I recently added all new banners for the upcoming 1866 mod (63 in all), and I became really disappointed with how banners and flags were handled in game. Adding new banners was very imprecise and making them show up properly as flags on the world map was near impossible. As I researched, I found that many people were having the same kind of headaches as I was, so I decided to try to fix it and make the results available to everyone.
These are the problems with the current system:First of all, the banner textures are all different sizes which is very annoying if you are importing multiple banners.
Secondly, the map flag system is horrendous. It uses a different shaped flag based on which number in the sequence you choose, and it is totally arbitrary.
So you get one of the following based on the number in the sequence you choose:
X) horizontal, non-square flag with a V-Cut at the end:
1, 2, 4, 6, 10, 11, 12, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 29, 30, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 53, 55, 62, 59, 63
Y) vertical banners:
3, 5, 16, 18, 27, 28, 31, 40, 42, 45, 56, 58, 57, 61
Z) tiny square flags:
7, 8, 9, 13, 15, 17, 23, 25, 32, 33, 34, 37, 46, 52, 60
To make flag types X and Z, the game arbitrarily chooses part of the banner from the texture, so you never really know what segment is going to come off of your flag.
It also uses another arbitrary segment from the texture to draw the top roll of the banner which more often than not looks very ugly.
Also I know that this is a medieval game, but there is a complete lack of what we consider to be the most normal type of flag: A horizontal flag without a V-cut in the end of it.
This is the solution I am working towards:Banners:
I will be recreating banners_a.dds, banners_b.dds, and banners_c.dds so that the textures use standard sized banners of 132x330 pixels (2:5 aspect ratio).
Additionally, the top 10 pixels in the banner will be stretched and mapped over the roll at the top of the banner, and the wooden dowel will be mapped to a wooden texture like it is now. The models in banners.brf will be replaced to point to the correct locations on the new textures. I will also be removing the v-cuts from the bottom of all banner models.
Horizontal Flags (without V-cuts) - new map flag shape:
This shape will be a horizontal flag without the v-cut that is currently found on all horizontal flags.
To avoid image distortion issues, I will be creating new texture files to hold the textures for a new horizontal map shape. These textures will be standardized as 132x220 pixels, which is the most common aspect ratio for flags (3:5). This also makes it easy to move over your banner texture since the widths are the same (lengths are different). I will create a map flags brf which will have an entry for every flag that is meant to replace the entries found in map_flags_a.brf, map_flags_b.brf, and map_flags_c.brf. These models file will point to the correct areas of the new 3:5 flag textures and the brf file will include updated vertex animations for each flag (which will be a lot of work)
So just to be clear, there will be seperate textures for the flags and for the banners. SO you may have to do a little extra work, but you'll always know what part of the flag you'll be getting in game and its orientation, AND you won't get image distortion. I will also provide my templates for easily creating new textures.
Other Flag Shapes:
As of now I do not have plans to provide standardization options for the three existing flag shapes, but I may do this if there is sufficient interest.
I'm basically doing this to solve a specific problem I have, and I'm hoping it will be useful to others. Let me know if you think this will be useful to you.
I am somewhat of a modding novice, so i will be posting requests for help in this thread. Please help out with advice when you can. If you think I am missing a crucial piece of information, please inform me as well. Thanks!
First Problem:
I exported a square-bottomed banner from banners.brf using BRF edit so that I could re UV-map it to my new texture locations.
However, I am getting wierd shadows on my mesh and I honestly can't figure out how to get it to look like the other banners. I'm assuming it is due to edge hardness issues since edge hardness is not exported from BRF edit, but I just can't recreate the original model that exists in banners.brf.
Wings Screenshots:
BRF Edit Screenshots:
Standard Model vs My Model (notice the bad shading on the upper left and lower right corners):
If you know what I am doing wrong, please help. If you want to recreate the problem, just export banner_a10 from banners.brf as an .obj and import it into wings.
EDIT: I deleted the trouble parts of the model and extruded as necessary to rebuild them. Something must have been off.
