Map Maker Beta ...

[JMass]

ORIGINAL: Stridor

Jmass does the scenario or campaign editor work for you as that uses the same libraries. Puzzled.

Yes, all the others editors work.

[rickier65]

JMass -

Besides deleting the MM directory and the Media/mods directory, also delete the Editor directory. Then try unzipping again. Also check the properties of the ActiveX files to make sure they aren't blocked.

Rick

[JMass]

ORIGINAL: Rick
Besides deleting the MM directory and the Media/mods directory, also delete the Editor directory. Then try unzipping again.

It works! Thanks! [:)]

[Stridor]

ORIGINAL: Rick

JMass -

Besides deleting the MM directory and the Media/mods directory, also delete the Editor directory. Then try unzipping again. Also check the properties of the ActiveX files to make sure they aren't blocked.

Rick

Bless you Rick [;)]

[Biffa]

Didn't want to post on the Tutorial thread but omg, nice job Stridor.

[rickier65]

Stridor (or others),

Thanks to Rob I obtained electroinc copies of the 3 SL boards for a SL scenario. I've put them together using MS.Paint, and followed your New Tutorial To come up with the map below. I notice in your tutorial that you load the generic "flat" HM, but then got though and pretty much build your map with structures and textures and other niceties.

If you're going to put in some hills, does this need to be done before the structure placement?

By the way, Your final map (if it is final), looks great. The trees, tufts of grass, the wheat fileds. Everytime I see some of what you and Rob and Saf are able to do, i'm impressed (as well as embarrassed by my renditions - but hey - how did you get to Carnegie Hall? - practice practice practice).

By the way - while your AI map took you around 90 min - mine took me around 4 hours - I don't think I've quite got down the knack of drawing on screen, I keep looking down at my mouse pad.

Thanks for the tutorial - looking forward to the section on HM.

Also, I'm taking the liberty of trnsposing your New Tutorial to a word doc, with pics and all. You are welcome to it (or to a pdf if you prefer) of course.

Thanks again!
RIck

[Stridor]

ORIGINAL: Rick

Stridor (or others),

Thanks to Rob I obtained electroinc copies of the 3 SL boards for a SL scenario. I've put them together using MS.Paint, and followed your New Tutorial To come up with the map below. I notice in your tutorial that you load the generic "flat" HM, but then got though and pretty much build your map with structures and textures and other niceties.

If you're going to put in some hills, does this need to be done before the structure placement?

By the way, Your final map (if it is final), looks great. The trees, tufts of grass, the wheat fileds. Everytime I see some of what you and Rob and Saf are able to do, i'm impressed (as well as embarrassed by my renditions - but hey - how did you get to Carnegie Hall? - practice practice practice).

By the way - while your AI map took you around 90 min - mine took me around 4 hours - I don't think I've quite got down the knack of drawing on screen, I keep looking down at my mouse pad.

Thanks for the tutorial - looking forward to the section on HM.

Also, I'm taking the liberty of trnsposing your New Tutorial to a word doc, with pics and all. You are welcome to it (or to a pdf if you prefer) of course.

Thanks again!
RIck

Rick, That looks great!

You can build your map anyway you want. If you want to start with sculpting the HM you can. If you want to start with placing structures you can. If you want to start with doing the textures you can. If you want to start with .... well you get my point.

My tut map is not finsihed yet. I delibrately compartmentalized each build stage so that it is easy to follow. As I noted in the last post to that thread the ground is flat as a pancake, so the next stage will be HM scultping.

Like anything else there is a learning curve to map making. As you noted the more you practice the easier it gets. It seems at this stage the longest part of the map making process is drawing up your map. You can speed this up considerably by learning how to use paint.NET more effectively (using the tools, layers, etc).

Something I will say based on your map (and it may be a jpeg artifact) but it appears that there is a subtle yellow border around your brown (field) areas and there looks like a different shade of red color inside the main red structure color. This means that there is way more than 5 apparent colors on the map. This can happen becuase the alias option for the tools was left inadvertantly on!. It needs to be off. Both the MM and PCK need pure colors to work with. With the next version of the MM you won't even need to use PCK map colors. You will be able to use your own palette and then map your colors to PCK colors during the build process.

I hope that helps

Regards

S.

[rickier65]

Thanks Stridor.

I think (hope) the 'extra' colors are artifacts of jpg conversion. I tried to make sure the aliasing thing was set (I get confused with aliasing antialieasing on and off, so I just made it look like your screenshot!).

I'm going to follow along with your tutorial in the order you're doing it. That seems to work better for me.

So now I'll get to start playing with Textures. This battle takes place in Nov - so I'll be playing with some snow textures - light dirty snow I think.

Thanks again!
Rick

[rickier65]

I'm still going through the tutorial - I'm working with beta .9a. So no grass or wheat. But I have put in some textrues, and the one tractor of course. There are quite a few more fixed structure I want to add.

But I wanted to try out the autogen feature.

Had some difficulty adding new tree defines from list. I tried clicking the check mark, shift clicking the map, various combinations - but it's late here so I suspect I'm not functioning at 100%. In any event, did get trees added as well for both light and hvy woods. I"ll probably play around a little more with some parameters to see efect. I really like how you can try something, build, see the change it makes pretty quickly. makes it much more likely to experiment to get what looks better.

Thanks Stridor (and ben and Saf and Rob).

Rick

[Mraah]

Stridor,

I tried out the HIRES mode ... possible bugs (0.9a) :

-- 1. When loading AI Map it doesn't display the text in lower right corner ... "Scanning and Classifying Map Area".
Maybe it's my system being slower than yours.

-- 2. When Adjusting the H/M using Brush Size 1 it adjusts like the brush size was 4 ... ie, it adjusts like the low res mode. I'm unable to adjust one pixel.

Rob

[rickier65]

I'm making progress (slow - but steady) with map for Piepsk using SLmapboards from Rob and MM .9a.

One thing I've seen though is that I need to tweek some bldg placement, perhaps I made the red (bldg) color too large in some places as I'm getting some houses place right next to each other.

What's the best way to do this? After All finished then use sceneEdit?

Thanks
Bleow is screen shot (doesn't show the bldgs mentioned above). I'm still going to add some more bldgs though before I move on to putting in some relief (elev).

Thanks!
Rick

[Stridor]

Hey Rick,

Good to see you making it work!

In terms of placing buildings you can do it the autogen (random) way or the fixed way.

If you zoom the map in, then move your fixed structures into place. The zoomed in view gives you the most accurate placement. You may need to fiddle a bit to get them exactly where you want them.

Ultimately when you have completely finished with the MM process you may need to go into SE to do some final polishing tweaks. But this you need to do last as any new MM builds will overwrite your work.

Regards

S.

[Stridor]

I have implemented a skybox tinting system for the next beta.

Whilst this won't replace a well made novel skybox, it does hugely extened the mileage of the skyboxs which are already available. It also allows adjustment of skybox lighting to be consistent with map lighting so that you can get much more atmospheric effects. Once we get the fault normal models fixed up then fighting under a whole range of lighting conditions should look pretty cool.

Details of its use will be revealed in the Map Maker tutorial thread.

Regards

S.

[rickier65]

Just finished reading throught the entire tutorial - though I'm still back on the auto-gen part adding buildings to my map. So still have a little ways to go in "hands on".

I see a few feature in the .9b or .9c that look like they'll be helpful. Since you mentioned in tutorial about order that textures were placed, I decided to play, unfortunately, to change order I had to delete a layer, then add it. Not too hard with MM, but still took a little time, It looks like this now has a control in .9c.

Thanks - thats a good idea.

I alos like the mapping of the colors to AI map. I just realized I could have saved myself some tweaking by using two or three different bldg colors for autogen purposes, then converted to the same blding AI color at the end. This would have given me more control over how-whre auto gen creates different bldgs. In fact, I may go back and do it this way anyway. I can have a shade of red for "big stone bldg", another for nice houses, a third color for not so nice houses, and even a fourth for outbuildings.

Whey didn't I think of that?

Thanks - any idea when you'll be ready to send links to .9c?

Don't you think it's far enough along to call it 1.0 beta now? Sure seems pretty full featured to me.

Thanks for the MM and for the tutorial Stridor!
Rick

[Stridor]

ORIGINAL: Rick

Just finished reading throught the entire tutorial - though I'm still back on the auto-gen part adding buildings to my map. So still have a little ways to go in "hands on".

I see a few feature in the .9b or .9c that look like they'll be helpful. Since you mentioned in tutorial about order that textures were placed, I decided to play, unfortunately, to change order I had to delete a layer, then add it. Not too hard with MM, but still took a little time, It looks like this now has a control in .9c.

Thanks - thats a good idea.

Yes there is quite a few new niceties since 0.9a

I alos like the mapping of the colors to AI map. I just realized I could have saved myself some tweaking by using two or three different bldg colors for autogen purposes, then converted to the same blding AI color at the end. This would have given me more control over how-whre auto gen creates different bldgs. In fact, I may go back and do it this way anyway. I can have a shade of red for "big stone bldg", another for nice houses, a third color for not so nice houses, and even a fourth for outbuildings.

Whey didn't I think of that?

Yes the whole idea of the mapable colors came about as an extension to allowing more defined autogen areas than the base AI colors would allow. Also because who could memorize all of them anyway. This way you have a lot more flexibility.

Thanks - any idea when you'll be ready to send links to .9c?

Don't you think it's far enough along to call it 1.0 beta now? Sure seems pretty full featured to me.

Thanks for the MM and for the tutorial Stridor!
Rick

Thanks Rick. The tutorial was a big write and a long slog, it is nice to get some feedback. 0.9c is pretty much ready to go now, probably could call it 1.0 beta. Can't think of what else I could stuff in it?

Regards

S.

[Stridor]

Version 0.9c is posted post #0. You *will* need the 0.9a full install to use otherwise it won't work.

This is a code version only, none of the new models will be included until the next big release.

As always, this is not save file compatible with prior versions (you can use your HM + TM however).

Regards

S.

[Mraah]

Stridor,

Thanks for your TUT and your work!

I'll get 9c and holler your way ...

BTW, did you see my post about the HIRES mode?
This thread, p.11 , post #329

ROb

[Stridor]

Rob,

I think those bugs are fixed now (they are not in 0.9c)

[Mraah]

Ok ... I have 9c ... I'll have to try the HIRES mode again.

I do see a color ID problem ... It's calling MUD (96,96,78) or C8/#60604E as CLEAR terrain.

Rob

EDIT NOTE : Never mind ... the AI MAP you gave us has mud 96,96,78 ... should read 64,64,16 .

Not your bug ... just a color typo from the other palette ... phew

[Mraah]

Oh yes ... 9c is a winner ... It does a MUCH better job all around ... including dropping autogen (it seems).

Screenie of a couple of SL boards slapped together ... 110910 ... rough draft.

Rob