Wall bit issues

LadieStorm

I've joined yet another mapping challenge on the Cartographer's Guild website. This is the November 2017 Mapping Challenge: Survive!

We are supposed to be mapping a fort/fortress/stronghold or area where a group can hold off a zombie invasion (or ghouls, or vampires, or any other monster one can think of!)

Well, I thought of a fort/fortress with an interesting moat idea (doesn't look like much now, but the moat WILL get interesting), and an escape plan. I'm in the beginning stages, I've set up my 'countryside', made my moat, and my 'island' in the middle. But any fort/fortress would still have walls (and possibly towers) to help citizens fight off any kind of attack, so I'm creating a walkable wall with towers, where soldiers (or anyone else defense minded) could set up a watch and defend the fort. I'm making this map in DD3, of course, just like any dungeon.

I wanted to make it so that the towers and the walkable walls were connected. There are doors down at the bottom of the towers (which can't be seen), and stairways in the towers that lead to the roofs(which also can't be seen) with trapdoors in the roofs (which will be seen once I add them). This would give soldiers access, and then they can walk along the walls and act as sentries.

I started out by creating the towers (floors and walls) then using the corridor option with no wall end to connect the towers. But when I cut the towers were the corridors connected, I ended up with little green patches where the floors didn't quite meet, and the grass fill was showing through. I wanted everything to be seamless, so I decided to do things another way.

What I did, was create the tower and corridor floors first, without the walls, which allowed me to overlap them just enough to prevent the grass fill showing through when the walls were cut. Then, once that was done, I went back, and added the walls, without the floor. That is what has led to the issue I'm having. Some of my corridor walls don't quite reach the tower walls on one side, but they overlap and 'cut into' the tower on the other side. I tried a node edit to fix them, but I couldn't get it to work. Probably because of the width of the wall line. I have a screen shot to show what I'm seeing. My question is, how to get everything to line up, and make it look as one piece. I'm using SS2 to make this fort/ress, and I thought there was a way to make everything match up, but I haven't been able to figure it out.

Any ideas?

Monsen

You'll need to use node edit to fix this. When using node edit on a wall like this though, remember that the actual line defining the wall is alwys in the exact center of the wall and not the visibale edge of the wall, so keep this in mind when you try to pick the node to edit. It may sometimes be helpful to reduce the width of the wall to a small value to visualize this location.
Another important thing when using node edit is to make sure you don't pick the floor below instead. Generally, the best way to avoid this is to simply hide the sheet with the floor on it, and just have the walls visible.

LadieStorm

GRRRRRRRR... I forgot about picking the middle of the line. That's why I couldn't select it. Thanks Remy.

Monsen

You're welcome. It can be quite a bit of information to keep straight in your head. Generally though, for any entity with a width greater than 0, the line you need to select will always be in the middle of the visible line. For zero width entities, it depends on they are closed (polygons) or not. If it isn't closed, you'll simply see the line, easy to select, but if it is a closed shape, that shape will be filled, and the actual line will then be at the exact edge of the entity.

Dogtag

Another option could be be to hide the floors and use TRIM TO ENTITY on the corridor walls (trim them to the tower wall). Then, unhide the floors and delete the corridor floor. And then redraw the corridor floor as a filled poly on the FLOOR sheet instead of using the floor tool. That way you could hide the ends under the tower walls.

Cheers,
~Dogtag

Dogtag

Note, if you try my suggestion, you can make things easier when redrawing the floors by using the Extract Properties button on the floors to automatically set the fill style, sheet, layer, and other properties, then simply draw the polys.

Dogtag

Hm. Although I tested my suggestion before posting, Monsen kindly whispered to me that TRIM TO ENTITY doesn't play well with circles. It did in my experiments but, on further experimentation, I did come across circumstances where it didn't work. Weird. I suppose node editing is the more certain method, though TRIM TO ENTITY might be worth a shot first, in case it does work.  

I suppose it makes sense. Circles and Arcs don't always play nice with other commands either.

Loopysue

Does it work if you first convert the circles to paths?

And is that practical with the wall system?

Dogtag

I don't know about a path, but Monsen said it works if you convert the circle to a 2d poly. I don't know if there's a wall system so much as entities on the WALLS* sheets.

And, like I said, it works for me with circles almost as often as not. I'm unclear what causes it to fail.

LadieStorm

Well, I've just encountered a second problem. My wall cutting tool doesn't seem to be working. I thought I would cut the tower walls first, then node edit the corridors so that they all lined up.. then I was going to combine paths, so that everything was all one piece (or two pieces, technically). That way, I wouldn't have any stray nodes. But I can't seem to cut my tower walls. I was able to do it before, when I was using the tool that creates the floors and walls together. But now that I've created them separately, the cutting tool won't cut.

help, please?

Monsen

Which wall cutting tool would that be? If you use the one from the symbol catalog, make sure your walls are on the correct sheet and layer, as it is set up to only cut entities on the?

I recommend using the Break command, especially for entities you have drawn manually since these often don't conform to what some of the tools expect (And for ease of use, hide your floor sheet while working).

LadieStorm

uhm... Remy, how many cutting tools are there? And I didn't really draw the walls manually. All I did was use the room building tool, and in the first go around I unchecked the wall making tool. Then once my floors were all in place, I went back, rechecked the wall making tool, and unchecked the floor making tool. Of course I made sure that my floors were on my floor sheet and my walls were on my wall sheet.

Monsen

Posted By: LadieStormuhm... Remy, how many cutting tools are there?

A lot. Almost all the various dungeon style have a cutting symbol or three in their wall features symbol catalog, and then you have the basic trim, split and break commands. I usually prefer the latter, since they give me more control, although any of them should work.

The important thing to make sure of for the symbol tool is that the walls are on the WALLS layer (Check with the LIST command, note LAYER and not SHEET). Also, make sure that Snap and ortho is turned off, as they often prevents you from clicking where you thought you did.
I recommend you use the BREAK command though, because you can then use the intersection modifier to create the break exactly where the corridor wall intersects with the tower wall, and then later combine the paths to get a nicer continuous corner.

LadieStorm

If I use the break command, will it eliminate the section I'm cutting out? Or do I just erase the section once I've broken the wall at the two separate points?

Monsen

Break removes the section. You could also use split twice (once on each split point) and then manually erase the section.