Slitherine

My new terrain set for SJ is now available in the Modders Corner.

This is the standard Ukiyo-e Terrain recoloured to give an orange colour, similar to the ground colour used in the Battle of Anegawa screen.

See here;








Cheers

Paul

I love this orange. Reminds me of mikan oranges.
Thank you for this.

Nice one Paul.

Very cool, Paul!

Spot on for many parts in Northern China. Not sure about Japan, though. Japan is generally very green all year around. You rarely see anything brown on the ground save the desolate fields in winter. Many of the battle screens are indeed brownish but the idea was to look good, not to reflect realty. Something very Japanese there. Snow is also quite rare south of Tokyo. Tokyo area gets just a few snowy days a year and it melts away right away. Northern areas however are much like Scandinavia and Niigata gets more now in any given winter than Finland and that is saying something. Then very few battles were ever fought up there and certainly not in winter.

So if realism is what you want I'd just go green.The green tiles are excellent and the graphics beautiful. What will stay in MY mind forever is not the beautiful four seasons the Japanese make so much noise about but the fifth season they never mention in this context, the miserable rainy season, wet, hot and humid (anything up to 96%). Truly unbearable. Trust me, I should know.Well, just kidding, it´s a beautiful country .

Kanbatte-ne,

Henry

urkki63 wrote:
So if realism is what you want I'd just go green.The green tiles are excellent and the graphics beautiful. What will stay in MY mind forever is not the beautiful four seasons the Japanese make so much noise about but the fifth season they never mention in this context, the miserable rainy season, wet, hot and humid (anything up to 96%). Truly unbearable. Trust me, I should know.Well, just kidding, it´s a beautiful country .

Kanbatte-ne,

Henry

Thanks Henry,

For this set I was not going for realism, I was trying to recreate the ground colour used in the Anegawa screen.

regards

Paul

For this set I was not going for realism, I was trying to recreate the ground colour used in the Anegawa screen.

I knew that, Paul. Just general musing on the subject. But the Anegawa tiles would look great in any Jurchen/Ming/Qing scenario in Northern China. Maybe a little more brownish (=less orange) for ultimate realism. Just in case you run out of projects, how about a dedicated tile set for China? Yellow Earth of Northern China, Eastern Wastelands, Jungles of Yunnan.. Buildings and trees and some other details could perhaps be tweaked a bit. They look a bit too Japanese to me.

Winds regularly blow that yellow earth stuff (loess) all the way from China to Korea and Japan and you can clearly see see it in the clouds. They call it Koosa or Fukukaze in Japan. Makes you feel kind of small.

Cheers!

Thanks for the ideas, some separate terrain sets for the various areas of China and Korea sounds very interesting. Unfortunately I have no 3D skills, so I cannot make any changes to the buildings and trees, apart from altering the colours.

regards

Thanks for the ideas, some separate terrain sets for the various areas of China and Korea sounds very interesting. Unfortunately I have no 3D skills, so I cannot make any changes to the buildings and trees, apart from altering the colours. e]

I might be able to give you a hand there, Paul, if you´re interested. I used to do that stuff quite a bit when I was involved with Steel Panthers ww2 (camo) the way back when. I even created a small Medieval mod for it with knights and all. Good fun.

Henry

urkki63 wrote:I might be able to give you a hand there, Paul, if you´re interested. I used to do that stuff quite a bit when I was involved with Steel Panthers ww2 (camo) the way back when. I even created a small Medieval mod for it with knights and all. Good fun.

Henry

Thanks for the offer, Henry. You would need the object .S3F files for the buildings and trees/forests, in order to modify them. I don't know if Richard or anyone can provide them to us? The .S4F files that come with the game cannot be modified.

I remember someone transplanting Japanese pine trees from SJ to P&S or something. I wonder how he did it. If anyone ever did. Did a quick search on pine trees but no suitable matches found..

Henry

urkki63 wrote:I remember someone transplanting Japanese pine trees from SJ to P&S or something. I wonder how he did it. If anyone ever did. Did a quick search on pine trees but no suitable matches found..

Henry

Yes, that was me for my Holowczyn scenario. That did not require any 3d editing, I just took the Forest .S4f files from SJ and used them unedited in that scenario. I think I had to modify the Texture.dds file.

You can do the same the other way around, ie; take the P&S Forest and put it in SJ. I have already done it for my own amusement, but not released it yet. Is that all that would be required for Chinese trees?

regards


Paul

The original trees look just fine for bamboo groves and cedar forests in the hills. I especially like the mist effect. P&S trees are great for hardwood forests but they could be peppered with white cherry or pink plum blossoms in spring and bright red maple leaves in fall. In China, roads, rivers and canals are regularly lined with weeping willows but from a distance they probably look like regular leafy trees. Palm trees are common in the subtropical southern parts of the country.

Buildings look terribly neat and tidy which is fine for Japan but the villages in the Chinese countryside can be very poor and rundown. Even today, 1 million Chinese still live literally in caves. A few collapsed roofs and smoking ruins wouldn´t look out of place in 17h c war zones. Japanese castles look just beautiful but the majority of SJ castles were made of wood, often just palisaded villages. The whitewashed picture book walls are largely later construction.

It all depends on those s4f files. S4f sounds familiar, I might have a small translator somewhere that opens them. Are there further complications inside?

Henry

urkki63 wrote:It all depends on those s4f files. S4f sounds familiar, I might have a small translator somewhere that opens them. Are there further complications inside?

Henry

I have been told that the .S4F files cannot be modified, you need the .S3F versions of the files for any modding work. Unfortunately I have never managed to load one in a 3d editing program, so I do not know how difficult they are to use.


Cheers

Paul

Hmm.. hardly unexpectedly, my stupid editor didn´t open .s4f files either. More hmmm... Do you think I should post a request on modder´s corner? I know it´s a bit of a long shot but maybe someone will take pity on me..

Henry

urkki63 wrote:Hmm.. hardly unexpectedly, my stupid editor didn´t open .s4f files either. More hmmm... Do you think I should post a request on modder´s corner? I know it´s a bit of a long shot but maybe someone will take pity on me..

Henry

It's worth a try, maybe someone may have the .3SF files for the Buildings and Forests. I know Jomni made some new buildings for his original Sengoku Jidai mod, maybe he still has the files.

You can edit the binary S4F files with any appropriate binary editor, to change the texture names for example. You just need to ensure that the replacement name is the same length.

Cheers

Pip

pipfromslitherine wrote:You can edit the binary S4F files with any appropriate binary editor, to change the texture names for example. You just need to ensure that the replacement name is the same length.

Cheers

Pip

Thanks Pip, but I think Henry wants to do something a bit more complicated, like new building shapes etc.


Paul

Then it would need to be built in a 3D tool and exported. There are no importers for either of the S*F file formats AFAIK.

Cheers

Pip

So I need a program to convert a Photoshop image to .s3f? What kind of editor would be suitable?

Henry

No. s3f/s4f files are 3D data. The textures are included in them - you can read them in plain text when you open the file. The textures are DDS or TGA files which can be edited with a number of plugins.

Cheers

Pip