have a facwalk is tried to be displayed it will crash worlded. Anyways, I think I might create to folders in my art folder: ALLFacades, and workingfacades, renaming them facade as the need arises, and within workingfacades, I'll keep all the facwalks split up according to what they do, and just put them in the main folder when I'm editing something that uses that particular set of facades...note that as long as an unused facade is not on the screen worlded won't crash, so if you only ever go to the desert for this particular set of editings, you should only need the desert facades...yes, I think I will do this.(If somebody would like a list of related facades with titles, I can list them here once I've finished). Some Examples will be like: Underground, Desert, Void, Elven, DarkElven, etc...

EDIT: Well, that wasn't nearly as complicated as I expected. I just was thinking along the wrong lines...Alright so here's the deal:
in that beginning part you say what the dimensions of the area are. Then starting at address 26(hex) you say where each tile in the art file is, and whether the tile is blocked.
Works like this:
Blck1 Blck2 Blck3
1000 2000 0000
Block 1 being 1 means go one tile from the top corner down and left.
Block2 being 2 means go 2 tiles from the top corner down and right.
Block3 being 0 means do block.
Ex: suppose my art file was 3x3, then the facade in topdown view would look like this:
(2,0)(1,0)(0,0)
(2,1)(1,1)(0,1)
(2,2)(1,2)(0,2)
where the coordinate in parentheses corresponds to the coordinate in blocks one and two of the three blocks for the tile. So
0000 1000 0000 2000 0000 1000 1000 2000 1000 would create a facade that looked like this:
X__
X_#
___
where _ is empty, X is unblocked and # is blocked.
So, you can make your own facwalks now, I'll get those 3 facades troika left out up and running and post them for download later today.

EDIT: Gah! Lighting, I forgot about lighting, that's probably that first address...I'll get it in a minute, the extra art is almost ready.

Oh, so to clarify, the first address after the intro text is the ground that the facade deletes to(presumably also the sound it makes), the second and third seem to control lighting.

So, now that I've done that, there are a few facades that seem like they could use some fixing...I'm referring to things like dungeonrug2(why is it lit?) If people could post the names of facades that seem to have something wrong with them(as far as tiles blocked, deleting to wrong thing, or incorrectly lit/unlit) and what is wrong with them, I'd be happy to fix all those bugs, and post a set of fixed facwalks for everybody.

 

Here are the cavern facades
This zip includes the facwalks and facadename.mes, you canjust unzip it into the facade subdirectory of art, and added onto the end of your facades will be 3 new facade files.
They are unlit, unblocked, and if deleted become dirt(like the Dwarven floor symbols). So if anybody wants a mine with mine-cars you now have a track for them too. Note that the art files are already on your computer...presumably, I mean they were already on mine.

 

Thank You!

 

Wow, theo. That is some unbelievably impressive work for a hex editor of any amount of experience, especially since you figured this out so quickly. I think you should definitely make a sort of proto docs for facades, where you explain what each address means and how long the string is. I can't imagine what you might do when you move on to protos - are modders finally going to be able to decipher the entirety of a .pro file sometime soon? I really hope so.