Strat Models - M2TW

For everything you always wanted to know about the campaign map models in M2TW.

Strat Flag

The strat flag carried by units consists of one .cas model to which each faction's symbol is applied. The size of the displayed symbol cannot be altered by changing the .cas model.

The model comprises three components:

• banner
• pole
• symbol

The background the faction's symbol is displayed on is the 'banner' mesh in the model, this has to be one flat plane, it appears to have a texture uv mapped onto the plane, but the uv map used by the game is actually just the co-ordinates given for 'flag' in descr_standards.txt. The visible parts of the texture are also overlayed with the faction's colour with a darker section that expands from the bottom that shows the strength of the army. If you apply an alpha channel to the texture then the faction colour background also won't be shown in any alpha'd out area. The position of the faction's symbol in left/right and up/down plane is determined by a hard-coded relationship to the 'banner' mesh, so changing the size of the banner mesh can also move the symbol position.

In terms of depth the texture of the banner, and the faction/strength colouring is always shown as though the mesh were at zero on the front/back axis, but the faction symbol position moves to the front/back axis location of the 'banner' mesh. The banner mesh therefore needs to be slightly in front of 0 in the front/back axis so the faction symbol appears in front of it.

The 'pole' is a conventional piece of mesh with texture.

The 'symbol' mesh although required doesn't appear to do anything if changed.

Strat Characters

The Strat Flag position follows roughly the path of the Bone_Lhand in the strat character skeleton. It seems to follow a smoothed less exact path, so can appear out of sync with some movements.

Strat Trees

Trees appear to sway, but they don't have an animation in the .cas file. The sway seems to be a hard-coded movement around their 0,0,0 location.

Trees are not revolved on the campaign map, and 'back-faces' of the model aren't seen, so some detail at the rear of models can be omitted.