Two different flat cliff meshes in a map

[Pyrogasm]

I know how to import the cliff textures to overwrite them. My problem is I'd like to use two different types of flat cliffs in my map (dungeon flats & cityscape flats) but afaik none of the tilesets have a double flat mesh in them. Most tilesets are mixed 1 flat/1 wavy, and a couple have double wavy... but none have double flat.

I'm just boned, right? Or is there a way to change the mesh for one of the cliffs to have double flat? Only other solution is to use pathing/vision blockers + 90 degree terrain sloping over a cityscape/dalaran tile for the city flat cliffs, but that wouldn't really give me the effect I want. I found this quote from @Dr Super Good but I'm not sure I fully understand it:

Possibly, however the cliff meshes might be wrong. Too little research has been done into the cliff variation mechanics to know. In any case the limit is 2 cliff meshes and 2 cliff textures even though you can have up to 16 referenced cliff types. Each cliff type forces the loading of their accompanying base ground tile type and also are loaded before custom ground tile types are.

I'd like to be able to build a sinister brick/non-dirt dungeon and a multi-tiered stone city in the same map. Any other suggestions for how to achieve the feel I want?

 

[Veronnis]

I was able to easily find the cliff meshes in the CASC for reforged, I'm not sure if the game blows up if you edit them, but I can't open the new Reforged MDX format. Maybe I'll see if I can find another way to get it working.

Edit: I actually think I figured it out and might be able to solve this for you. Stay Tuned.

 

[Dr Super Good]

I recall that invalid cliff variation values caused the mesh to default to square irrespective of type. For example square grass cliffs.

This might require a third party editor to take advantage of.

 

[Veronnis]

I was able to replace parts of the cliff with a fake useless model I made, looks like it deleted them easily enough.

Looking at the CASC viewer there appears to be cliff varieties of either 1 or 0. I assume this equates to rocky or flat, or something similar. The casc files are exportable and importable as is, but the files are ambiguously named. I believe if you identify the correct files (multiple since cliffs result in a composite model) and overwrite their paths with straight cliffs then you will able to sustain 2 flat cliff types in one map. None of this testing resulted in a crash so it seems stable as well (fingers crossed). I hope and think this will work for you, you'll have to let me know if it does!

 

[Pyrogasm]

I recall that invalid cliff variation values caused the mesh to default to square irrespective of type. For example square grass cliffs.
This might require a third party editor to take advantage of.

You mean like extracting and editing the terrain file to set their variations to -2 or something? Are there other ways to manually set cliff variation like setting tile variation via triggers?

I was able to replace parts of the cliff with a fake useless model I made, looks like it deleted them easily enough.

Looking at the CASC viewer there appears to be cliff varieties of either 1 or 0. I assume this equates to rocky or flat, or something similar. The casc files are exportable and importable as is, but the files are ambiguously named. I believe if you identify the correct files (multiple since cliffs result in a composite model) and overwrite their paths with straight cliffs then you will able to sustain 2 flat cliff types in one map. None of this testing resulted in a crash so it seems stable as well (fingers crossed). I hope and think this will work for you, you'll have to let me know if it does!

Took me quite a while to find the cliff models in CASCViewer. There are a LOT of files to overwrite... oof. 94 in /doodads/terrain/cliffs and 32 in /doodads/terrain/clifftrans. Thanks for the direction!

 

[Veronnis]

You mean like extracting and editing the terrain file to set their variations to -2 or something? Are there other ways to manually set cliff variation like setting tile variation via triggers?

Took me quite a while to find the cliff models in CASCViewer. There are a LOT of files to overwrite... oof. 94 in /doodads/terrain/cliffs and 32 in /doodads/terrain/clifftrans. Thanks for the direction!

Yeah if there were not so many I would have done it for you haha. I am not entirely certain that an entire half of them need to be overwritten, it may be narrower, or it really could be half. Good luck!

 

[Pyrogasm]

It took a lot of importing but that actually worked! Sweeeeet. I was wrong about what I posted below, it was an editor-only visual bug that is fixed in-game.

Editor only visual bug

So overwriting the files mostly worked. But not entirely. Level 2 cliffs are still using the wavy cliff mesh in some areas and I'm not sure how to proceed now:

The files CASCViewer (latest version) showed in in \cliffs and \citycliffs were not a 1:1 match (which seemed confusing). There were 94 files in \cliffs, 2 of which were not present in \citycliffs. There were 111 files in \citycliffs, 19 of which were not present in \cliffs. Initially I just overwrote every path in \cliffs (and duplicated a couple files to fill the 2 non-present files, but did not add the 19 non-present files. This left level 2 cliffs almost entirely broken: only the corners used the flat mesh. I then added in the 19 files and overwrote paths to files that 'should' have been there but weren't visible in CASCViewer, which resulted in what you see above.

Currently some variations of each facing direction of level 2 cliffs and some variations of level 2 corners have been successfully overwritten to be flat... but not all of them. With a lot of patience I can repeatedly place walls until I get the right variation and then move on, but this is not ideal. Is anyone familiar enough with the cliff mesh naming convention to guess which ones I need to overwrite that I can't see? They follow a xxxxN format where x is a, b, or c and N is the variation number for that shape. Ones that start with c seem to be the level 2 cliffs.

 

[Veronnis]

Glad I was able to help! I usually feel pretty low on the totem-pole knowledge wise haha.

Edit: The cool thing about knowing this is that if we really desired we can now create terrain based walls. For example a mineshaft wall that is actually 3d and spawnable just by dragging the terrain tool. Maybe I'll make one =D

 

[Pyrogasm]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "spawnable just by dragging the terrain tool". Also, while one could re-texture the wall models, they initially pull textures from cliff0.blp or cliff1.blp, so you are kind of limited on what these walls might look like.

 

[Veronnis]

Sorry, spawnable was just a reference to created via terrain rather than by dumping loads of doodads. I haven't actually checked out the cliff blp's but I presume they should be rewriteable without much consequence.