Map Editing Questions

[Alrowan]

ok, im in the process of making a map or the great city of acre... only problem im having is that it keeps crashing when i test it. The map consists of a coast on two sides, with a large castle type structure occupying about 1/2 of the map. It keeps crashing... any reasons?

[Shahed]

Hey Dude I successfully filled half a costal map with houses and stuff before, only did it as a test/proto for the map I wanted to make of a coastal desert city/ I also lined up walls half way thru the map, put towers, gates etc.. seemed to work.

maybe you can send me urs and i'll try to check it out ?

katsujin_ken@hotmail.com

[Alrowan]

ill send it a little later... i tihnk it might be because my walls are too close to the ednge of the map at one point, but ill see...

the other thing i will do is get rid of all the water to test it

[GilJaysmith]

There's no explicit limit on the size of a castle, but there may be a problem for the attackers during deployment if you make it too big. The game draws a rectangle to enclose the castle and then enlarges it by a bit in all directions to ensure the attackers can't deploy too close to it. Each attacker then starts somewhere outside this area, although they can all redeploy anywhere they want outside that demilitarised zone (DMZ). The problem will come if the DMZ is too big, especially to the south, and it overlaps the red zone, which is the outermost three tiles on each map edge. In this case the deployment code will have a crisis; it doesn't have a fallback position and will just go nuts trying to find a safe home point for that attacker.

(The same thing happens on the Bannockburn map, which has a river; on river maps the attackers are forced to deploy to the north of the river and the defenders to the south, but the river is so far south that there's no room for the traditional 'second defender' position.)

So for safety's sake I would make sure that the castle walls stop at least five tiles away from the edge of the map in all directions. I say in all directions because there could conceivably be seven attackers deploying at various points around the castle, although if you're sure the map is only going to be used for fewer players then you could probably make the castle a little bigger.

Gil ~ CA

[Alrowan]

thanks a million for this little bit of help. Ill try fix my map up tomorrow then test it again, if it works, then expect to see a nice BIG map of the city of acre... and hell why not try your hand at seiging it.

this will be my 3rd map for my currnet series, a collection of famouse castles and forts... as it stands it is looking like this (All are maps that are completed or under contruction)

Krak des Chevaliers (Syria)
Harlech Castle (Wales)
Acre (Palestine)

and i have about 3-4 more planned

[Alrowan]

well i finally worked out the problem, after moving the walls in to 5 sqaures eaach minimum, it still crashed, so i looked elsewhere... i found that if i made all the walls castle walls that were large it helped a lot, and after removing one or two overlapping walls it worked fine. So now i have that out of the way i am nearly ready to announce the map of the city of acre

[Orda Khan]

With STW/MI we used to make a .tga screenshot of our custom map. What is the case now with these scrolling shots? Is it still an F2 screenshot?

......Orda http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wacko.gif

[Alrowan]

yeah, its F2... i usually ad a couple of screenshots with my maps in Zip format... with my latest lot ive been adding a few of the real pictures to compare them with