Map Making - First Try

[DragonCat]

Made my first map and it is a GLORIOUS failure.

A couple of tips for the amateurs. . .
Water (lakes etc.) can make severe pathing problems. Watch out for sides that are too steep. A little heighth goes a LONG way.

You can make some very interesting shapes for mountains. I put some fantasy style high peaked mts. rising out of my lakes. Very cool looking. And the boats on the water are outstanding.

I can't wait till some people with talent make some more maps, maps that are fair but interesting- that lend themselves to tactical decisions.

I'll keep trying - when there's no one online to play, that is.



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DragonCat
"On the prowl . . . ."

[KumaRatta Yamamoto]

Keep on trucking! I mean Trying DragonCat http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

(but do continue to point out your errors , this will help us newbies to map editing NOT TO repeat the same mistakes. Thanks)

[Catiline]

point htem out in Editing Mods and Patches (http://www.totalwar.org/cgi-bin/ubb/forumdisplay.cgi?action=topics&number=5&SUBMIT=Go) though http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

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Oderint dum metuant

[DragonCat]

Doh! My bad. Thanks Cataline!

By the way, the directions for the Map Editor are in the ReadMe in your MI folder under Total War. Also F1 brings up a help screen for each editor tool. The Map Editor is very simple to use, very hard to use well.

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DragonCat
"On the prowl . . . ."

[NARF]

Neeed.........Expansion.........Pack http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/frown.gif

[Kraellin]

dragoncat,

welcome to the wonderful world of world making :)

there are no failures in map making...just unfinished efforts.

when all looks hopeless and frustrating go download the demo game and try THAT editor. when you come back to the new one you'll just kind of chuckle and carry on ;)

prolly the most difficult part of map making now is getting the textures to match up correctly or maybe getting the impassable zones to be where you really want them to be.

for texture blending, familiarity will breed success here; knowing what texture blends with what to get where you want and the only way to get familiarity is by using everything over and over again. it almost gets to be second nature after a while. bear in mind also that not every texture will match up with every other texture and that you sometimes have to use a bridging texture to get those mountains to blend into your trees smoothly. i've already asked the dev guys for some blending tools to make this easier but for now you may have to just use additional textures to make the segway (sp?).

impassable zones are another bugger at times. remember that it takes the right texture AND a steep enough slope to make an impassable zone. also, to get the gray impassable zones to show up on the radar you have to save and quit from the editor and then re-load your map. if you've done it right, your gray impassable zones will now show up in the radar screen or mini-map. if you want to edit these a bit you can do so by either changing the texture or the slope. remember it takes BOTH to make an impassable, so by modifying one or the other you can make an impassable larger or smaller.

the simplest way to do rivers is to 'dig' one hole down to water. then use the 'copy height' feature (control-click, i think) to duplicate that one hole in a line for your river. this sets everywhere you do this to the same level as your original hole and thus digs your river. i'm afraid the editor also has one other drawback when making rivers; it doesnt like diagonal river lines. it likes rivers best that follow the edges of the tiles (splines). so, it's sometimes tricky to make a river that goes diagonally across a tile or tiles. it can be done with a lot of careful tweaking, but it will take more time to do. that one diagonal river i did for stw took hours to get right and even then it had little flaws along the way that wouldnt have shown up if i just followed the splines.

remember also to read the rules about water in the readme file. tosa has already informed me that someone posted a map with a river but it had one land crossing of it that completely voids the map as this causes bugs in the map with units once they are loaded.

and that brings me to bridges. again, read the rules in the readme about this. the rules are strict and very limited. to place a bridge, make your river or whatever and then go to the models mode. using the insert and delete key, scroll down the little list on the bottom left till you get to 'bridge'. left click on the map where you want the bridge and voila, a bridge will appear! dont worry if it doesnt span your water at first or if it spans it too much. save the map, exit the map and re-load it. your bridge will automatically adjust itself to fit across the river. again, read the readme, cause bridges will only work one way.

you can experiment around with water and bridges, but dont post them until you've tested them if you do try and break the rules about these, cause i've tried just about every possible combo of multiple rivers, multiple bridges and every kind of weird junction, lake, pond and so on in the old stw editor. and whereas i could get as many as 9 bridges to show up in a single map, it did VERY weird things to the game when i tried to play it. i suspect the new editor is similar, but by all means do test this for yourself...just make sure you also test the map thoroughly before posting it.

also, one other small thing here. it shld be possible to make a map in the demo game editor and load it into the xpack editor and then re-load it into the stw editor. it shld. i havent actually tried this yet, but the stw maps do work in the xpack, so in theory, it shld work. the reason i mention this is because there are a couple of features in the stw editor that you wont find in the xpack editor and you may want to swap a given map back and forth.

i'm sure i also speak for tosa here when i say, 'welcome to all the new map makers...we've been waiting for ya :)'. i really do look forward to seeing a lot of new stuff. tosa and were getting bored just feeding off each other's works...now we can feed off yours as well ;)

K.


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I'm sorry, but i never apologize.

[DragonCat]

Tosa,

I've tried a few more efforts and still learning. Thanks for all your advice, very clear and helpful.

Another thing, is a little height goes a LONG way. It doesn't look much in the editor, but once you put units on it, its a LOT steeper, LOL.

My only problem is finding time for, work, sleep, eating, playing online, the rest of my life AND map making. I do find it fun, so will keep at it inbetween everything else. Thanks for the encouragement.


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DragonCat
"On the prowl . . . ."

[Vanya]

The readme that comes with the editor says when making a river map, there

1. Can be no double-backs or loops,
2. There must a MINIMUM of 1 bridge
3. There can be a MAXIMUM of 3 bridges.

http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

[Kraellin]

dragoncat,

tosa? hehe...better read again who wrote those notes :)

ok, a little more info that i found a little confusing at first in the readme. there is a difference now between an 'enclosure' and a 'castle'. they are NOT the same thing and there are some rules that go with them. an enclosure is any walled-in area, but it isnt necessarily a castle just because it's an enclosure...and this makes a difference in how the program works. your enclosure is not a castle until you put a castle keep within it and that changes how it operates within the game. also, in the little models list they dont call it a keep or castle keep, they call it 'castle1, castle2, etc'.

if you have more than one enclosure the game will assign one of them as a castle, but not both. you can only have one castle on a map. you can have more than one enclosure. if you put a keep in one enclosure you cant put a keep in another as well. if you have a castle the defenders will ALWAYS be assigned deployment within the castle. if they cant all fit they'll be placed off the map and come in as reinforcements. if you put the castle within the attacker's deployment area the defender's troops will still only be able to deploy within the castle and fighting will break out before deployment is even over, so it's prolly not a good idea to do this. lol. you can have any number of enclosures, but again, you can only have one castle.

we briefly tested this online yesterday and we're not quite sure yet, but troops in castles may get a defensive bonus that troops in enclosures may not get...more testing is needed. if this is true, then i dont like it. a wall is a wall. but again, inconclusive data yet.

you can put castle entries on at least the front and back walls without any penalty that i can see. this is true of castles and enclosures. i dont know about the side (east and west) walls yet since i havent tried this yet.

the number of models you can use is very limited due to texture limits. the models are texture hogs. bear in mind that this is 'textures' and not number of models. so, if you use a given wall for a castle or enclosure it is best to keep using that wall in all other enclosures and castles because an additional wall or model of the same type already has the textures loaded and doesnt require any more to duplicate the same wall over and over. the same is true of every model type.

different models use a differing amount of textures so if one is eating too many textures and you're getting an overflow error, then try another model.

castle keeps when placed seem to be fairly small when you first place them on the map. if you save and exit and reload, the keep may well be 2 or 3 times bigger than when you placed it. i'm not sure yet if this is an automatic scaling feature due to the enclosure size of if this is just a bug or if they'll always come up the same way or not. more testing needed.

the beach textures come in 2 flavors. if you look closely you'll see that the ripples of sand face one of two ways. there is one set of each facing. be a bit careful here when you place these so that you match up which way these ripples face. it's a small thing, really, but does affect the overall look.

ok, that's all i've got for now. i'll prolly find more oddities as i go along and i'm thinking i'll prolly coalate these notes and start a new topic with all this stuff and add in a wish list too. that is already growing nicely :)

K.


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I'm sorry, but i never apologize.

[DragonCat]

DOH, posting at work I didn't bother to scroll down to the sig. Must have had Tosa on the brain.

So officially, thank you Kraellin!

I would say I'm sorry, but I never apologize. (is there an echo in here?)

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DragonCat
"On the prowl . . . ."

[Kraellin]

cat,

hehehe...good reply, and you're welcome :)

ok, i've crashed my first map. was working on one last night that i already had a few hours on, moved some things around and it crashed and i cant reload it without the game crashing back to desktop, so we've got a bug in here somewhere, or i seriously violated one of the map rules, or the program thinks i violated one of the rules. i suspect it's the latter. i had tested out this river map in a custom game and found some things that needed to be changed. one of the bridges wouldnt let units go across it, so i thought i'd tweak the land on both sides a bit and re-set the bridge to see if that would clear it up. i saved, and exited to get the bridge to stretch out across the water and tried to re-load the map and it crashed to desktop. and this isnt a vid card driver thing. the map is now bugged so badly for some reason that it wont load. it sort of acts like it thinks i've got 4 bridges instead of 3, which i dont.

target, you reading this forum? any way to fix this? i could try and go in with a hex editor but that seems drastic.

so, first warning to all new map makers (and old), save your map to a different name every once in a while. i didnt and now that map is lost to me. the new editor makes it so easy to save that i didnt bother to save it to a new name like i did in the demo editor. i even thought about doing this a couple times just in case, but never did.

ok, moving on...

here's some more things to watch for. if you make a castle, not just an enclosure, but a castle, the defender is forced to place his units in the castle. if all the units cant fit in the castle then they are placed off the map and come in as reinforcements. k, i already stated that somewhere else, but here's the new part: they come in from all over the map in different locations and even on the attacker's side and even into impassable zones if you have any along the edges of your map. that means that if you make a castle that forces reinforcements or play the game online where you can have more than 1 army on a side which also forces even more reinforcements because ALL units must fit in the castle or they are placed off the map as reinforcements, you cannot have impassable zones along any edge of the map with a castle map that cant fit ALL armies into the castle. i did this last night in a test game and i had reinforcements stuck up in mountains with no way out. so careful with this one.

and here's a bit of a weird feature also. in the editor when you go to load a map, it shows all of your newly edited/created maps at the top of the map list. that's fine, but you need to realize there is a reason for this. maps you make are saved in the 'savemaps' directory, not the normal battle\maps directory. so, if you go to play your nice new map online and you've sent a copy up on a web site somewhere and others now have it as well, if you try and find your new map online it wont show up if you host or if you try and join a game where someone else is hosting your map. YOU MUST MOVE NEW MAPS TO THE BATTLE\MAPS DIRECTORY TO PLAY THEM ONLINE! i think it was the daimyo who reported there is a limit on the number of maps you could have in your maps dir. what i'm thinking here is that he tried to play some online and couldnt find them because he hadnt moved them over to the battle\maps dir and erroneously assumed the maps got wiped or lost or something. this is not the case, as far as i know. so far i've found NO limit on the number of maps you can have stored. the only limit would be the size of your harddrive or partition...again, at least as far as i know...and i have 330 maps currently in my battle\maps directory and they'll all display in if i try and host online, except the ones in the savemaps directory; they wont display online because the online portion of the program doesnt check the savemaps directory for maps. the editor does.

k, that's all i've got for now...gotta go try and recover that map that crashed...bah!

K.


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I'm sorry, but i never apologize.

[Kraellin]

well, we've found some more features in the editor.

when making a castle or enclosure or even just a wall with an entryway in it somewhere, your various models may not match up at first. this is not a bug. it's designed this way and i'll try and explain. every tile can have models on it. that means if i have a wall on one tile i can also have a wall on the tile right next to it on the same abutting edge as the other wall. so, i could have 2 walls with very little space in between them. that also means that when making any type of enclosure i might end up making the 4 walls of the enclosure but have 1 wall that is on the 'outside' tile. hmm, not very clear...let's try it this way. let's make an enclosure on ONE tile. this one tile has 4 other tiles that surround it and butt up against it (unless it's on the edge of the map, but forget that for now). i'v got a tile somewhere in the middle of the map, 4 tiles around it. i want my enclosure ALL on that one tile...call this tile 'X'. we'll call the tiles around 1, 2, 3 and 4. i can place my walls on the 4 edges of tile X, but i could make a mistake and place a wall on the edge of tile 1 and 'think' that i had it on tile X and it would even sort of look like it was on tile X, yet it wouldnt quite match up with the other walls on tile X because it's not on tile X. so be careful of where you place your walls and such.

now, to further complicate the above example, there is another case where you could have all of your walls on tile X and they still wouldnt match up. each model can be rotated. most walls can be rotated 90 degrees at a time. this brings up a case where if a wall is rotated one way and is on the right tile, it may not match up to the other walls on the tile because it has to be rotated 180 degrees first to fit with the center line and offsets of the other walls. this is also the case with entryways. you can have one of those entries with the banners facing out or you can rotate it 180 degrees to have the banners facing in.

to even further confuse this, there are 4 types of walls and entries and type 1 wont match up well with type 2 and so on and so forth.

the bottom line here is to just move and rotate your models until you get them so that the corners of enclosures overlap OR you put a tower in the corners of walls...and this is also mentioned in the readme file in the main dir.

map sizes: seems tosa and i were both wrong about the speculated sizes of maps. it's not 30 x 30 like i thought, or 20 x 30 like tosa thought, for the max size of a map. smalls are still 20 x 20 so that the old maps will still work. mediums are 26 x 26 tiles and large are a whopping 31 x 31 tiles.

the original stw maps can be loaded into the editor and edited. just remember to revise the name when you save or others wont be able to play unless they use your revised map. it would be best to keep the original maps as the original map names and use new names for revised maps for the xpack. this keeps everyone on the same page.

for ease in making a new map it is suggested that folks edit a 'base' map for each of the 3 map sizes. a template map for starting your new maps. i've made 3 for my own use and delineate areas in 10 x 10 tiles for easy reference and also i make them rather flat. the new editor tends to make gently rolling hills as the default new map.

when making a map, bear in mind that there are new styles of game play, like last man standing and king of the hill and so on. we're now seeing a new wave of maps that are 'specialty' maps made specifically for play on one game style or another. this usually doesnt mean a map wont work in another style, but it might be 'unbalanced' for another style. something in the readme file you include with your zip file might be helpful here, or particularly in the text file used in the online map description.

tosa has also found a new water feature but i'll let him explain that one ;)

i've mentioned already that i had one map crash on me already and that i couldnt re-load it into the editor, but it's worth mentioning again. save often and save with a slightly altered file name once in a while. i suspect my crash now was just the resuult of an errant save corruption and nothing particularly bugged about the map itself. i thought at first that it might have been that i had 4 bridges on the map, but upon looking at the file under a microscope, i found that i only had 3. so save to an altered file name every so often and avoid losing your work completely.

that's it for now.

K.


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I'm sorry, but i never apologize.

[Pachinko]

Kraellin:Huuuhhh....What the hell.... I dont understand it...Try again,please.That "X tiles"

P.

[Kraellin]

pachinko,

when i said 'tile X' i was talking about any old TILE, not that TEXTURE with an X. dont confuse TILE with TEXTURE, they are not the same thing. think of a TILE like a floor tile on your house's floor and TEXTURE as the colors and roughness and look on the surface of that TILE. in the game editor we designate how many TILES we're going to have by picking the size of the map, but we pick TEXTURES from the list of these colors and looks from the TEXTURE mode within the editor.

go read that last post again and see if it now makes more sense.

K.


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I'm sorry, but i never apologize.

[Pachinko]

Ahhh..OK.
P.

P.S. Btw what is that "x-tile" It is tile 143. I would like to know.