-
i've been posting some of the findings about the new editor in one or two other threads and i thought it might be better to bring this all into one thread. so, if you've got new data about the new editor, put it in here. do please read the docs and F1 helps within the editor first and read this help thread first so that we dont get too redundant.
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.
-------------------------------------------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.
-------------------------------------------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.
--------------------------------------------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.
-------------------------------------------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.
i put all this stuff in one post so that folks could print it out as one file. if you have stuff from your posts that belong in here, feel free to add it. i know tosa's made a discovery or two that i missed and i'm sure others have as well.
i'm also going to start an editor wish list thread where we can propose things to CA regarding the editors.
i've also been downloading and looking at most of the new maps and the two things i see the most are texture mismatches and model placing on sloping heights that dont look right.
to try and help folks correct the texture mismatches, bear in mind that most of the textures come in 4 slightly different looks. if you look at textures 5, 6, 7, and 8, you can see what i mean. these are tree textures, and prolly the most common tree textures used. 8 is the full texture in trees. 7 is 3/4 trees and 1/4 in the #4 green. these quarters are the 4 corners of the texture, so 3 of the quarters in 7 are trees, where 1 corner matches up to the #4 green texture. 6 is 1/2 and 1/2, trees and green. and 5 is 1/4 trees and 3/4 green. most all of the textures follow this layout scheme to allow for blending one texture into another seamlessly. if you look at 43, 44, and 45, you'll see that these are tree textures also, but they match up not with the #4 texture, but with a darker green/black texture. you might also notice that there isnt a full tree texture in this series..not sure why. and if you look at #42 you'll see this is the full or 4/4 texture that matches up with 43, 44, and 45, but that the other 3 textures that would be partial 1/4-3/4, 1/2-1/2 and 3/4-1/4 textures arent right next to it. this happens with some of the textures also. they arent all put right next to each other in the texture scroll bar. but they are there.
almost any texture can be blended into another texture, but you may have to use an intermediary texture to do it, or even two. and this is the secret to making good looking maps, the smooth blending of the textures.
the other thing i've noticed is a few maps have models on them that are either half buried or are tilted down a hill. this is an easy fix. level the land where the model sits and hit that icon at the top of the editor for 'compatibility'. then swap edit modes and your models shld sit themselves squarely on the land. now some models dont need this, like a fence running up a hill, but a house sitting on the side of a hill and tilting to the same slope as the hill looks kinda strange.
i've seen some really nice new innovations in maps, things tosa and i either couldnt do in the old editor or just never thought of. it's lookin good folks and more and more folks are jumping in all the time and we havent even got our euro buds in on this, for the most part yet, so, i'm really quite impressed and look forward to even more :)
and as always, have fun. i for one enjoy the creative side of this game even more than the destructive...now if i could just nuke some of my pretty creations i'd be overjoyed ;)
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
-
Good stuff!
Here is a question for ya: I was making a medium map the other day and noticed that while in the editor, the attacker's back and left sides show water although I never added water to the map. When I play a game on the map in custom battles, I notice that that area shown as water in the editor -- and which is untouchable, by the way -- is shown as a funky greenish gridlike plain.
Do you know why this is or how to remove it? Or should we just stick to making large and small maps and skip the mediums?
-
ok, rather than edit my main post, i'm doing up a separate one here for water cause this shld stand out from the other stuff as it's so important.
we're seeing a lot of new maps with a little pond or lake here or there on the maps. in the old editor this would cause the map to be BADLY bugged. in the new editor it's not as bad of a bug, but it's still goofy at times and can render a map almost worthless.
so, i thought it was about time to check out the new rules about water, and particularly about these little ponds that folks seem to be fond of.
first off, read the water rules in the readme file that came with the xpack, and then read them again. load the readme in .html format so that you can read the stuff about the editor separate from all the other stuff in there. the readme rules are true except for one thing...ponds. they can be done now, but, they must be done somewhat carefully.
there are now 2 separate ways in which ponds work (and i use 'work' cautiously here). if you have a map that DOES have a river going all the way across a map east/west or, if you have a map that DOES have a coast per the guidelines, you CAN make a separate, unconnected pond somewhere else on the map. this pond will be an impassable zone to units. they cannot enter it, just like your rivers and coastlines.
if you have a pond/lake on a map that DOES NOT have a legitimate river or coast, the water will NOT be an impassable zone! units CAN enter the water! and in fact they will enter it so far as to be invisible if the pond is deep enough....and that's the new 'bug'. it's not really a bug per se, in the sense of units cant move or fight or the map crashes or something, but it is a bug in the sense that it's not a logical thing.
tosa first found this latter feature while checking a map made by pachinko and told me about it. it's really quite hilarious watching your cav units march into a lake and at first walk ON water and then, as they move further into it, go under water and completely submerge. so where i could make flying horses in the old editor, we can now make frogman units in the new. ;)
ok, so this is obviously going to be called a cheat when someone uses this to hide their units from someone else. soldiers and horses obviously cant remain underwater like this in real life. the one saving grace to this is that it 'shld' be possible to edit the depth of the water VERY carefully to allow units to enter the water but not be covered up by it. it will take a pretty careful edit to do this..i know, i've tried. this also means that we shld be able to do fords across water that follow the above examples...mind you, i said shld. i've still some more testing to do and i've certainly not tested all possibilities and i welcome others to post their findings about this as well, but we may just have a new water feature here.
for those of you that already have put these little ponds in your maps without a legit coast or river, i suggest you re-edit them and re-post them. folks wont play 'oddball' maps very often, or maps they consider bugged or cheats. if the dev guys are going to give us new features it is inevitable that we are going to find these oddball ways to use them and it's up to us to use these features in a manner consistent with good gaming. so, once again, the dev guys did listen to us and did give us something new and useful we had asked for. thanks CA :)
edit: you shld also be aware that you MUST leave enough room for units to be deployed. that means knowing where the deployment zones are for up to a 4v4 multi game. the map will most likely crash if someone tries to play a map where a deployment zone is now all water.
also, if you try and put a bridge on a pond, the bridge wont save and when you load the map in the editor again, the bridge wont be there, at least when the pond is NOT impassable. i didnt test a bridge on a pond that IS impassable.
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
[This message has been edited by Kraellin (edited 08-24-2001).]
-
excellent funky,
and yer welcome :)
as i find out more i'll post it. tosa's also trying to rope me into putting some of this stuff on the .org web pages...we'll see ;)
oh, 1 new thing...there is a limit on the number of models you can have in a map. not sure of the exact number, but i just hit it in a map i'm making now. just a quick guess...maybe 40 or so? dependent on model size at all? dunno yet for sure.
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
-
well, i was able to edit a map with ponds that worked...more or less. the units dont suddenly adorn snorkel gear and go frogman on me. but they now walk on water...jesus-cav? ah well, at least it works. it takes some tight editing to make this work and it may well be possible to have units that 'wade' with and even tigher editing, but i find i miss the height numbers that used to be displayed next to the cursor in the demo editor.
it's a little difficult to say how i edited this so i'll just tell you that i had to 'go underwater myself' to do it...or at least partially so. in other words i moved the camera view to slightly below the water line and then edited the small bits of land that show so that i only had a thin line of land showing underwater. it's a bit tricky and very easy to just have your pond disappear but it can be done and if done correctly it makes isolated ponds, that dont have rivers or coasts, work. i tested this in custom mode and all of my water could be walked over with no other bugs on the map that i could find.
and whereas i havent tested editing water to make it wade-able, so that units actually sink down into the water a bit, we do know that this is possible by viewing some of the early maps made thus far. the problem with those early maps is that the units can sink completely out of sight and go 'frogman' on you. they dont die, they dont float, they dont move out of it on their own, they just sit at the bottom of the water and apparently have gills ;) but because when they enter this type of water you can see them slowly follow the land terrain and slowly be swallowed up by the water, it shld be possible to make things like river fords and shallow ponds that accurately show going into shallow water. i'm hoping it just takes a bit of proper editing and a lot of testing to make this happen.
also, one other thing that has occurred again with one of my maps is that it again has crashed me back to desktop. luckily, i've been saving different versions so not that much was lost this time, but it seems to occur when i use models in the red zone or very near to it. this could just be coincidence or a real bug. i'm not sure. but both times it's happened i've placed a model, once a bridge and once some rocks, in or right next to the red zone, saved the map, exited, and when reloading that saved map, the thing crashes me to desktop. it's only happened twice so far, and it could just be a windows thing or bad spots on the harddrive or who knows what, but it seems to be related to models and also i 'think' it happened when not just saving as a new file but while overwriting a previous save of the same name. if anyone else experiences this or can reproduce it at will, please post it in here.
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
-
after playing with shallow water some more and trying to get units to 'wade' rather than swim, i've found a small curiosity. if you move a unit into some shallow water and the unit is showing as 'water up to the hips', try moving the camera in closer and it will no longer look like it's wading, but will show the full unit. move the camera back away again and it once again looks like it's wading.
now, i dont know if this was intentional to show the clearness of water when up close to the unit or what, but if yer gonna try and make shallow water where units can wade, do bear this in mind.
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
-
read my posts about how water works and then amend it as follows: if your water is wade-able and not impassable, you CAN deploy your units on this type of water.
and one note for testing maps. it's a good idea to run at least one custom game with 8 armies to test for oddities and bugs. leave the camera restriction off and move around the map and watch how various units behave. you can sometimes spot things by doing this that you wouldnt see in just a 1v1 game.
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
[This message has been edited by Kraellin (edited 09-03-2001).]
-
thought i'd move this over here and make things easier.
hi cat,
what you're trying to do amounts to one of the no-no's in the readme file. making an island like yer trying is essentially a river 'that wraps around or twists back on itself' and this is a no-no according to the program.
the way the program allows bridges is quite weird and i hope they change it in the future, but for a small explanation of what you're attempting, let me explain it a bit. if you were to make 2 separate rivers running east/west across a map and they never joined anywhere...just 2 'horizontal' rivers, and then you attempted to put a bridge on one of those rivers, the bridge you placed actually runs the entire length of the map north/south. you may not see it, but it is there. so, that bridge actually goes thru your other river as well. depending on some unknowns it may actually display this bridge over the 2nd river or not and i've even done this with 3 horizontal rivers and gotten 3 bridges displyaed by just placing one bridge. the thing is, though, it's really only one bridge. and if you look at this stuff from underwater you can actually see that there is one loooooong bridge running all the way from the north edge to the south edge. now, that's the way it was in the old editor. i'm not sure it still displays this in the new like that.
so, what happens is that the program, for the sake of moving units, still thinks there is just one bridge and all sorts of weird things can start to happen. i've never seen another editor treat water and bridges like this one does and i dont really understand why they made them like this, but it does mean that islands would be very hard to do.
there is a way, though, but not with bridges. if you look at my notes in the tips and tricks thread you'll see that there are 2 ways to do water...impassable and passable. you could easily do an island using passable water. and, you could even do an island with impassable.
for the passable, just read my notes in the other thread. for the impassable i'll just explain. you would need to use one of the listed methods in the readme for making a river or coast. placing any other water on that map makes that water impassable. so, let's say you dont want a coast or a river showing in your map, or at least not a river that cant be forded or bridged. place a VERY narrow coast along either the east or west edge and hide it with some hills or mountains. you dont have to hide it, but you can. then, make your island surrounded by water, but DONT extend it all the way out to any edge of the map, as this will most likely be taken to be a river. you wont be able to use bridges, most likely, because of what i said before, but, you can make fords across the water to the island. since this is not a true river and you already have a coast, the water is just impassable but not a river and thus can have land crossing it.
i've done this sort of thing already in one test map, so, i know it works. and the biggest drawback is playing the ai army on it. he gets very stupid about moving around these impassable zones and tends to get hung up on them quite easily. if it werent for this fact i'd do a lot more maps with various impassable zones on them.
now, if you really want your river that isnt a river to look like a river, extend it almost all the way to the edge of the map, but leave a tiny bit of land right at the edge, as if it were just another ford across the river. it's far from perfect, but that's about the only way i currently know to do what yer trying to do. this would also work for castle moats and things like that.
also, from what i've seen so far, you can put a bridge on passable water in the editor, but when you save, exit, and reload, the bridge will be gone. so, apparently, the water must be impassable for a bridge to be saved on it, which is why i devised the other method using impassable water. if the river is passable, apparently the dev guys figured you didnt need a bridge; just wade across it.
the stw maps were 20x20 which works out to be a small map in we/mi. see my notes for the actual map sizes.
i'm sure that's all clear as mud (in both passable and impassable water :) but i hope it helps.
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
-
i dont know if this is universal to all maps made with the new editor or not, but i've been having trouble getting 3 WORKING bridges on a map. i can place all 3 bridges just fine, but one of them seems to always be bugged and doesnt work right; units wont cross it at all or badly break up when trying to, with part of the unit trying to find another bridge to cross to get to the rest of the unit.
this seems like a bug so far, but may just be a peculiarity with this particular map. one really odd point is that i had 3 bridges and the middle bridge was bugged this way, so i re-did some stuff just around that bridge and got it to work again, but now, one of the other bridges is bugged. and i hadnt even touched anything around the new bugged bridge.
i'm not sure if this is true of all maps with 3 bridges or if it will happen on a map with just 2 bridges. i'll run some more tests and see what i can find out.
for now, i highly recommend that if you're making a map with 3 bridges on it that you thoroughly test your map, making sure all units can cross all 3 bridges with ease before releasing it to the general public.
i'll let you know more as i find more.
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
-
well, 3 bridge maps seem to ALWAYS bug at least one of the bridges. i made a very simple map with one very straight east/west river and put 3 bridges on it. none were in the red zone. all of them stretched out nicely when i loaded a custom game. all were visibly correct as far as i could tell, but in every instance, one of the 3 would treat units quite oddly.
in every trial in custom games, one bridge wouldnt allow units to cross correctly. the units would break apart and a few might make it across, but most of the remaining unit would head off towards the next closest bridge and go all the way to that one and then find their way back to the rest of the unit.
it sort of acts like one bridge is 'turned' incorrectly or partially overlaying another or something. the partial unit that does try and cross will hug one side of the bridge while the rest of the unit will hug the river edge while heading to the next bridge to cross there.
so, i would have to strongly recommend now, that no one use 3 bridges in a map, even though the readme says you can use 3. i can only hope CA/DI sees this in time to add it to the patch.
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
[This message has been edited by Kraellin (edited 09-16-2001).]
-
this isnt so much a new tip or trick, but more a reminder. when laying textures in a map, remember, there is a 'FLIP' feature that allows one to do just that...'flip' a tecture to a reverse image view of that texture. this is a VERY handy tool at times, particularly when you cant match up textures at times. by flipping a texture you can often utilize textures into places where you normally couldnt, or match up textures better. very handy tool!
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
-
ok, here's a new one i've not seen before. i was editing one of my new maps and saved it to a new name and i normally do. when i quit out of the map and got back to the map listing in the editor, i got a warning message. it went something like this:
WARNING: Map limit exceeded. Some maps may not be available!
when looking at my map numbers i noticed i had 500 maps listed. yes, that's a correct number. i make a lot of versions when making and saving a map i'm editing. as many as 30 versions sometimes.
now this strikes me as very odd. why would they put a limit on the number of maps? the only thing i could think of would be that when looking for a map to play in multi or custom you have to see a listing of all maps and perhaps they figured they shld limit the number due to memory considerations? i dunno.
i can certainly delete a number of these early versions of maps and make more space, but what's going to happen when i just have one version of everyone's map and i reach 500 again? not sure i like this.
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
-
there is a small bug with models. when putting a model near the edge of a map, make sure that the model doesnt extend outside of the map boundaries. it is quite possible to do this, but it will either bug the map, cause a crash, or render the map inaccessible.
you CAN place models within a forest texture, or place a forest texture over a model. in the latter, the forest will simply not show up in the near proximity of a model. the trees wont show, that is. as you move outward from the model the trees will begin to show. this is a good feature as it allows the models to not have trees poking up through houses and so on :) . in the former, the model will sit down on the trees and the trees will show through the model but if you change editing modes or save and reload the map it will be as the latter method. it will self-correct. this was very smart on the part of whomever coded this. nice job :)
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
-
here's another little tip/trick that seems to be new to the we/mi editor: as you move the cursor around on the map you shld be able to see a tiny little white dot on the points of the tiles where that tile can be raised or lowered. this little white dot shows exactly where the point is where the height is altered.
K.
------------------
I'm sorry, but i never apologize.
-
Another quick note since Krae bumped the thread.
Be careful when placing woods terrain on the north and south map edges. For some reason, the trees associated with those textures will not show up. I'm not sure if this is happening on all map sizes, but it most certainly is on the Large maps.
There is no problem with this on the East and West edges, only the North/South. If you really want trees on those edges, you will have to fill them in manually.
------------------
Obake
Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience.
-
Konnichiwa,
True about the woods, that was also the case in small maps in the demo editor.
There's yet another 'risk' with woods near the edges: it will force units to go around it. Units will go into RedZones. Personally I think the RedZone is a very good thing in the maps, but many people have different ideas about it. What will happen is that you make a map that'll make players upset and thus the map won't be played anymore.
------------------
Ja mata
Toda MizuTosaInu
Daimyo Takiyama Shi
http://www.takiyama.cjb.net
-
hiya guys i just made some maps - but i cant figure out how to take a pic of them to place on them - can be downloaded at the dreadmaster's site - www.dreadmasters.com/downloads/polarpack.zip
-
7bear,
the easiest way is to take a screenshot of your map using the F2 key. this will put a .tga file in your tga folder of the screenshot. you then find this file and load it into a paint program, like paint shop pro, and resize it to 304 x 120. i think that's the right size. save it and rename it to the same name as your map, but with the .tga extension and place the map and .tga file in your maps directory. and note that there are two directories in we/mi for saving maps. i forget the names right off hand, but one is saves from the editor, while the other is for multi games. i forget all the quirks that can arise from this, but it's best to put finished maps and their .tga's in the main maps folder. this saves some confusion when playing multi games.
now, tosa has another way of making the map pic files and i believe he's posted this method on the .org somewhere. you'll have to look for it there or if someone knows the exact link they could post it. there was a resaon for this other method, but you'd have to ask tosa about it. it might just be an aesthetic thing...i forget. tosa also recently told me that regardless of the size of the .tga it gets resized by the program to fit in that pic location. i've not tested this myself, but that info might also be useful in making a different style of pic for the map images.
K.
------------------
The only absolute is that there are no absolutes.
