So far on the extra and unusual building list I have:
Kilns (apparently medieval villages always had a kiln or two... pottery must have been a bit too fragile to last very long!), blacksmith, watermill, windmill, towers (round and polygonal)…
Anything else that people are always asking for?
Other smaller things include something called a bee skep, which is like a shed without walls for keeping beehives in. Its extremely tiny and I'm not sure whether it should be part of the building set or included in a collection of things like water troughs and mill stones. Ruins as well...
Bridges. There never seen to be enough bridges...
I have a feeling I'm starting to drift rather a long way from the buildings, when I've only actually got one very small one nearly right.
The style of the rooftops is a big question. That first one, and the one I'm working on now, are both Skillion with lean-to - which to me is like a large shed shape with a smaller shed shape back to back with it. The larger ones might take a bit of thought. I looked at medieval rooftops yesterday and found the general style is very flat - probably because these tiles tend to move over time. There are lots of different roof shapes - none of them square or straight, and a very great tendency for those dormer windows that are like a section of the roof cut into a flap and raised into a ski-slope flip at the bottom end. That's going to be a bit tricky! LOL!
Styles vary dramatically from Mexico, through Spain, Italy and further east. I think I'm going to have to settle on one general style and concentrate on that one.
Quenten - what does a medieval arena actually look like?
A bit like a coliseum, perhaps a bit more ovoid, or like a hippodrome, with curved ends. The roof would only be for the outer part, with the centre open to the sky. IMHO anyway.
It really depends what you mean by "medieval". These days what I think of "the dark ages" are commonly referred to as "early medieval". However from memory (of reading not personal experience !) in England open timber halls of the early post Norman conquest period were generally open all the way to the roof timbers and had a central hearth, with smoke filtering out, either through gaps, or at most a sort of louvre arrangement. This reflected the communal living and feasting lifestyle. Chimneys were inserted. Lords acquired more personal chambers. A chimney tended to be at one end of a room rather than central, although you do get central chimneys with fires on two sides where a hall was converted. I will check dates but as I recall this came in in the twelfth /thirteenth century. Newer buildings were built with chimneys from the start and older ones were upgraded but may have retained the older layout for a considerable time. Once chimneys had been inserted and with the move away from communal living spaces the great hall, previously open to the roof, often had a first floor inserted. A couple of things you look for when investigating timber buildings are a central hearth, usually hidden under a later floor and smoke blackening of timbers in the rafters now hidden in the attic both of which suggest the building was originally an open hall. It is not uncommon for a building regarded to be of fifteenth century date, or later, to prove to have been built around, or developed from, a much earlier halled building. I will probably be showing some visitors around Stokesay Castle this week. I think it has these features so I will try and grab some pictures.
Other buildings - dovecotes if you want high status, I think medieval pottery kilns are usually pretty small, brew-houses, other structures - fishponds, fish-weirs, dams, quarries and mines (clay, stones, lime, metal, coal), charcoal burning heaps..........Many mines at this period would be bellpits, so what you see at ground level would be basically a crater, with a ring of spoil around a hole with a ladder gong down. Just some thoughs
All of what Andrew says is correct, but remember, this is Fantasy medieval, with magic, and is also a very civilized city - so think more Bagdad or Constantinople for sophistication.
I think I have a better picture in my mind of the sort of thing now - a gradual evolution away from the communal long houses and halls to private dwellings, which seems to be the driving force behind the necessity for chimneys. The partition of the upper floor space would not have been possible without them. You have also explained why one of our local landmark buildings (c.1100) has a large open 2 storey space with a balcony first floor. I wonder if this is even the reason that much later great houses were built with balcony first floors and grand staircases? A sort of race memory thing about there needing to be a central open space for the fire - later replaced by these showy staircases?
Quenten - I think in the average building set of about 30-40 buildings there possibly isn't quite the range to be able to cater for everything, but I will certainly think about an arena. I have greater need for ordinary housing to fill the residential areas right now.
You can make a really simple oval roof with a few shaded polygons?
I'll knock one up for you in a minute. I'll use one of the standard city roof fills, but you can change properties to whatever you like.
Five minutes tinkering in GIMP allowed me to weather the rooftop and add a bit of grass growing between the tiles. Do you like it better that way, or is this going a bit OTT with the details? The drawback is that this isn't something that can be reproduced in the texture itself, so drawing new shaded poly buildings with the standard barrel tile texture that would be provided with the set would only make buildings like the one on the right.
Oooh ! Can we have some more porrige ? Uhm, buildings ?
Anyway, I like the damaged roof. There aren't enough building symbols for abandoned cities, nor for ruins.
Different amounts of damage would be nice. Along with different types of damage. Not that I'm asking for too many... say 5 or so ?
Or small symbols/frills that could be placed on top of a non damaged building, and that would modify it. I don't know, but methinks it would be easier than drawing a new building for each change.
Ok then. Assuming I get past this fixation I seem to have on one small building right now (its only the same size as the Thatched House 07 in the PF set), I could do an A set and a B set. Set A being the perfect ones without weathering and damage, and the Set B being the weathered and damaged ones for ruined cities.
I'm hoping to get to grips with how to create varicolour house symbols as well, but right now I'm only at the very simple stage of creating the image and MAP files. I haven't even added any frills and things like it says in the TOME yet.
It only took a total of about 20 minutes to do what I did with the weathering and ruining. I modified the existing symbol graphic in GIMP
Loopysue, as far as building types go, remember that Greeks and Romans used tile like/similar to this for their buildings as well. So maybe something like a Roman house with a courtyard or something similar.
Funnily enough I was looking at Roman houses yesterday. They have a sort of double square arrangement a bit like a figure 8?
I've also discovered that skillion roof is a really modern idea, so the building I've already done will be modified to a more classical gable, maybe with one of those ski-slope type dormer windows on it as well as the chimney
Oh yes! Sorry Jim! I keep forgetting who everyone is with two different names to remember. I have enough trouble just remembering one name for each person.
Thanks to you calling the strangeness of the roof design to attention on the FB page, I have decided that skillion roofs are out
The first 7 houses are mostly done. A bit of touching up here and there. I might have to adjust the texture and re-render them, since there seems to be a flaw in the spacing of the tiles on the seam of the tile.
There's only one regular shaped house in the set at the moment. The rest are all odd roof shapes. Is that a good or a bad thing?
Nevertheless, I still think I should have stuck to more conventional rooftops for these tiniest buildings of the set. Maybe I will have 14 of these tiny buildings. These and another 7 that are not quite so oddball.
I have seen photos of two story normal gable houses with a one story lean-to on one to to as many as all sides. Like your split level, but with the high roof equal on both sides then with a lean-to applied to both front and back or three sides or just one side or a 360 porch.
I thought of doing that particular building that way, but I seem to have an aversion to symmetry today. Maybe when I do the alternatives tomorrow I will do it that way
The largest of these buildings is only 30 x 20 feet, so these are the really tiny ones. The smallest are about shed sized, but we don't seen to have enough sheds and outbuildings. I've left it up to others to decide whether to add chimneys and call the 10 foot ones a house!
Ironically, I decided to take a break from the really tiny stuff and try a roman villa. You can't get more symmetrical than that! Not having a great time with it just now, but again - maybe tomorrow will be better
Its only my first try, and there's a whole ton of stuff wrong with it - the roof ridge, the shadows... etc. I didn't bother to weather the tiles because its wrong, AND its huge. Not even sure its an acceptable size for a symbol at 90 x 70 feet. That's a lot of dabbing with the splodgy brushes if its not the final edition.
The central courtyard: I nearly added a ton of details like a pool and paving and steps, etc, but I thought that would make the symbol less useful. Its completely empty of anything so that you can put whatever you like in it.
I'm beginning to question the quality of the texture I made for it, since the contrast is making it difficult to shade and nearly impossible to adjust for the light and dark differences between the shaded pitched part of the roof, and the non-shaded roof ridge. I've had to make that roof ridge 50 units lighter than the rest of the roof just to get it to the same general 'lightness' as the finished roof - which has bleached all the black and dark colours out of it and made it look wrong.
This is a typical English Roman Villa built during the Roman occupation. As you can see, there's no atrium at all. Maybe they were different in the cities or closer to Rome?
Posted By: LoopysueThe central courtyard: I nearly added a ton of details like a pool and paving and steps, etc, but I thought that would make the symbol less useful. Its completely empty of anything so that you can put whatever you like in it.
That only works well for people good at making visual compositions. A lot of people would actually find a fully-fleshed out symbol more useful. I guess what I am saying is that people would probably love to have both variants available
Of course, you can always debate how detailed a city symbol should be anyway, they are normally not intended to be shown in the map at the zoom level shown here anyway, that is only for very special use cases.
And for your entertainment, what I hope to do a building plan of one day, based on this imperial villa of Pollio Felice, for the Speaker's residence at Stromphe, capital of the irisian City States in Artemisia.
Pollius Felix had been a powerful patron – probably of Greek origin – who lived exactly during the time of Flavia and her friends. Even more exciting, his wife may have been Polla Argentaria, the widow of Lucan, a poet who was implicated in a plot against Nero and forced to kill himself. A poem by a Roman called Statius describes Felix's villa and a shrine to Hercules on the Cape of Surrentum.
Comments
Hmmm.
So far on the extra and unusual building list I have:
Kilns (apparently medieval villages always had a kiln or two... pottery must have been a bit too fragile to last very long!), blacksmith, watermill, windmill, towers (round and polygonal)…
Anything else that people are always asking for?
Other smaller things include something called a bee skep, which is like a shed without walls for keeping beehives in. Its extremely tiny and I'm not sure whether it should be part of the building set or included in a collection of things like water troughs and mill stones. Ruins as well...
Bridges. There never seen to be enough bridges...
I have a feeling I'm starting to drift rather a long way from the buildings, when I've only actually got one very small one nearly right.
The style of the rooftops is a big question. That first one, and the one I'm working on now, are both Skillion with lean-to - which to me is like a large shed shape with a smaller shed shape back to back with it. The larger ones might take a bit of thought. I looked at medieval rooftops yesterday and found the general style is very flat - probably because these tiles tend to move over time. There are lots of different roof shapes - none of them square or straight, and a very great tendency for those dormer windows that are like a section of the roof cut into a flap and raised into a ski-slope flip at the bottom end. That's going to be a bit tricky! LOL!
Styles vary dramatically from Mexico, through Spain, Italy and further east. I think I'm going to have to settle on one general style and concentrate on that one.
Quenten - what does a medieval arena actually look like?
There are hardly any chimneys!
Surely we weren't still filling the upper floor with smoke that filtered out through the tiles in medieval times?
ovoid, or like a hippodrome, with curved ends. The roof would only be for the outer part, with the centre open to the sky. IMHO anyway.
Other buildings - dovecotes if you want high status, I think medieval pottery kilns are usually pretty small, brew-houses, other structures - fishponds, fish-weirs, dams, quarries and mines (clay, stones, lime, metal, coal), charcoal burning heaps..........Many mines at this period would be bellpits, so what you see at ground level would be basically a crater, with a ring of spoil around a hole with a ladder gong down. Just some thoughs
I think I have a better picture in my mind of the sort of thing now - a gradual evolution away from the communal long houses and halls to private dwellings, which seems to be the driving force behind the necessity for chimneys. The partition of the upper floor space would not have been possible without them. You have also explained why one of our local landmark buildings (c.1100) has a large open 2 storey space with a balcony first floor. I wonder if this is even the reason that much later great houses were built with balcony first floors and grand staircases? A sort of race memory thing about there needing to be a central open space for the fire - later replaced by these showy staircases?
Quenten - I think in the average building set of about 30-40 buildings there possibly isn't quite the range to be able to cater for everything, but I will certainly think about an arena. I have greater need for ordinary housing to fill the residential areas right now.
You can make a really simple oval roof with a few shaded polygons?
I'll knock one up for you in a minute. I'll use one of the standard city roof fills, but you can change properties to whatever you like.
To modify, or not to modify?
Here is what I mean.
Five minutes tinkering in GIMP allowed me to weather the rooftop and add a bit of grass growing between the tiles. Do you like it better that way, or is this going a bit OTT with the details? The drawback is that this isn't something that can be reproduced in the texture itself, so drawing new shaded poly buildings with the standard barrel tile texture that would be provided with the set would only make buildings like the one on the right.
Just how far would you want to go with this modification if you liked it?
Anyway, I like the damaged roof. There aren't enough building symbols for abandoned cities, nor for ruins.
Different amounts of damage would be nice. Along with different types of damage. Not that I'm asking for too many... say 5 or so ?
Or small symbols/frills that could be placed on top of a non damaged building, and that would modify it. I don't know, but methinks it would be easier than drawing a new building for each change.
Ok then. Assuming I get past this fixation I seem to have on one small building right now (its only the same size as the Thatched House 07 in the PF set), I could do an A set and a B set. Set A being the perfect ones without weathering and damage, and the Set B being the weathered and damaged ones for ruined cities.
I'm hoping to get to grips with how to create varicolour house symbols as well, but right now I'm only at the very simple stage of creating the image and MAP files. I haven't even added any frills and things like it says in the TOME yet.
It only took a total of about 20 minutes to do what I did with the weathering and ruining. I modified the existing symbol graphic in GIMP
I've also discovered that skillion roof is a really modern idea, so the building I've already done will be modified to a more classical gable, maybe with one of those ski-slope type dormer windows on it as well as the chimney
Thanks to you calling the strangeness of the roof design to attention on the FB page, I have decided that skillion roofs are out
The first 7 houses are mostly done. A bit of touching up here and there. I might have to adjust the texture and re-render them, since there seems to be a flaw in the spacing of the tiles on the seam of the tile.
There's only one regular shaped house in the set at the moment. The rest are all odd roof shapes. Is that a good or a bad thing?
I forgot the tower - the first of 3 or 4
I think I may need to do another set of the first 7 with more 'normal' rooftops
Nevertheless, I still think I should have stuck to more conventional rooftops for these tiniest buildings of the set. Maybe I will have 14 of these tiny buildings. These and another 7 that are not quite so oddball.
The largest of these buildings is only 30 x 20 feet, so these are the really tiny ones. The smallest are about shed sized, but we don't seen to have enough sheds and outbuildings. I've left it up to others to decide whether to add chimneys and call the 10 foot ones a house!
Ironically, I decided to take a break from the really tiny stuff and try a roman villa. You can't get more symmetrical than that! Not having a great time with it just now, but again - maybe tomorrow will be better
First attempt:
I can also see that the shadows are too intense, and that the shadows cast by the top floor are a bit wrong.
The central courtyard: I nearly added a ton of details like a pool and paving and steps, etc, but I thought that would make the symbol less useful. Its completely empty of anything so that you can put whatever you like in it.
I'm beginning to question the quality of the texture I made for it, since the contrast is making it difficult to shade and nearly impossible to adjust for the light and dark differences between the shaded pitched part of the roof, and the non-shaded roof ridge. I've had to make that roof ridge 50 units lighter than the rest of the roof just to get it to the same general 'lightness' as the finished roof - which has bleached all the black and dark colours out of it and made it look wrong.
This is a typical English Roman Villa built during the Roman occupation. As you can see, there's no atrium at all. Maybe they were different in the cities or closer to Rome?
I guess what I am saying is that people would probably love to have both variants available
Of course, you can always debate how detailed a city symbol should be anyway, they are normally not intended to be shown in the map at the zoom level shown here anyway, that is only for very special use cases.
Pollius Felix had been a powerful patron – probably of Greek origin – who lived exactly during the time of Flavia and her friends. Even more exciting, his wife may have been Polla Argentaria, the widow of Lucan, a poet who was implicated in a plot against Nero and forced to kill himself. A poem by a Roman called Statius describes Felix's villa and a shrine to Hercules on the Cape of Surrentum.