I began finally working on better positioning of city/army/port sprites.
British Islands (eg. first 65 provs) are done in recently released 0.a.4 version.
There are several sprite types, for which the position is calculated by game engine, and can be changed only by changing of position of another sprite.
- CoT is calculated from city sprite position and placed in SE direction
- siege cannon is calculated from army sprite position
- goods icon in economy view takes same position as manufactory sprite
- natives sprite - I did not find yet from which sprite the position is calculated
I'll have to rework the positions of manufactories, because some goods icons are now in very strange locations and can be hard to guess to which province they belong.
Same with natives sprites, but there I must find first from which sprite their position is calculated.
I am using MichaelM's
Position Editor which is making the work much easier, although there are still places for improvement. The editor don't show for example the shading layer of map, only the border and coastal lines. So you don't see the province labels and if you want to place the sprite to not overlap the label, you may have a little problem.
Also the sprites themselves are shown just as dots of various colors, so you don't know how the positioning will look like in the end, until you launch the game. If you want use this editor also for placing terrain decorations (tree, oasis, mountain, etc. sprite) you may easily end with overcrowded province.
Sometimes the editor has problems to select some province and from unknown reason is showing sometimes ID -1 (Terra Incognita). In the 65 provinces I made for now I found 2 that were absolutely not selectable and for which I could only write down the coordinates and fill the values in the province.csv manually.
Despite the problems, the editor is a great help. Much better then searching the coordinates by yourself and writing everything manually.
So thanks, MichaelM
