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.

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I'm sorry, but i never apologize.

[This message has been edited by Kraellin (edited 08-24-2001).]