Kraellin
08-21-2001, 03:08
the new editor is sweet. no question. but i'm a fussy old f*rt and lazy, so i'm always thinkin, 'boy, if i only had .....'. so, this is the place to post all those .....'s you wish you had in the editor.
a blending tool for blending any given texture into any other given texture. we've prolly all come up against that one situation where we cant quite get the look we want by using intermediary textures to do our blending. how bout a tool that would sort of morph or slur on blend the edge of one texture into the edge of any other and sort of mix up the textures on those 2 edges to make a new edge that blends one into the other smoothlessly. this is really more of a paint tool than anything else and a number of paint programs use this sort of tool as well.
either bring back the rgb mode or get rid of the 'hazy' look in the editor. most of the time i would set this haze in the stw editor to minimum when editing anyways. so either default to no haze or bring back the rgb mode so i can set it the way i want.
a weather mode would also be nice to be able to test map looks in rain, fog, and snow. not a biggie since it's so much easier to go from editor to custom and simply check it, but would be nice to have in the editor.
in the stw editor when using the height tool i could move the cursor around and the height tool would follow along with me editing as i went. this was a very fast way to edit height and i liked it. the current method wont do this. it stays editing in the same place no matter how you move the cursor around while holding down the mouse button. perhaps both methods could be incorporated, but if we can only have one then i prefer the stw method to the new.
i could easily stand having more textures. where's the browns? and maybe some reds and yellows? i love the new whitish granite looking rocks. great textures and i'd love to see about 8 more like this, specially that have rock going out all the way to the edge and not just gravel at or near the edge. and i'd also like to see the inverse of that where you have some that are gravel all the way around but with larger rock in the middle.
um, even though we couldnt place models on the maps in stw, there was a tool for scaling the models to other sizes. this would have been especially nice for bridges in the new editor. lots of folks dont play bridge maps because of the difficulty of crossing them. if i could make a bridge much wider and scale it how i wanted, i think this would make bridge maps more playable. and this applies to a few of the other models as well.
more models. the first that comes to mind is a wall with some thickness to it...great wall of china thickness, parapet thickness. if yer gonna be doin crusaders anyways, you might as well start making walls with parapets. also, how about some 'tall grass' models or textures or 'mature rice' models that units could actually move through and be shown being hip deep in weeds, grass, or rice. more rock models that match up to the color scheme of texture types.
water. this one is a must. water at heights above sea level. mountain streams, ponds, waterfalls. farm ponds and lakes. sloping rivers. shallow water that works like shallow water. river fords.
the ability to set impassable zones without the use or need of slope and texture. it's a bit difficult yet to tweak an impassable zone with height and texture. there sometimes key areas, like a mountain pass, where you need the impassable to match up perfectly with the terrain. the current method doesnt always.
river tools. rivers are fairly easy if you just follow the edges of tiles, but if you dont, then they can be a real pain in the butt. some kind of delineating a river edge tool would be great for this. draw a line with a mouse where you want a river edge and let up on the mouse button and the river automatically contours that edge to that line...something like that. even prefab river shape textures would be an improvement.
auto-designed/made maps. games like sim city had in their editor a feature where when you first called up a new map you could set certain percentages of trees, water, sloped terrain and so on and when you hit ok it would build a random map based on those percentages. this was a real time saver at times.
this one might be a bit trickier with the style of editor you have, but i'd love to be able to import real world height maps into the editor. for an example of this see railroad tycoon II's map editor. it allowed one to take real world maps that had height data included and import them into a map within the game. they were .pcx type files. this was a great feature in that game. we could take real world maps from japan, france, germany, the u.s., etc and simply load them into the game and have the height data set to real world settings. all you had to do then was color the map, tweak it a bit here and there, and voila, you had a map of pennsylvania that matched up height-wise with the real pennsylvania. very slick.
i know the main push is prolly on crusaders now, but surely that game is going to also have a map editor http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif throw me a bone from time to time. i mean, who says we cant have a patch that is just for the editor!
K.
edit: bring back the old way of raising and lowering sea level. this was a much easier way to refine sea level. either bring it back as an extra key combo or if necessary, replace the current manner with the old.
multiple tile editing. we can currently edit only one tile at a time for texture and height. how bout a click and drag method for editing larger sections at one time?
bridges that can face any direction. i know somewhat why you did them like you did, specially after getting 9 in one map in an stw map (i'm a tricky fellow http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif, but it would be nice to have more than 3 and be able to rotate them to fit over my rivers rather than rotating my river to fit my bridges http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif
with a much lesser priority, bring back the old stretch tile/weird mode. we didnt use it very often and i know i abused it with my flying horses, but it was sorta cool. but if you can do it a bit differently, it would be nice...that half blue screen and tree thing was kinda confusing. why not just have a mode where you can 'grab' an edge or corner and pull or push as long as you kept the mouse button held down?
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
[This message has been edited by Kraellin (edited 08-22-2001).]
a blending tool for blending any given texture into any other given texture. we've prolly all come up against that one situation where we cant quite get the look we want by using intermediary textures to do our blending. how bout a tool that would sort of morph or slur on blend the edge of one texture into the edge of any other and sort of mix up the textures on those 2 edges to make a new edge that blends one into the other smoothlessly. this is really more of a paint tool than anything else and a number of paint programs use this sort of tool as well.
either bring back the rgb mode or get rid of the 'hazy' look in the editor. most of the time i would set this haze in the stw editor to minimum when editing anyways. so either default to no haze or bring back the rgb mode so i can set it the way i want.
a weather mode would also be nice to be able to test map looks in rain, fog, and snow. not a biggie since it's so much easier to go from editor to custom and simply check it, but would be nice to have in the editor.
in the stw editor when using the height tool i could move the cursor around and the height tool would follow along with me editing as i went. this was a very fast way to edit height and i liked it. the current method wont do this. it stays editing in the same place no matter how you move the cursor around while holding down the mouse button. perhaps both methods could be incorporated, but if we can only have one then i prefer the stw method to the new.
i could easily stand having more textures. where's the browns? and maybe some reds and yellows? i love the new whitish granite looking rocks. great textures and i'd love to see about 8 more like this, specially that have rock going out all the way to the edge and not just gravel at or near the edge. and i'd also like to see the inverse of that where you have some that are gravel all the way around but with larger rock in the middle.
um, even though we couldnt place models on the maps in stw, there was a tool for scaling the models to other sizes. this would have been especially nice for bridges in the new editor. lots of folks dont play bridge maps because of the difficulty of crossing them. if i could make a bridge much wider and scale it how i wanted, i think this would make bridge maps more playable. and this applies to a few of the other models as well.
more models. the first that comes to mind is a wall with some thickness to it...great wall of china thickness, parapet thickness. if yer gonna be doin crusaders anyways, you might as well start making walls with parapets. also, how about some 'tall grass' models or textures or 'mature rice' models that units could actually move through and be shown being hip deep in weeds, grass, or rice. more rock models that match up to the color scheme of texture types.
water. this one is a must. water at heights above sea level. mountain streams, ponds, waterfalls. farm ponds and lakes. sloping rivers. shallow water that works like shallow water. river fords.
the ability to set impassable zones without the use or need of slope and texture. it's a bit difficult yet to tweak an impassable zone with height and texture. there sometimes key areas, like a mountain pass, where you need the impassable to match up perfectly with the terrain. the current method doesnt always.
river tools. rivers are fairly easy if you just follow the edges of tiles, but if you dont, then they can be a real pain in the butt. some kind of delineating a river edge tool would be great for this. draw a line with a mouse where you want a river edge and let up on the mouse button and the river automatically contours that edge to that line...something like that. even prefab river shape textures would be an improvement.
auto-designed/made maps. games like sim city had in their editor a feature where when you first called up a new map you could set certain percentages of trees, water, sloped terrain and so on and when you hit ok it would build a random map based on those percentages. this was a real time saver at times.
this one might be a bit trickier with the style of editor you have, but i'd love to be able to import real world height maps into the editor. for an example of this see railroad tycoon II's map editor. it allowed one to take real world maps that had height data included and import them into a map within the game. they were .pcx type files. this was a great feature in that game. we could take real world maps from japan, france, germany, the u.s., etc and simply load them into the game and have the height data set to real world settings. all you had to do then was color the map, tweak it a bit here and there, and voila, you had a map of pennsylvania that matched up height-wise with the real pennsylvania. very slick.
i know the main push is prolly on crusaders now, but surely that game is going to also have a map editor http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif throw me a bone from time to time. i mean, who says we cant have a patch that is just for the editor!
K.
edit: bring back the old way of raising and lowering sea level. this was a much easier way to refine sea level. either bring it back as an extra key combo or if necessary, replace the current manner with the old.
multiple tile editing. we can currently edit only one tile at a time for texture and height. how bout a click and drag method for editing larger sections at one time?
bridges that can face any direction. i know somewhat why you did them like you did, specially after getting 9 in one map in an stw map (i'm a tricky fellow http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif, but it would be nice to have more than 3 and be able to rotate them to fit over my rivers rather than rotating my river to fit my bridges http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif
with a much lesser priority, bring back the old stretch tile/weird mode. we didnt use it very often and i know i abused it with my flying horses, but it was sorta cool. but if you can do it a bit differently, it would be nice...that half blue screen and tree thing was kinda confusing. why not just have a mode where you can 'grab' an edge or corner and pull or push as long as you kept the mouse button held down?
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
[This message has been edited by Kraellin (edited 08-22-2001).]