Wall problems in outdoor level

[Sharkeem]

Hello everybody!

I seem to have a problem with walls. Specifically I want to make an outdoor level with a structure that the player can enter. So I'm using forest_ground as the base tile, and castle_wall for the walls. Only that doesn't work - the walls block movement and show up on the map, but are invisible (see screenshot)



So the first question is: Am I doing something wrong here or does that just not work?

Second question: I proceeded to build the structure using the wall components (not the tiles) and started to have a shadow problem. While I figured out that i need to "double up" the walls so they block sunlight from the other side, I don't know what i can do about the ceiling



This screenshot was taken looking at the sun, you can see the walls throw a shadow while the ceiling doesn't. Any ideas on how to fix this?

And finally, an slightly unrelated third question: I wanted to create a "magical" structure that is bigger on the inside than the outside. I have implemented this using invisible teleporters. Since walking into this teleport triggers a visible effect, I have made a timer to wait until movement is complete (0.2 sec seems to do the trick). So you walk into the disabled teleporter, trigger a floor trigger, which starts the timer, and after movement is done, the teleporter activates and sends you to an identically contructed level somewhere else. Apart from this being visible on the map, do you have any ideas how to implement this in another/better/more elegant way?

Thanks already in advance,
Sharkeem

[gambit37]

I haven't experimented much with outdoor stuff yet, but it looks like the normal indoor ceilings are ignored when calculating shadows, so the sun basically penetrates right through.

I think you need to build your outdoor stuff from wall objects and floor objects that block light; hopefully others on the forum can help with that.

[OGDA]

Hi,

I did something like this just yesterday, this is my suggestion:

- Fill the area with forest floor tiles (normal walkable stuff)
- Make a rectangle with castle floor
- Surround the rectangle of the castle floor tiles with empty tiles (dungeon wall type) except for the one tile where the entrance goes (not on a corner). This will make sure you automatically get the inner castle walls
- Place the asset forest_ground...something on the now invisble tiles (like in your first picture) to hide the non-walkable space (make sure, that the noise layer is not active around that area)
- Put some non passable assets (boulders, mushrooms, etc, on the forest_ground..-assets
- Put the castle_outside_wall (something like that) assets around your building on the outside and the castle outside entrance asset at the entrance of your building (eventually correct orientation)

That's how I did it and there are no visual flaws or mechanic problems except that you can not walk around directly at the wall and only step to the building on the entrance tile.
But that's how the original campaign also did it with some buildings. Eventually you can place fake walls on the outer edge of the dungeon wall tiles to make it so that you even can walk up to the wall (not tested).

Kind regards,
Joerg

[jxjxjf]

I haven't done anything with the castle assets, but with the dungeon assets, I just put floor tiles as a kind of roof, which correctly cast a shadow. Not sure how that will fit with what you have shown here, but basically, just choose something whose model/texture faces the sky and put them where you'd normally place a "roof". Pretty sure that's your best option. The ambient light and direct light can still cause some issues, though, such as seams showing in the dungeon ceilings and where the model cuts off in dungeon stairs.

And yeah, from what I've seen, generally different tile sets don't mix well. They seem to affect the area around the tile as well as the tile itself (for instance, mine tiles automatically create a kind of rocky wall different from the mine wall on adjacent tiles, even if you didn't place a mine wall there). But the tilesets are actually made up of assets that exist in the editor, so you should be able to recreate whatever you need by searching the tileset name in the asset viewer (eg. "dungeon", "castle")

[Sharkeem]

Thanks for the replies,
so, I can fix the shadow thing by putting floors above, that works. I only have to rework the outside a bit, since it now involves some artifacts of those floors...

I tried using dungeon_wall, but they also turn out to be invisible.

Just for the record, the way this building is currently constructed is:

interior filled with tiles dungeon_floor with a certain ceiling height which automatically gets the ceiling.
Ceiling "reinforced" with castle_floor (asset, not tile), so it casts shadows.
Walls made of castle_wall (tile), which turns out invisible but blocks movement.
Visible walls made with castle_wall and castle_pillar, where the walls face both ways (once inside to be visible, once outside to enable shadows)

Anybody else have any better way of doing this?

Thx,
Sharkeem

[Karinas23]

the problem is that the visible part of the walls only forms when a floor tile meets a wall tile of the same type.

[Jackard]

Only certain outdoor tiles naturally form walls, like swamp ground next to more swamp ground. You can use fake wall objects for the rest.

When it comes to light piercing ceilings, I disable the lighting on the sky object for my mod.

[msyblade]

for the transition to a larger level, Stairs now allow you to set target to any level/coordinates, so there is no need for the teleporter workaround. It might be easier, instead of building an indoor environment in an outdoor area, to simply do a level transition into an actual indoor area?

Both of these entrances are level transitions into whatever kind of world I wanna create for them:





I don't want to be bound by the constraints of the of the forest skybox while designing the interiors, I would rather just avoid the hassle.

Hope this helps!

[OGDA]

I'll upload an example when I get home.

[OGDA]

Hi,

here is an example for two structures on one map:
https://das-kartell.org/files/Buildingtest.zip

One with boulders and thin walls and one with thick walls where you can walk directy at the wall.

The lighting inside the building may be still a problem, perhaps that can be solved with one of the solution mentioned above.

Kind regards,
Joerg