Foothold XML Update

[John]

Hey guys, I've been wrestling with XML in hopes of making myself more useful to modders in distress. I think I have successfully managed to convert Foothold to our new XML format. I got it working on my computer so hopefully it will work for you too. Let me know how it goes.

Thanks again to Hale for creating Foothold in the first place. It is truly a masterpiece.

[Silverfish]

Confirmed to be working (alpha 43).

Nice job John! I've been wanting to check this out for a while now!

[agarrett]

I think he did it on my account. The problem is that I had trouble with most of the maps, not just foothold. I'm downloading alpha 43 to see if they work now.

[John]

Yeah you helped inspire me Agarrett, I decided to practice what I was preaching to you in the OG Steam chat and the strategy I proposed to you seems work. Start with an alpha friendly map (one that loads successfully) and layer on additional data from another map while checking to make sure that it still loads successfully after each baby step.

Maybe you guys can use the new Foothold XML file as a template for updating other maps you have your eye on. One thing that really helps is stripping away nested grouping. It might be cool to bring Kohlbrinia back.

[John]

Updated Kohlbrinia as well. I think a couple of the objects have been misplaced for now so there might be a little bit of whale fail on one or two objects.

Kohlbrinia.xml

(280.67 KiB) Downloaded 105 times

[Nimai]

Updated Kohlbrinia as well. I think a couple of the objects have been misplaced for now so there might be a little bit of whale fail on one or two objects.

Kohlbrinia.xml

Woo!! Thanks John!

[John]

Ask and ye shall receive Hale. Thanks again for another sweet level.

There are still 2 whale fails, one for gc_smallleaf and another for StuccoPillar1

Valley.xml

(959.13 KiB) Downloaded 100 times

[Hale]

Pity, the valley.xml you fixed doesn't seem to work for me... D:

[John]

Interesting. I had a lot of fun exploring all the different cliffside villages and everything looked great. What errors are you getting? I haven't directly tested the file I uploaded here, so maybe it got corrupted in transit or I uploaded the wrong one.

[John]

Foothold-6-30-2010.xml

(1.28 MiB) Downloaded 66 times

I had a complaint on Meebo of someone not being able to load Hale's awesome map Foothold. Since my last xml update we have added detail textures to the terrain which makes the level xml files slightly more complicated. Adding the necessary detail texture info to the front of the my old Foothold XML update seems to have fixed the problem.

[John]

Foothold-7-7-2010.xml

(1.3 MiB) Downloaded 84 times

Users still reported having trouble loading foothold in the alphas namely getting an error in windows exclaiming: "The file 'Data/Temp/conversion.dds' is not a supported image type (or could not be found)."

So I decided to try testing my XML with the actual alphas instead of my local svn build and I was able to recreate this error. What I discovered is that the alphas seem to disagree with the line: "<ColorMap>Data/Textures/Terrain/GreenHills/GreenHills_Color.tga</ColorMap>" because they don't actually have a GreenHills_Color.tga file. They really have an optimized file called: "GreenHills_Color.tga_converted.dds". I therefore changed the XML tag to be: "<ColorMap>Data/Textures/Terrain/GreenHills/GreenHills_Color.tga_converted.dds</ColorMap>" and the alphas seem to load Foothold happily.

I have again attached my working Foothold XML file. Feel free to let me know how it goes.