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Mike.nl, on Oct 28 2008, 08:18 PM, said:
three pages of comments already. Wait, did I say comments, I meant a chat between Valdez and Kelathin .gif)
Kelathin, on Oct 28 2008, 08:30 PM, said:
CHAT?! I stayed up 2 am late waking up at 5:50 AM (for classes) answering questions 
To avoid similar incidents of the above (Evania's thread being hijacked by yours truly to bombard kel with questions), I hereby open this thread so people can come here and bombard each other with map Editor-related questions which they may or may not get the answers to.
You may also use this thread to post things that you have come up with regarding the map editor.
That being said, these are the basic functions I have come up with so far (thanks for everything kel)
MAP DIMENSIONS
When you first start out your map, you'll set the height and width of the map, defined as integer values. Width represents horizontal dimensions, height represents vertical dimensions.
At the starting context info window, you will see Width and Height in "Patches" which is the unit of measurement. A single patch gives you 32 units of vertices, one unit will be blank, and 31 will be visible terrain; a single cell is bounded by 4 such vertices to form a square. The vertices also represent the pixel dimensions of the map's heightmap. You can view the map in wireframe terrain to see the grid of cells.
A cell measures 20 by 20 units in the game's ruler measurement tool, and translating to real life dimensions (approximated by me using the Hummer vehicle object) a cell is around 3 by 3 metres so one patch is around 93 metres.
The max for both height and width is 20 patches each, so in theory the largest map you can possibly make would have dimensions of roughly 1.86 by 1.86 kilometers so for ambitious (or crazy) folks trying to do a realistically scaled Easter Island map or something, bear in mind you'll never be able to fit the entire Easter island within the map dimension constraints
http://img162.images...81467316vp4.png
CAMERA CONTROLS
Zooming in and out is the same as UAW. If you have no idea what that means, buy a copy of UAW to find out.
Changing rotation and pitch requires holding down control key and right mouse button. While these two are held down, you may rotate by moving mouse left or right, as well as change pitch by moving mouse forward or backwards. Sims fans, you will understand that this is like what you can do with the camera in Sims 2 (except in Sims 2 you hold own mouse wheel, not Ctrl+rightclick)
MODIFIER BOXES
To avoid the hassale of typing in values into the modifier boxes, left-click and hold on either of the up/down buttons beside the box, and drag your mouse left or right. It'll work like a slider. this is especially useful for rapidly rotating objects to an approximate direction.
Alternatively you can also click on the modifier box itself and while the numbers inside are highlighted, move the mouse wheel to change the values. Wouldn't advise this method for object rotation since the values change slowly, i.e. super slow object rotation. The slider method is best for that.
OBJECT PLACEMENT AND SELECTION
Access the objects Tool at the top. Browse the objects list on the left for whatever you want, select the object in the list.
Hold down the Shift key, the object should appear at your cursor for placement on the map
As long as the Shift key is held down, you can place objects. Holding shift and ctrl at once while dragging the mouse will make a chain of the same object (distance between can be adjusted by 'object placement distance' box)
You can orientate the rotation of the object by moving your cursor in a circle around the object as soon as you place it. Bear in mind the Shift key still has to be held down.
To select an object, click on it while in the Objects View mode. Double-clicking an object will group-select all objects of the same type. Holding Ctrl while clicking objects will add them to selection (similar to what you do in-game by holding down Shift while selecting units.)
OBJECT ORIENTATION
Under the Objects tool there are modifiers for you to change your object's orientation:
X Angle = changes roll
Y Angle = changes pitch
Z Angle = Changes yaw
Most frequently you will use the Z angle modifier as it is used to rotate objects already placed on the map.
UNIQUE COLOUR
Civilian content can be recoloured using the Unique Colour tool. Simply click the object and then click the Unique Colour block on the left. Depending on the object, the colour may be barely noticable (eg. school bus) or distinctive (eg. beach umbrella). This tool is what you will use to make custom colours for the civilian cars and certain civilians that you place on the map (by default they are blue-gray), for some reason the civilians don't keep their selected colour though; the colours change to some random ones.
If, for some reason you want to place a Hierarchy/Masari/Novus/Military object, you can also give it a unique colour, but you must change the owner to Neutral first, then deselect the object, and then re-select it again and you can then change the colour. Have fun with pink Nufai!
ROADS
Access the Citiscape Tool, hold down Ctrl and drag across the terrain to create a stretch of road.
w_Asphalt_Road is the main one used for urban settings. It starts as a small 2 lane road but may be expanded with extra lanes.
Look for the Left and Right lane boxes on the left in Citiscape tool. Lanes on the same side of the road are separated by white dotted lines. By default for w_Asphalt_Road there will be two lanes separated by a yellow line as the road is bi-directional, with yellow separating the left and right. You can add up to 5 lanes per side.
If you make zero lanes on one side and 1 lane on another, you'll get a single-lane one-direction road, perfect for that driveway leading up into a civilian house. be sure to uncheck the sidewalk on both sides so the driveway doesn't have sidewalks adjacent to it.
For dirt roads look for the textures with the names w_road_sandtrack in them. be sire to filter out the curbs, sidewalks and road edges for those.
When adjusting the curves of a road, note that the Road Curvature applies to the entirety of whatever road stretch you use, if there's 3 curves in a road and you hit Broad, all will have Broad Curves, any subsequent curves you add are also Broad. Sadly, there is no individual curving.
It is important to note that the Undo function does not work with roads. As far as possible try to keep road sections separate, for example, a T junction consisting of 2 roads touching rather than 1 single road with a branching out road. This is because the inability to undo mistakes or delete curve points can result in you having to erase entire stretches of road based on a single mistake.
TEXTURES
Kelathin, on Oct 28 2008, 11:48 AM, said:
Do you see how your texture is a tiny square? Try clicking next to it. That will select the a separate black box. The map supports up to 64 texture sets. Now you go down you can see that you can load textures into the texture set.
lazy to type own version. However I'll add that the Material Diffuse, Additive and Specular colour can be handy for adding a colour tint to your terrain, so you can darken or lighten a particular texture, or make grey pavement slightly reddish, etc. And of course you can alter the size and angle of the texture via Texture Scale and Tilt Angle respectively.
HEIGHT
All these must be done while eight View is accessed to take effect:
To raise terrain, left-click on the map. If you see no visible change, try changing the Intensity value on the left to a number that is actually higher than 0.10
To lower terrain, hold down the Ctrl-key and left-click on the map
To smooth terrain, hold down the mouse wheel and left-click on the map.
To level terrain, select Leveling Brush from the Brush Style drop-down menu at the top. You will notice that in Height Brush Settings, "Intensity" becomes replaced by "Terrain Level". input a value there, and when you left-click on the map, it'll create flat, level terrain, normally useful for urban areas.
Passibility is also modified via a height brush also found in the Brush Style drop-down menu. it allows you to paint out impassable areas on the map or edit the passibility to mimic that of water at different depths (eh. shallow water, where hover units float on water while others move on ground as per normal)
Important: Always recompute your height map after every modification done to the map. If you raise/lower/smooth/level terrain somewhere and forget to recompute, you'll see one helluva minimap generated when you save.
This post will continually be updated until all the basic info is in place. In the likely event that you mapmakers somehow do not understand any of this crazy s@!$, it just means
Kelathin, on Oct 29 2008, 07:10 PM, said:
You're just a dunce JK
JKEdited by Valdez, 18 December 2008 - 11:12 PM.
