Hobbes, do you think some city housing blocks could be imported to the farm terrain to provide more versatility? (After all, the farmers must live somewhere.)
I am not sure ho OpenXCom handles mcd files, and if it can have more than 255 objects at the same map.
It's impossible for the game simply import the city map blocks and use both terrains to generate a battlescape. Each terrain has a set of mapDataSets (aka MCD tilesets) assigned that must be loaded by the game on a specific order:
- name: URBAN
mapDataSets:
- BLANKS (required for all maps, MapView assigns it automatically)
- ROADS
- URBITS
- URBAN
- FRNITURE
This is the order that they were used when designing the individual maps. The game (and MapView) loads them in this order and they are then combined internally on a single tileset, with each entry on the list having its specific number identifier. This then is used to fill the Battlescape: e.g., on ground tile on location x,y,z goes MCD entry #178.
But if you added to the Farm terrain the Urban tilesets and maps:
- name: URBAN
mapDataSets:
- BLANKS
- CULTIVAT
- BARN
- ROADS
- URBITS
- URBAN
- FRNITURE
You'd have changed the entire order and you'd have to redo all of the Urban maps, since the MCD references would be all wrong due to the order being changed. This wouldn't affect the Farm maps, since the new order also starts with Cultivat and Barn but he Urban maps wouldn't start with Roads tileset anymore.
OXC can load and use more than 256 MCD entries (tiles) since it does not suffer from the limitations of the original game, where the internal number for each tile could only be 1 byte long.
The MiB mod does this pretty well; sometimes you get the traditional farm, other times you get sort of a suburb with a few houses and buildings from the urban terrain.
The MiB mod does this:
- name: CULTA
textures: [1, 2, 4]
- name: URBANA
mapDataSets:
- BLANKS
- ROADS
- URBITS
- URBAN
- FRNITURE
textures: [3]
It adds URBANA, which has exactly the same maps and tilesets of URBAN, I'm guessing the different name is because you can't have the same terrain assigned to both UFO and Terror Sites. And it also assigns it the Geoscape texture #3, which was previously assigned to Farm, so that UFOs that land on that Geoscape texture will have their missions on the URBANA terrain, and all the others on Farm.