So, it came to my attention that it was possible to mod the textures of biomes or at least I interpreted it that way. So I have a couple of questions. 1. Is it possible? 2. If so where can I get the textures which PA currently use. 3. If I revamped the textures how do I get them in the game (This is most likely already on the forum but i'm lazy and i'm making a thread non the less ) 4. Does the PA engine handle normal maps? I would love me some normal maps on terrain
1. Yes. 2. It's been a year since I messed with it, but I recall them being in texture folders for biomes in /pa/terrain. You'll have to use the papa texture editor by @DeathByDenim to extract the pngs from the papas. His tool can be found at the bottom of Raevn's stickied modding reference list that's at the top of this forum. 3. You'd have to copy a default.settings file from the texture folder into the tools folder in the PA exe folder, and then run papatran.exe (I believe with the command line option -o texturepapa.papa texturepng.png, but it's been ages since I used this tool so I could very easily be rememberinng wrong). Be aware that if you're making a server mod, you can't shadow papas so any papas that you make will have to have new names. 4. I doubt it, but this is untested ground in the modding community. The history of terrain modding basically goes: September-October 2013 someone created custom biomes with different colors in the system editor. They couldn't be used in-game. Early 2014 - Someone figured out how to enable the sandbox biome. Early June 2014 - Server modding is made possible May 30th. In the early days of June @aevs releases his volcanic cliffs mod. July 2014 - I spend a little time enabling the pre-December 2013 deserts to work and promptly abandon that mod because terrain modding < balance modding. Throughout fall 2014 - Wondible and a few others make a few mods based aroundd metal planets and galactic war planets that nobody does anything with because CSG customization becomes available. ~Months pass. Sometime in late 2014 - Someone modifies Aev's volcanic cliffs to be seaside cliffs. ~Months pass February - March 2015 - @allister figures out how to create feature papas after much sweat, blood, and tears and says that he'll release a guide on how to create them so that nobody else has to give sweat, blood, and tears on the project. He then vanishes, and no one is willing to give sweat, blood, or tears on the project of getting terrain features with custom papas working. And basically nothing's happened since then. So good luck!
@rivii can I request you look into implementing the "crystal" biome from TA (just google for reference images). I always thought that looked especially good and I think could be achieved by modifying the ice biome..
Stuart that's not even hard. I could do it easily if I wanted to. I'm pretty sure the only thing he did was replace the tree model with a flower model and then make custom textures for it. I don't see why that wouldn't work.
Excellent, a volunteer for putting blood, sweat, and tears into terrain modding! I await your results Kiwi. All I know is that he did it using blender, that they're structured differently from units, and that he described it as being difficult. I'll go ahead and look up his posts.
Good man, do it! Edit: Also is it now possible to attach particle effects to the terrain with the new infinite particle? being able to not only add to the terrain, but maybe add in some effects too would go a long way to spicing things up imo
I'm not sure what the new puppet API does in terms of particle effects but you could ask @cola_colin But effects always had the ability to be "infinite", just set the lifetime to -1. Not entirely sure what "infinite particle means" anyway though.
puppets allow you to add client side models with custom texture, animations, shaders scripted via javascript in arbitrary fashion. So pretty powerful but a little different from what effects modders are used to. I am pretty sure if somebody who is actually good at doing models, textures, animations and shaders goes serious with them the game can be made to look quite different from how it looks right now.
Interesting, Interesting.. I want to start with making custom biome textures first before applying any new meshes and new particles. So 3 steps wise Step 1: New Textures Step 2: New CGS meshes (though Jables pretty much confirmed (he said he wassn't 100% sure) that new meshes required Uber Eniginering support) Step 3: Adding particle systems to create mood and juicyness.. So lets first do Step 1 and see how far we get. The first thing that I want to make is a UI mod that changes the textures of the biomes as they are now. Like the water mod (forgot what it's called).
This is probably the hardest problem. From all we know allister is the only person who figured out how to correctly texture CSG to make them work. Making a new CSG model isn't that hard, even I managed to make one, but getting textures to work on them is not easy.
Yeah I really want to look into that Altough I have my own vision of crystals. More like Tiberium from C&C dont know which colors though but that is for a later stage.
JAbles said I could replace existing ones. by copying one and change the things. but thats not something we want. And it's more a feature that Uber has to fix so that we can work with it. First I need to figure out how to get the current Biome Textures and make them editable as in png
meh, can't seem to find the biome .papa's :/ I think i found them.. and interestingly I see both Diffuse papa's and Normal papa's which propably indicates that PA is actually using normal maps.
So I already have the first texture done with normal map.. now I am not a code monkey or anything so I need someone to help me implement it and see if it works. and preferably pass it onto me so I can check it out personally Who volunteers to help me out at the back end?
If you exported the texture as a .png, you just need to convert to .papa using papatran then shadow an existing texture in the game files with the new .papa. Here's a pretty good tutorial on papatran https://forums.uberent.com/threads/reference-papadump-exe-papatran-exe.48386/page-2#post-1061100
I don't know what I am doing wrong but somewhere it's going wrong lol can you please give a step by step how to do this? When I click papatran than it opens and closes. And tbh I think I lack some previous knowlage about using this stuff so I can't figure it out xD
You need to open a console to enter the papatran command. Do a shift rightclick into the folder where the exe is and select something like "open command line here". Then type in the command as described.
