[Request] Large Walls

[Forsaken67]

Hello! For awhile now I have been in search of a mod that provided large walls for mostly aesthetic reasons. I finally decided that since no one else has made a wall to my liking's, that I would then do it myself. So I set off to produce 3D-models for the 6 items needed

(horizontal, vertical, end cap, t-wall, corner, and gate)

. The goal was for walls that were either WxLxH:2x2x2, 2x3x2, or 2x3x3. I was well aware that learning Blender would not be easy, yet I was able to rough out some simple shapes of what I was wanting in a wall. I have not yet made the gate and I am assuming that the vertical works out when you get the camera angles for the sprite sheet. For the gate, I am torn on how to design it but I have a few ideas

horizontal sliding gate or a 3 way split gate that are 4 tiles long and will not be extendable

. I halted working on this due to being stuck on textures, camera angles, and the sun for the light source casting a shadow in the wrong direction.

To rap up this point, what I am needing is help adding textures and making the sprite sheet for the walls. I attempted this on my own and read many tutorials but with my non-existent Blender knowledge, I could not get it to work properly. Any help would be much appreciated and if you want to make any changes to the models or restart entirely that is welcomed! A great bonus would be to include a wall column, like the 4th image, with a turret mounted on top; this is not required.

I can provide Blender files on request.

Terrible

3D-Models

image

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Gate Inspiration

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Wall Inspiration

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[eradicator]

Not really moddeling related: If you want to use the auto-connect feature that normal walls have you should first make sure that it actually works for non-1x1 walls. And non-square footprints (i.e. 2x3x2) also will likely not work (high picture yes, just not footprint). Also if you want the gate to work without extensive scripting/hacking you'll have to make it work like the standard ones, i.e. outside poles, and inside tiles - not fixed size.

It was also announced that in 0.17 walls will have an additional filler sprite to make them not look so much like seperate walls (last picture of this FFF).

As for my limited blender knowledge you first have to decide which rendering mode you want, because "Blender Render" and "Cycles Render" work fundamentally different regarding textures as far as i remember (cyles offers more "realism" features but is more complicated to use and slower to render). The camera angle is 45°, and you should make sure that it's set to orthographic (and not perspective like on your pictures), otherwise the images will look oddly warped in-game. There's many good tutorials on YT and there's also a blender guide for factorio on this forum (possible more than one, use search).

[Forsaken67]

First off, thank you for your quick response! Also, I apologies for my late response, college had different plans for me this week. That aside I did some work on testing walls by making simple mock up images and it would seem that the auto-connect feature does not work beyond 1x1 sized objects. Nevertheless! It is still possible to do it similar to how the flow control mod does their pipes. If you are unfamiliar with flow control, you can craft a pipe into another pipe that is only capable of being in one shape/direction. The same could be done here or similar methods such as a gui like the text plates mod or using the rotation feature to cycle through the wall directions. If that were the case then the walls would not need the auto connect feature and would also be free of cubical shapes. Now onto the gates, I did not test this one yet but it should be possible to make a single object that reacts to the presence of a player and have it behave like a gate. There is a little note in the base code that explains some of that.

I am well aware of those gorgeous filler sprites and cant wait for them! However the desire is for a wall that has some height to it.

Referring to the camera angles, I had done those 'properly' in a separate file where I was following along with that very same guide and a couple Youtube tutorials but I was still encountering certain issues that were not covered in the tutorial that could be due to the version mismatch or the fact that idk what I'm doing in blender.

[eradicator]

I don't see any comment on the gate prototype. Where did you find that? Might be neat to abuse for some purposes of my own :p. Sure you can do seperate sprites for all the wall bits, but ofc that means you need a seperate "wall end" bit because you don't automatically get those anymore. Unless you design the walls in a way that doesn't need that, like in old strategy games (i.e. Stronghold, AoE1/2, etc). I have never used flow control or text plates. From looking at text plates it seems to use a gui. Do you have any example of a mod using "rotation feature to cycle through [...] directions"? Because i don't know any method to get more than 8 variations out of just rotating (though 8 might be enough here).

Also sorry for derailing a texture request into a technical discussion...

[Forsaken67]

The comment is in the demo-entities at line 3658, it looks like the original plan was to have damage be mirrored to neighboring walls at lesser values but was scraped. It might be possible to get the reaction to activate something else instead since you can specify the effect type. But back to the gate, if it were to be a standalone gate that does not connect than you wouldn't need any of that other than activation_distance and the sprite sheet. With gates working in a way that their collision box turns off when activated, that would make end bits necessary. However, if you just include the end bits in the sprite's and make them thin enough or accept that they will be without a collision box than it would still look correct as you mentioned in your response.

You should try those mods! Flow control feels like a must have to me, it makes piping and fluid control much tighter and easier with a lot less mistakes.

I believe there would only be need for 7 rotations for the wall if I counted correctly and 2 for the gate so 9 in total but the gates are always placed separately. YuokiTani made some 2x2 walls in one of his mods, but he did not include gates which makes me wonder if the activation_distance has a length limit or if other weird things occurred when increasing the activation_distance. If I get some time today I am going to try it out and see what happens.

You are fine! I learned quite a few things here anyways so it was helpful in the end! Like having proof of concept first haha

[eradicator]

Without having ever used it i'd guess that comment is about reflecting damage back to the entity that caused the damage. Several mods add "spiked walls" or similar that damage invading biters. Besides the comment is on type='wall' and not gate, so it probably doesn't work on gates. Also you can't just "disable the collision box" or change sprites (other than rotating, or being a gate i guess). Also bear in mind that even with 8 rotation (not sure if you can have 7, i think you need either 1, 4 or 8) all rotations must have the same collision box shape, and if that shape isn't a perfect square you lose all but one rotation for entities in the world (like combinators can only be swapped).

Other than that i don't really follow what your plan was there, but i'm sadly sure it'll break when it hits the hard wall that is the very sturdy and unbending factorio api :/.

[mrudat]

As a test case, would it not work to either composite the base wall (shifted appropriately) to produce a visually taller wall, or perhaps edit the sprite sheet?

I presume your end goal is something like castle walls, rather than what could be a wall of sand bags on the front lines.

[foodfactorio]

mrudat, that is actually a cool idea in itself.... some mods add Sand as a resource.
what if that could end up in sand bags and build a wall with sandbags if you spare sand

[eradicator]

mrudat, that is actually a cool idea in itself.... some mods add Sand as a resource.
what if that could end up in sand bags and build a wall with sandbags if you spare sand :)

Pretty sure at least one of the sand mods had sand(stone/bag?)-walls. Though i think they were just recolored walls.

[foodfactorio]

i try and find it, maybe the base tier could be basic sandbag walls
and then the 3 tiers from this mod could be next
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Reinforced-Walls