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More on GATEWAYS - by RBL-4NiK8r
Custom Brushes and Tile Sets How to get Edit World to use custom textures - RBL-4NiK8r

 

Things to consider when map making

by RBL-4NiK8r & Sununpa

I'd like to start out with what I think is one of the most common mistakes people make early on and how I deal with it. I'm talking about what I call

'The Dead Zone'....dead zone for resources / gateways

While playing any WZ game, you may have noticed a darkened area around the edges of the map that you cannot build on. This is the zone and every map has it. I cannot count the number of maps I've seen where people have placed oil resources in the zone, and I guess they never tested out the map enough to notice it. But if you happen to be one of the lucky persons to get that base, or happen across a resource placed here. Well.... you're screwed as to using that well. You can't build there, which means you can't put a well on it. Another issue related to the zone is that while you can't build there, the editor will still allocate areas there when generating gateways. This means while you can't build there, you 'can' travel there. Now, if you have a base near the edge of the map and want to build walls and defensive structures to protect your base, you cannot build in the zone, so no matter what you do, there will always be this small area where the enemy can go around your defenses and gain access to your base. In order to address both of these issues (to avoid accidentally placing resources in the zone, and to make it possible to actually wall yourself in completely with no unwanted gaps), here is what I now do to all my maps. First you need to identify the dead zone areas on your map. it's 3 tiles wide. Then place some type of non - traversable terrain there as a border around your map. Now, not only will you NOT be able to accidentally place anything in the zone while making the map, the finished map will allow players to build defenses up against the non traversable terrain and thus, no gaps in your defense there at the edge. There is one other thing to keep in mind when doing this. Because you are creating a 3D map, something you may not notice at first is that the first row of tiles along the right and bottom edge extends down along the side of the map. Which means you can't go there either. This equates to making the dead zone an extra tile wide on the right and bottom edge (which is why it's 3 wide on the right and bottom). So if you put like 2 rows of cliff face in your zone to block it off, you need to remember to add a third row on the right and bottom. This will end up being 2 rows in the map, as the third row actually extends vertically down the edge. This is the first thing I do before any other editing on a map. From this point on, I know that all the rest of the space on the map is 'usable' by the players and I can't accidentally place something in the zone that is either not reachable or not usable by the players. I call this 'masking out the dead zone'. You may have a reason NOT to do this, like you want to be able to move around the zone area in your game, but you still must remember that it's there and not design your map without considering the effect it may have on the ability to build there and the effect it may have on your gateways and ultimately, the pathfinding abilities of the units in the game. If you want to use the zone for movement, at least place non - traversable terrain along the first row of tiles on the right and bottom. Then the editor wont allocate that as traversable space when generating gateways. You can't go there anyway, so mark it off. You'll have a simpler time creating gateways if you do. YOU have to remember this because while the zone is darkened in the game, it's NOT in the editor. So it LOOKS the same as the rest of the map, but it's not.

You may have noticed that if you have large areas of one type of terrain, it starts taking on a checkerboard like pattern. This may be more noticeable with certain tile types than others. Anyway, here's a simple thing you can do to add some variety to those wide open spaces... If you double click on a tile (in the tile selection window on the left side of the screen) a pop-up menu well, ummm pop-up. You'll see various options for rotating the tile, etc... These can be handy if you're laying down several tiles at a rotation or x/y flip different then the default (which can be easier than using the rotate keys after painting each tile one at a time). But that's another topic. What I want you to look at is the little box on the right of the rotate options. You'll see 'random' x-flip, y-flip and rotate options. Check all 3 of them, then select OK. Now select 'flood fill tile'. Then fill an area with the desired tile. Walla... They are all randomly flipped, rotated, etc... creating a different pattern each time you fill it. This will make a much smoother and less monotonous looking layout then having all the tiles in an open area laid out at the same angle. You never know what you'll end up with, but it will be better than having them all aligned the same way. I even saw a little face in one area. LOL Be advised though... Flood fill is one of those options that can have unexpected results that are hard if not impossible to 'undo'. So, I strongly suggest that you save your work before you do this. Then you can freely play around with it and if you end up with something you didn't want (like it filled in areas you didn't want it to, because you didn't realize they were connected). You can reload the saved version and start over from there. I recommend saving your work before you use 'any' of the flood fill options, they can have unexpected results and cause problems that you do 'not' want to have to fix by hand, trust me on this one.
I do use fill texture a lot, but i use Fill using Edge Brush more so because you can set heights into the map a lot better. Now like you said it can have some really nasty effects and its best to save, but for the most part you just have to go touch up a few areas with cliffs and such. I think one of the best things to use though is copy and paste, its easy to do just 1/4 of a map and then copy it and flip it to the other 4 corners i did that with ArcticWaste and though i still had to make a few changes here and there, it worked out great. But anything that takes time to do, like ramps going from one level to another can be copied and pasted to fit else where on the map if its the same height grade. Also one thing that i am becoming good at is making maps with different level grades, so you don't end up with flat maps, also use the randomize in Edge Brush i think i can do a lot of my work with EB and do it in the 2D screen better then 3D. One of the best tricks that i try to do when working on the 3D screen is copy the whole map and let the white grid up so you can see the height and see the tiles, if i don't do the whole map i try to at lest do the area i am working in. when adding cliffs try and not go more then 50 from one level to the next if you do it becomes to high, at time you may have to add mini cliffs to give it a more real look to it. I first started playing with this on my map The Web and ran into a major problem with to make gateways, or the gateway out of memory error. Now i found the easy way to fix this was to add cliff face tiles into the single or let them have a edge of 1 square. Now what i ended up doing in The Web, was to make it so some of the cliffs in there where not really cliff so it didn't hog up to much memory.

 

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More on Gateways by RBL - 4NiK8R  

 

    Okay, once you have your 2D map up and click the Gateways button from the toolbar, the Locator map will change to a Gateways  map identifying cliffs, gateways, and different colored "zones" running between them. Basically you use gateways to break up the map into convex "zones".

 

    A convex shape may be defined in many ways. For example, if you pick any two locations (at random) within a convex shaped zone and draw a straight line between them, the line will never cross the boundaries (i.e. go "outside of") of the zone.  Phrased another way, if you traveled along the border of the zone, you
would always make either left turns or right turns  exclusively. In essence, a convex shaped zone has no "bumps" or "dents" along its border. Triangles, squares, hexagons, etc. are convex shapes. A five point star or crescent moon is not a convex shape.

 

gateway placement - criticalAt any rate, to lay down Gateways in the 2D view, once you have the Gateway tool active, click on a square in the map to  start placing a gateway, then as you move the mouse a bunch of cyan colored boxes will appear and track the mouse in a  straight line. That's your gateway. Move the mouse a few squares away until the gateway is 3, 5, or 7 squares long, then click again. This'll set the gateway. At this point you may (if you want to) hit the Gateways tool button again (or select View > Refresh Zones from the menu) to update the locator map with the updated gateway information (its colors will change).
That concludes the process of laying down gateways. If you want to remove a gateway from the map, simply activate the Gateway tool and then click on an existing gateway, this will remove it. In WZ gateways are used (obviously) for pathfinding. Once a path (defined from the algorithm as a set of way points between  "zones") has been determined for a unit, the unit will travel from gateway to gateway to gateway along that path, following  (relatively) straight lines between each. This means that if you have a long U-shaped canyon you can't just place a gateway at the two ends of it, you need at least  one more gateway (but preferably two or three more) at the bend of the canyon to make units know that they can't just go through the cliff.

 

 

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Custom Brushes and Tile Sets

How to get Edit World to use custom textures.

by RBL - 4NiK8r

Q: on custom brushes

I have a question. Custom Brushes. I made a platform on one of my maps, and it contains many different tiles to make it look very shnazy. Anyhow, I don't want to draw these tiles for every platform on my map (there are going to be many platforms) so how do I create a custom brush so that I can simply click on each platform, to make them look identical? Or, is there a way to copy & paste. That would be completely helpful as well. Thanks.


A:

Yes there is away to copy and paste, the controls for that are in your last set of boxes on top. Cntrl-A = Mark Area that places a grid across the map and its very easy to check height with it in 3D also, but if you mark the area you want to copy with this I use the arrow keys to move around with, and use 2D screen most of the time and set in marker to were I want to place things.

 

Cntrl-C = Copy marked area to clipboard, once you do this you can now save it as a .cpl file if you wish to add this to other maps and some point in time, but the main thing here is that this is the copy button.

Cntrl-V = Paste from clipboard, ok this can be tricky to do at times and I always try and have a tile count with some markers in or around the area I am pasting to, I use mostly crater tiles for this. Say I copied a 10x10 area and I wish to paste that on the other side of the map. Now the area this is going into would have 4 crater tiles set up as 10x10 so I can bring the copied area and fit it right in with no mistakes, and then its just a mater of letting it be, or X flip or Y flip.

Set Paste Preferences- this is the tab with the question marks on them what it will do is let you pick how or what you want in your pasting. If you don t want to paste the height then uncheck it, same goes for objects too, and textures.

Now a few things to keep in mind here if things get messed up you can get rid of it by doing ctrl-U or the undo button, though there is one thing that it wont get rid of and that is oil wells if you have them in area you copied, and they would have to be deleted or moved. I try to stay away from pasting with oil unless it s in a base, the rest I put in by counting tiles.

see also

custom tile sets


Tile sets Specifications.

The tiles MUST be 64x64, 256-Color .pcx files. Tile sets must be in the following format:

PageSize: 576x640
Colour Depth: 256 .pcx (ver. 5, if you need to specify)
Palette: Load a Warzone tile set (Arizona is good), and save the palette. Apply the palette to your tile set.
ANY other palette will result in your tiles looking REALLY funny in WZ.

Of course, individual tile size for the Tile Page must be 64 x 64. You can use Paint Shop Pro (I find it's the best one for this kind of thing).
Adobe Photoshop (too time consuming for my tastes). MS Paint COULD do it, provided that it's the one from Win95 or 98. Any newer, and it can't read pcx.
And of course, you can always use ZSoft products for it

Texpage - tile sets

What I do is the old texpage swap trick (see next page.) for that. The WDG->LND converter can open ANY .map file and make it a .lnd, but it DISPLAYS them as the Arizona tileset regardless if they are or aren't from Arizona. This could have been fixed with a few more updates. For that matter, since the tileset is included with the WZ Map in the .wdg (usually --- haven't seen one yet that wasn't), the converter could reference it and draw with the appropriate tileset.


You could also try making your own tileset, if you have Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop. MS Paint can't do enough, and later versions of Paint (Win ME and higher) can't even read pcx. If you do this, you'll need to open one of the native WZ texpages (tertiles C1 or whatever) and save the palette so your colours don't come out weird. (I recently discovered this myself. Then, load up a new map, 576x640, 256-colors, load up the palette, and make each tile one at a time (they are 64 x 64), copy-paste onto the 576x640 image (alignment is critical - they MUST be exactly on the right dimensions or they'll spill over in EditWorld), and repeat! There is no time limit on how long it should take you to make the whole tileset. Good ones are NEVER finished .

Save it as a .pcx file when you're done, and put it in texpages.

In mapDataSets, copy one of the .eds files. Open it with notepad or another text editor.

In the line where it specifies the tileset (first or third --- somewhere in there), change it to your new tileset name. Just save it --- don't rename it yet.

Close notepad.

Rename your .eds file to whatever, using the old cursor over the text thing. That's how you rename it --- cause you want to keep the file as .eds, and a 'save as' command will turn it into a .txt file. (You don't want that.)

Now, open your .lnd file into a text editor. Notepad will make you use Wordpad, so don't use it there. Download a text editor that can handle it, like EMEditor (you'll find it on CNet.com if you do a search). Open it with that instead, because .lnd files are big.

Change the line that specifies the dataset file name to your .eds file you just made.

Save it. EMEditor (if you use it) will ask you how to save. It'll SAY .txt in the file type --- leave it alone. Overwrite the .lnd file you are working on. EMEditor will ask you if you're sure, and other cautions. Just overwrite the .lnd file. It'll say, "file is read only - continue?" and click yes. If you CAN'T overwrite it, then change it's attributes (in the file box) to archive instead of read-only (you can do this in the Edit tab of EMEditor, too --- that will do fine also), and repeat the save process. Close EMEditor, fire up EditWorld, and make your map. TMLink IS required for exporting the map and custom tiles to a .wdg file. So, use it. Otherwise, your map won't work.

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how to - Make Edit world use custom tiles

 

1 - How to make Editworld use your custom tiles in a map:

-Create a new map with Editworld or use an existing map.
Assume the map is named 'MyMap.lnd' in directory '\Warzone2100\mapSaves'
-Go to directory '\Warzone2100\mapDataSets'
-If you intend to make a map that is mainly based on tiles of the Arizona scene you should copy 'WarzoneDataC1.eds' to 'MyMap.eds'
For a mainly urban map you should copy 'WarzoneDataC2.eds' to 'MyMap.eds'
For a mainly rocky mountains map you should copy 'WarzoneDataC3.eds' to 'MyMap.eds'
For a map that uses no tiles or a mix of tiles from the scenes, you can pick one at random.
Note: The information in these .eds-files is not critical. They contain only edge brush definitions and tile types.
The worst that can happen is that EditWorld s options 'paint with edges' and 'fill using edge brush' will paint the wrong tiles.
As far as tile types are concerned: you will need to change them in Editworld (explained below).
-Load 'MyMap.eds' into a text editor.
-Modify third line:
TILETEXTURES "TexPages\TertilesC1.pcx"
Into:
TILETEXTURES "TexPages\MyTiles.pcx"
In this example the pcx-file with the custom tiles is named 'MyTiles.pcx' in directory '\Warzone2100\TexPages')
You may choose either the software- or the hardware-version: this will have no effect on exported maps.

Note: IF YOU USE YOUR OWN DIRECTORY INSTEAD OF 'TexPages'

YOU MUST SPECIFY YOUR TILESET-DIRECTORY RELATIVE TO THE WARZONE DIRECTORY!

-Go to directory '\Warzone2100\mapSaves'
-Load 'MyMap.lnd' into a text editor.
-Modify first line:
Dataset WarzoneDataC1.eds
Into:
Dataset MyMap.eds
-Start Editworld
-Load 'MyMap.lnd' from directory '\Warzone2100\mapSaves'
Note: Editworld will now always show your custom tiles with map 'MyMap.lnd'.
All unmodified maps loaded in EditWorld will still show the default tiles.
-Select in EditWorld from menu 'Options' item 'Terrain Types'
The terrain type for each of your tiles will be shown in the box on the left screen.
-Modify the terrain types of your custom tiles: select one of the 12 terrain buttons
on the tools bar and then click on the appropriate tiles.
-Save map

Notes: The custom map will behave like a normal standard map in EditWorld with one exception:
EditWorld s options 'paint with edges' and 'fill using edge brush' may paint with unwanted tiles.
You can change this by modifying the BRUSHBEGIN-BRUSHEND block in 'MyMap.eds'.
Format not explored.



2  - Description of Export Multi Player Map options in tile-map linker program:

When exporting the map from EditWorld, a dialog box of the installed link program will appear:
-Select custom hardware & software tiles using the browse buttons.
Custom software tiles: supply the name of the software pcx that you want to use.
Custom hardware tiles: supply the name of the hardware pcx that you want to use.
If you do not have a specific hardware/software-version of your tiles you should
simply select the same file twice.
-Fog/weather:
Select the fog and light colour and the weather condition on your map.
You can experiment with this. It will always result in a working map.
Arizona=bright/yellow - Urban=dark/gray & falling rain - Rocky=white & falling Snow
-Vidmem/features:
Select the set of features you are using on the map.
You have no freedom of choice here: Features on your map will not be shown
correctly in the game if they do not belong to the Vidmem / features choice.
Look at existing maps to get a complete list of allowed features for each scene.
Arizona=(not explored) - Urban=ruins,... - Rocky=Trees,...
-Campaign:
You can experiment with this. It will always result in a working map.
Note: Normally EditWorld will select the option that corresponds with your type of map.
Since custom maps have no defined type you may select one yourself.
(Differences are not explored)
-Check 'Use custom settings' box to use the selected custom tiles and settings.
Unchecking this box will directly invoke pumpkin's original MakeWDG.exe and the
result will be a normal standard map without custom tiles and custom settings.
-Click 'Start export' button.

3  - Requirements for both custom hardware en software tiles:
-pcx format version 5
-576 x 640 pixels
-256 colour
-Warzone colour palette must be used.

4 -  Differences between soft and hardware tiles:
-Slightly different colour palettes
-The game uses the first colour in the original palette order of the hardware tiles in a special way:
If height = 0 this colour will turn into transparent water.
If height > 0 this colour will become transparent with background colour depending on the
choice of fog colour (Arizona, urban, rocky).
-Hardware tiles usually have a higher sharpness.
The hardware is able to smooth out this higher sharpness and give more contrast.

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