Texturing the map

[benpark]

Now that Stridor has allowed us the ease of making the terrain, I'm realizing that there doesn't seem to be an underlying texture anywhere for the way the ground will look in game.

I was hoping that this could be done by hand (over the data map), and then put in while editing the scene editor, but I don't see any info in the manual about it. Am I within a mile of how it's done?

[Stridor]

Ben in the map maker select the terrain texture from the texture box. The go into Map Maker/Textures and turn on "Show by large icons" this will give you thumbnails of all the textures. Now simply select the base ground texture that you want (there are lots of grass, dirt, snow, etc to choose from). Then press the tick button to update that texture.

In PCK the final ground image is built up in texture layers.

So the base terrain texture is defined. Then you might want a forest "texture" on top of this, then a "road" texture, "fields" texture etc. You can do all this in the map maker. Then what you need to do is go into the map directory and you will find the name mask files (pngs). Just edit these by drawing on them in white what you want (ie draw where the roads go etc)

[Stridor]

The first 4 textures in the texture box of the map maker are defaults

They are the

skymat: which defines the ground cover texture outside of the map play area (by default this is grass)
terrain: which defines the base ground texture for your terrain (by default is grass)
wall: which defines the texture which is used on the map walls (default = dirt)
water: which defines which texture you want to use for water (default = stream texture)

You are free select new textures for these if you like, but you can't delete them from the box as they are basic to each map. You are allowed to add new ground textures in order to build up your map as you like.

Each new layer you add requires another render pass so don't add too many (2-3 is ok) otherwise you will start to bog performance on lower spec machines. Higher spec machines can do many more layers without performance penalty however. Also remember that you *must* add at least *one* new layer to the texture box for PCK to show *any* terrain at all.

I hope that helps

S.

[Stridor]

We should bring this back into the main beta thread as well in case this info helps anyone else.

S.