Exult Studio: Disappearing Trees

[Shaun]

I have been fiddling around with Exult Studio, and have been specifically playing on Moonglow. I have built a mayor's office with a hall that allows the player to access the Catacombs I'm building. Anyway, I notice that when I put buildings together, the trees around the island disappear! The more I build, the more trees disappear! Anyone have any idea why this is happening?

[drcode]

That's not supposed to happen:-(

[Shaun]

I thought as much. Has this happened to anyone else, or just me? At first I thought it was happening when I put down chuncks, but I realized it just happened as I built. I have built a structure that is 3 tiles by 3 tiles directly southeast of the Lyceum. That has made all the trees between my building and the Lyceum come down, and a lot of the trees in front of the observatory. Anyway, if this is a new bug, I'll be happy to explain the porblem in detail if it will help fix it. E-mail me at expatri0t@yahoo.com.

[Scythifuge]

In one of the screenshots of my Savage Empire mod, the rocks on one of the chunks disappeared, leaving black squares. I can't recall exactly what happened, but I think I moved a shape, and the rocks disappeared.

[marzo]

Just out of curiosity, are you editing the chunks before building anything? I mean, are you editing the terrain to delete trees in the chunk you want to build or are you placing a tree-less chunk in there?

[Shaun]

What I'm doing is erasing the trees where I want to build and then placing chunks that look like building floors. Then I'm putting my buildings on top of those chunks. The probelm is that trees then disappear from nearby chunks that I'm not editing at all.

[marzo]

The thing is that there really is only *one* of each chunk type, and they are referenced in the map (usually in multiple places -- there are 3071 unique chunks in BG but 36864 locations to place them); if you edit one, you edit them all. That is likely what is causing the disappearing trees you are seeing, and the effect is likely to be far more widespread than just Moonglow (try Yew for example).

What you want to do is not to erase the trees, but search for a tree-less chunk (in Map Files/u7chunks in Exult Studio) and place it into the desired place. Some of them have built-in floors and walls, but that is not a requirement (although you have to work with the walls/floors already there, and cannot delete them either...).