[Mod] Painterly CK2

[Fishman786]

PAINTERLY CK2 V2 released.

Downlard from at this location.


Stay tuned for OP update...


Main changes:
- Patched for Rajas of India
- Includes Better Mountains II
- New, even more vibrant colour maps for land and sea. Land one is based on the vanilla one but with new colour shading. Sea is entirely painted.

The new sea colour map is quite cool because it's a bit of an unused feature in the vanilla game. Now there are brown, muddy rivers, the north sea is filled with deep green algal growth and sediment, the Mediterranean sea and Indian ocean have beautiful azure waters, the Red Sea is now red due to wind-blown sand, and the unknown depths of the Atlantic are dark and mysterious.

 

[Fishman786]

Okay, OP's updated. You should be able to get the mod from there too.

 

[Fishman786]

Fantastic! But it disables achievements. :-(

Thankyou.

Unfortunately, all mods disable achievements. This obviously necessary to prevent cheating, but it affects mods that don't change the difficulty as well.

 

[Fishman786]

This *does* work with 2.2, but I wouldn't recommend it. Firstly, 2.2 is horribly buggy and broken, I'm not going to play CK2 until the patch is released. Secondly, the snow needs a new texture as well as it looks hideous, particularly in the mountains.

 

[AstroCat]

This *does* work with 2.2, but I wouldn't recommend it. Firstly, 2.2 is horribly buggy and broken, I'm not going to play CK2 until the patch is released. Secondly, the snow needs a new texture as well as it looks hideous, particularly in the mountains.

Where is the snow texture coming from, which .dds?

 

[Fishman786]

Where is the snow texture coming from, which .dds?

Confusingly, the snow is created using a jumble of different things.
1. The diffuse colour of the snow is pure white, I believe, and doesn't come from any .dds file. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the ice.dds file. Nor does it appear to have any normal maps of its own. Unlike the rest of the terrain, the snow is not affected by colourmap.dds and is the same colour everywhere.
2. The opacity of the snow is controlled by a set of values in defines.lua, there's a number for each type of winter condition. Irritatingly, the snow uses the fogofwar.dds file as an alpha map (which is what cuts out the little splodges), meaning that you can't have a separate texture for the FoW and the snow. The FoW texture of course is very faint and almost invisible, so that mitigates the problem slightly.
3. There are various 'holes' in the snow as well, which are not generated by fogofwar.dds, and are dependent on the terrain the snow is on. These are created using atlas_normals.dds, another strange 'misuse' of a file. In the base game this isn't a problem because of the way the normal maps match up with the snowy mountain textures, but in PCK2 they don't match directly, meaning that there are loads of big holes in the mountain snow that expose all the black rock underneath. This doesn't look very nice zoomed-in, and zoomed out it has a nauseating tiling effect.
4. The actual elevation of the map doesn't seem to make a difference to the snow.
5. It is possible that the overall normal map used for the whole of the map does affect snow cover, but I'm unsure.
6. Obviously, the specific provinces that have snow are designated in climate.txt.

To fix PCK2 so that the snow looks nice, I reckon I will need to adjust the defines.lua to make the mild winter snow more opaque, and the other winters less opaque. I will also need to create new textures for the snowy mountain terrain, along with normal maps that match better. Hopefully that will resolve the problems with the relative thickness of the different types of snow and the horrible gaps in it on the mountains.

 

[Fishman786]

Progress update for Painterly CK2 v.3

I've re-drawn part of the colourmap to make the summer snow on the tallest peaks look white. Before it was a bit washed-out, and it didn't look right with the new CM snow.

 

[Fishman786]

Progress update for Painterly CK2 v.3

The summer snow textures have been changes to make them fit with the CM snow better. Many of the texture normal maps have been reverted to the vanilla ones because the snow uses them to function. The fog of war texture has been changed (necessary because the snow uses it as well). Terrain changes in Scotland, Wales and Northern England.

I'm considering releasing a 'snowless' version as well that includes the new colourmap and terrain, but uses the classic Painterly terrain textures and doesn't have any CM snow.

 

[DirtyRoberto]

is this compatible with SWMH/ HIP ?

 

[Fishman786]

is this compatible with SWMH/ HIP ?

Nope. There was a SWMH-compatible version available before RoI messed everything up though. I'm considering asking the SWMH developers for permission to make one. However, making this mod compatible with another map-mod will be a slow process.

 

[Fishman786]

Looooooong hiatus, but.....


CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD PAINTERLY CK2 FOR VERSION 2.5.2

Also compatible with 2.4.5 etc if you don't like Conclave.


Unfortunately I no longer have access to Photoshop, which is why this has been basically abandoned. However, I've managed to do this quick fix if you really like the textures in this mod. Sadly the terrain type changes have had to go since there's some kind of conflict with post-HL versions of CK2, maybe they changed the steppe terrain or something. This means there aren't as many nice field areas dotted around the map any more, but otherwise things are fine.


You may experience some freezes and hiccups when loading the game with the mod installed, but I've been noticing that with all mods and I don't think it's specific to this one. If the game hangs at the Paradox icon, just wait and it will sort itself out hopefully. If there are real problems you might need to clean the cache.

UPDATE: The problems with the terrain type changes have been fixed. If you're using any version of the game after Horse Lords [2.4.1] please use the new version, v4.

 

[Fishman786]

PAINTERLY CK2 VERSION 4 RELEASED

Download HERE

I finally figured out how to fix the problem with the terrain.bmp file without using Photoshop, so now we have Painterly CK2 fully restored again!