Friday Update: Week 31/2012, Barbarian settlements & Francisca

As one could conclude from the poll, this week's Friday Update, posted conveniently just two days before I go on holiday, is about Barbarian settlements in K&B. I haven't got much time for this update, so I'll let the pictures do the talking...

Ah, before you start facepalming, those pink things only appear in the editor... They're the pathblockers that make it so that units can't march straight through subciv settlements, and ingame, they'll be completely invisible.


As you might be aware, subcivs are called "Barbarians" in K&B, in the same way that they were called "Natives" in unmodded AoE3. Like AoE3, there's a different grouping for every few subcivs, but there's a twist. We took an ingenious yet simple thing from AoC, which is the addition of a flag. These are both aesthetically important and user-friendly, as they make it so that one no longer has to select a settlement or hover over the Trading Post Socket to know exactly which subciv it belongs to, but can see this straight from the flag. Once one's learned which flag goes with which subciv, that is. This particular grouping will for example also be used for the Avars and Goths, but their flags will be different.


As you can probably see in both the Sicilian and Frankish settlements, we used the possibility to import new models to great extent, and delved right through the stack of models that comes with AoM. These obviously don't have destruction anims or models (unlike our own Town Square model), but for a subciv settlement, that doesn't matter anyway... Oh, and I'm well willing to award the first person to guess ALL AoM models that were used in these two groupings a spot of Chivalry...


Something that I've been working on recently is improving some of my older textures, as proven by this rather elated remark in the team forum:

AOE_Fan wrote:Oh, I love the new textures for Crossbowman and Light Cavalry!

K&B salutes... The summer holiday. It may be a time of inactivity on our forums as almost everybody is either gone or has recently been, but It's lovely nonetheless...
K&B refutes... The Syrian Civil War. While we're well in favour of more freedom in Syria, it is a bit cringing to see fighting among the historical monument-laden city centres of Aleppo and Damascus

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- Quoted from peugeot407