Editing continuous wall symbols.
seycyrus
Traveler
What would be the best way to edit the continuous wall symbols used in September 2020 CA? I'd like to make them have a greenish tinge etc.
Thank you for your time.
Comments
Do you mean the cliffs?
The cliffs are mapped symbols like house symbols, so you should be able to use any of the colour modifying sheet effects on them. There are certain issues with the cracks at the top of the cliff where there are transaparent parts of the symbols that take more colour than they should. You can cover that slightly with an overlapping terrain patch.
Thanks Sue! I was actually talking about the continuous walls that came with the continuous cliffs. I think your answer will apply equallu well to the walls, thanks again.
There were walls? I don't remember. That was a while back now.
If they aren't mapped symbols the sheet effects won't work on them. It's because mapped symbols like houses and the cliffs aren't redrawn at the end of the rendering process, while anything that isn't a mapped symbol is redrawn. The redrawing of the symbols puts them back to the original pre-sheet effects state, so the only effects that still show on symbols that aren't mapped are the glows and shadows.
You can prevent redrawing using the DELAYDRAWSYM command and setting it to 1 (I think. Basically, if it's zero set it to 1, and if its 1 set it to zero. It's a switch - on or off). However, there are problems associated with switching it off. Any symbol with a transparent part loses that transparent part altogether. It's up to you if you want to try that. It may affect the overall appearance of your map in an unexpected way.
Sorry for any confusion. They are city walls, sorta look like castle parapet walls. The methods you mentioned above works.
Wish we had a continuous section of crumbling castle walls!
I think there is a damaged town wall section in Darklands City. You have to draw the wall and then delete one of the normal symbols and replace it with the damaged section by hand.
Maybe that would be a nice idea in the future.
Thanks Sue, I'm taking a look now.
Do you recall perhaps where it was discussed either in a video, or in a thread, how to make the continuous entities continuous again, if one has to change the scale of the symbol?
I am trying to use these continuous symbols on a metric map, and have to reduce the scale so that the symbols make sense in terms of relative scale to other entities on the map. When I do this, there are gaps between sections. Pretty sure that you covered this issue somewhere before. Thanks for your help.
The only way to use continuous symbols is to allow the default scale for your map.
So you might, for instance, draw the line at default scale twice as long as it should be, and then scale the whole line down by 0.5 to make the line itself the right size.
I hope that makes sense.
Beautiful! Thanks.
Sue, do you have any suggestions with the issue shown in the attachments below. I am comparing the two wall sections. One is tinged green using the suggestion you demonstrated a few posts back, while the other is simply a crop of the first using Gimp. They are both on the Wall sheet. Any ideas?
Nothing should ever be on the MERGE layer. It does completely unexpected things to the map. But this isn't what's causing the new symbol to behave differently to the old ones.
Strictly speaking none of the wall symbols should obey colour changing sheet effects because they aren't mapped symbols, though I have observed that if regular symbols are imported at the same time as mapped symbols (ie they are all in the same folder) there is some kind of marker set for all of them that prevents redrawing as described earlier in the thread.
So you can do it the conventional way and use the DELAYDRAWSYM command to prevent redrawing for the entire map, or you could try an experiment by duplicating the new symbol then erasing the image from the duplicate png (leaving it totally blank) and naming it "[filename]_MAP.PNG". When you reimport the new symbol it might just be given the same kind of tags as the rest of the wall and behave just like them.
There is no guarantee that I am right. It was quite a long time ago I observed this.
I'll have to take a deeper look into this after considering your post, thanks.
One thing about the merge layer... I NEVER intentionally put things on the merge layer, but 9 times out of 10 if I'm not looking that's where they end up!
I know you didn't put them there. Sorry if that sounded accusative - it wasn't meant to be.
For some reason in this style things have a strange way of ending up on there. I think Remy once explained why but I can't remember the reason. Something about the initial symbol catalog.
I think Remy once explained why but I can't remember the reason.
In simplified terms, the MERGE layer has id 0 internally in the software. What happens if something tries to go to a layer that doesn't exists, it will default to 0. Can be avoided by having the expected layers in the map.
Thanks Remy :)
You didn't sound accusatory at all. I was just trying to convey my confusion about the mysterious MERGE layer. You guys are all wonderful, and I appreciate your time.
Setting DELYDRAWSYM 0 fixed my issue.
But now I am left wondering, what are the possible negatives of setting DELAYDRAWSYM 0?
The negatives are that you will have to do this every time you open the map, and that it destroys any semi-transparent parts of the symbols. I don't think there are many in that style, but some styles (like Marine Dungeon) have loads of semi-transparent symbols.