Some utterly surreal **** ya'll!!!

[Worbah]

Right. The topic name is vague, but then again so am I. As we all know, nowadays your position on the world map affects the battle map. BUT it doesn't change in the vicinity of the cities. Correct me if I am wrong, but castles were surrounded with cities and villages, and when enemy forces or bandits approached the dwelling the civilians would flee behind the walls of the fortress/castle/whatever. So, could there be houses and such as random features, the way rocks and trees are now. Very rare away from cities, but near them you could have a dozen houses on the battlefield. The edit-mode has houses, barrels, and whatnot, so could they be used to make different types of thingys from?

 

[Kynes]

I put forward an idea like that a while back.

The problem (I believe) is that it's very hard to produce a normal-looking populated area with a random map generator.

You'd end up with houses on cliffs, bits of fence randomly sticking out of the landscape and barrels in places barrels shouldn't be. The alternative is to make a few permanent maps with farmsteads, wells, barns, roads, fences and whatever else and then put a few peasants in for good measure.

The structures wouldn't be hard to model as you wouldn't be able to go inside them. If future updates or some enterprising modder takes up the idea you could have guard towers with bowmen fixed in place at the top and the AI soldiers that defend structures instead of rushing at you.

 

[GonZ]

This is why (imo) Armagan needs to get a map editor out into the public domain...

http://forums.taleworlds.com/viewtopic.php?t=4154&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

 

[Ingolifs]

As far as i can tell, houses and barrels and that are randomly placable on a generated map just like trees are.

Unlike trees, however, houses take up space in the x and y dimensions, meaning they have to be on flat ground or they'll start looking wierd. A house on top of a hill is going to have some see-through parts underneath, for instance.

 

[chicken_ramen]

How about farmland? Like fields of wheat or something. It'd be really similar to the little weeds that are scattered around the map only taller and more dense. I dunno, maybe it would be too graphically intensive or something, but I think that it'd rock. But it would be something youd find around castles.

 

[Stormbringer]

I've been working on a game-engine for a while, which allows players to add building to a landscape. To solve the slope-problem i took the following approach:

1. get the terrain position where the house should be placed
2. get the slope of the terrain at a few given points. (it should be somewhat flattened. Can't believe anyone would build a house on a mountain top size of a basketball without doing some digging..)
3. place poles or "foundation" under the house to support the structure.

Wasn't too much trouble to get it to work.
that way you don't need face-culling to cover the floorfaces either... It doesn't get much worse if you want to carve the hill for a cellar/basement either.. Depending on the landscape type. (i use a segmented matrix with a fixed amount of vertices and constant x,z.. So i just get the lowest point in the "house-rectangle area", subtract the depth, set all vertices within the house-area at the lowestY-depth. Done.

But that's how MY engine works, Don't know how M&B terrain is generated.