Poland, Bulgaria and Arbër will probably feature in 0.16.
Apart from that I think we should work on making this game more reallistic or HQ looking.
Many people have been talking about Europe 1200 not using Polished Landscapes.
I think we should not include it, but we should enhance a lot of stuff which we could change with some files from PL.
Somth like what I did for my mod, Hiridia.
So,
things we should do to elliminate the Native feeling:
TEXTURES AND MODELS- New ground textures for turf mainly, but maybe for others as well. We should leave the one for desert, rocks and pebbles.
- The village road path is also very iconic from Native, so it would be good to find or make another texture.
- New scene borders. The Native borders simply suck. If I'm not mistaken PL has some which look really good. But I would take from the model the part with trees, cause those trees (like in the borders we have now) can look gigantic if the scene is big.
- Checking for new trees. With all the stuff I've already listed the game should look quite nicer, but the trees coming from Native kind of suck hard. We could try taking out the worse trees and putting in their place already existen ones (copies). And from there, we could look for new trees. Way of the Crusader has some new trees which we could fin useful for the tuntra/desert areas, and maybe somebody could make some nicer (but not highpoli) trees.
SCENESWe have quite a big problem here. We have the biggest map ever made for MaB, with a bunch of historical cities and castles. But lets face it, making scenes for all of them is impossible. We should only make the important castles and cities. Now, I'm sure you already know that, but then we are leaving 98% of settlements with poor worked Nativeish scenes, which are more than known to MaB players, and are very small.
So, my suggestion is, making very nice placeholder scenes. This way we could take out those little already known city and castle scenes, and give all places a new look. We could make 2 or 3 castle scenes and 2 or 3 city scenes, and use them all over the map, elliminating the old ones. Perhaps we could have a castle and a city scene for each culture (not faction), north african, mediterranian, russian, etc...
Then, once the new placeholders are done and the old scenes have disappeared, we could focus on specific scenes for important places, like Constantinople or Jerusalem.
The idea for these placeholder scenes cames to me from the castle and city scenes from Medieval 2 Total War. So the thing would be to make relatively big settlements (so the player feels he enters a really populated space), with a square of walls surrounding it, with a central plaza and a church.
Note: We have a totally new and really nice church building, done quite long ago, which we aren't using.
We could make scenes look even bigger and make work easier by just making the city up to the plaza, and leaving the rest blocked to the player. Exactly how the Nuremberg scene is done. I really like the scene from Bremen because it really gives sense of inmersion. It looks like a complete medieval scene, with its market district and Church, and a clear principal road.
TOWN WALKERSBut we don't want desert scenes! The bigger the scene is the more walkers it has to have. So I strongly suggest to add more town walkers, maybe twice their number, to make the new cities look really alive.
