Map Maker Beta ...

[Mraah]

Stridor,

I'm having a problem with the LABEL and AI MAP controls ...

From your tut ...

Once again this control is at the very bottom of the main UI pane so you may need to left click and drag scoll the control into view.

I'm not seeing where I can click and drag scroll the control into view.

Rob

[rickier65]

Rob -

You can click on an unused part of the left pane and drag, click hold and drag.

(between the alpah and density label - or even right on the Structure word works), well at least for me.

Rick

[Mraah]

ORIGINAL: Rick

Rob -

You can click on an unused part of the left pane and drag, click hold and drag.

(between the alpah and density label - or even right on the Structure word works), well at least for me.

Rick

Doh !! My scrolling technique is lame to say the least !! [:D]

Thanks!

[Stridor]

"Some men just want to watch the world burn ..."

MM now supports particle emmiters for extra flavour - yum!

[spellir74]

ORIGINAL: Stridor

"Some men just want to watch the world burn ..."

MM now supports particle emmiters for extra flavour - yum!

Cool.

[rickier65]

I downloaded the update to .9c, but now when I try to build a map, when it displays in SceneEditor, all I have is a plain white map, regardless of what txtures I try.

When I first updated, I did have to go into windows properties on the htm file and "unblock" (it showed blocked originally).

This is on a laptop running IE7, 1.5Mhz Celeron, 450MB Ram

I also tried calling up Sceneeditor to view the new map independent of MM - still got white map.

I'm going to try Scene editor on another, stgandard map. And then I'll try going back to version.9a and seeing if it makes a difference.

EDIT:

Ok - did some more checking looks like this might be on my system. Other maps also had problems in Scene Edit (they show initially, but then if I try panning around they get blocks of white until entire map is white except for structures.).

So I went back to MM, put in a structure, it displayed, more, but still not able to use very well on this system. It appears like I'm gettikng a white "plane" sitting over the rest of the terrain. Strange behavior, but probably my system is problem.


thanks,
Rick

[rickier65]

Well - I seem to be going in the wrong direction. I put mm.9c on my desktop system. (After concluding that MM or at least scene edit part doesn't work on my laptop).

On my desktop I can build the map, and change texture, and apply a base texture to 'mix' textures as in the Tutorial. I can also create dirt road texture. and it gets applied to the map.

However, when I assign any other texture, such as light or heavy woods, or plowed fields, none of them get shown on the map.

I looks like textures assigned to colors that are not "PC:K std". don't get assigned. At least that seems to be the common aspect of which textures arent assigned.

below is a screen shot after assigning textrues to roads, dirt fields, light woods, hvy woods.

This was working in .9a, but doesnt seem to be working in .9c.

Thanks,
Rick

[Stridor]

Thanks Rick.

Bug found + fixed (and several others).

New version 0.9d is out, includes these fixes + adds smoke plume effect.

You can find it on post #1 of this thread.

Regards

S.

[rickier65]

Hey great - I was beginning to think it was just user dumbness.

Rick

[rickier65]

The MM.9d patch has it working on my desktop now! Thanks. (still no joy on my laptop, but I thinks thats a problem with graphics on the laptop - it's a fairly old system. - the game runs on it, but the editors don't work very well - well scene edit doesn't work very well anyway).

Thanks Stridor -

Rick

[RyanCrierie]

Kind of a stupid suggestion:

But is it now possible to design a "template generator" that ties into the map maker?
 
Basically, it would run off some basic assumptions:
 
Roads/Open Terrain; Where vehicles are most likely to be:
Rubble/Forest: Where infantry and atgs are most lilkely to be
 
Think it's doable?

[rickier65]

I've been putzing around with mm9c - Its pretty neat that you can go through a dozen different combinations of textrure - transparencies - order in about as many minutes.

I'm not sure I've settled yet on the textures, but thought I'd post a pic with some of the auto gen houses. I haven't done any tweaking yet, so there is some overlap. And I haven't done any height scultping yet.

But MM.9cworking fine so far.

Thanks
Rick

[Stridor]

ORIGINAL: RyanCrierie

Kind of a stupid suggestion:

But is it now possible to design a "template generator" that ties into the map maker?

Basically, it would run off some basic assumptions:

Roads/Open Terrain; Where vehicles are most likely to be:
Rubble/Forest: Where infantry and atgs are most lilkely to be

Think it's doable?

Doable? Sure. Difficult? Yes. Likely? Maybe.

[RyanCrierie]

Is it possible to have map maker be more specific about what it changes?
 
For example, I've worked up a pretty good revision of my "State Farm" map; and I used map maker to randomly generate houses for a village; and I then edited the file in Scene Editor to remove houses bunched together, etc.
 
Now that I've gotten the map to look the way I want; I want to make a winter version of it; but that's problematic with map maker; since it would then "randomly" regenerate the trees (not a problem, since I need to replace them with winter ones); but very problematic with my modified structure locations, which I've cut out the locations for on the AI Map....
 
So I'm wondering if there could be a sort of "palette swap" utility, that loads up an existing map (without using mapmaker.xml); and then allows you to swap textures and structures (e.g from Grass.dds to snow.dds) and (KharkovTree01 to WinterStormTree01)...?[&:]

[Mraah]

ORIGINAL: RyanCrierie
So I'm wondering if there could be a sort of "palette swap" utility, that loads up an existing map (without using mapmaker.xml); and then allows you to swap textures and structures (e.g from Grass.dds to snow.dds) and (KharkovTree01 to WinterStormTree01)...?[&:]

Ryan,

Yeah ... we need MM to be able to reverse engineer an entire existing map.

Perhaps it could be done ... I'm not a programmer but it seems MM can read all the info in the directory and spit out an MM format to display. It would have to scan every object for duplicates and group them into categories otherwise we would see an entry for every single tree,bush,structure (not bad), etc.

The only other way to fix your problem is for you to go in to the XML's and manually change the MM_XML settings and the sceneXML settings (ie change grass to snow).

We'll have to see[&:].
Rob

[Stridor]

ORIGINAL: RyanCrierie

Is it possible to have map maker be more specific about what it changes?

For example, I've worked up a pretty good revision of my "State Farm" map; and I used map maker to randomly generate houses for a village; and I then edited the file in Scene Editor to remove houses bunched together, etc.

Now that I've gotten the map to look the way I want; I want to make a winter version of it; but that's problematic with map maker; since it would then "randomly" regenerate the trees (not a problem, since I need to replace them with winter ones); but very problematic with my modified structure locations, which I've cut out the locations for on the AI Map....

So I'm wondering if there could be a sort of "palette swap" utility, that loads up an existing map (without using mapmaker.xml); and then allows you to swap textures and structures (e.g from Grass.dds to snow.dds) and (KharkovTree01 to WinterStormTree01)...?[&:]

Ryan what you want would need to be a sepeate program or an extension to MM. I will consider it.

For now you can achieve the same effect by simply opening the map scene.xml in notepad and doing a global find and replace. Eg replace kharkov_tree01 with tree01. That will turn all your summer trees, winter and keep them all in the same locations. You can do the same with the buildings and textures etc. It is a simple quick fix for the moment.

Regards

S.

[RyanCrierie]

[:D]So I just got a new camera, and I've been taking screenshots for textures for PZK and skyboxes. I'll post them soon

[rickier65]

Still working with this. Have textures, structures. Started laying in the terrain. Taking me a bit longer than Stridor (-- ha ha - its taking me a LOT longer). Found I needed to load my original SL mapboard as an AI map to trace the hills. Ive only done the center part of map. Still have more work to do. After I finish with MM - I'll still need to load into Scene Edit to put edit some of the structures (have some of them jammed into each other from the random generator)

Couple of questions and a pic for those of you a bit better at this.

1) If I make the areas of structure color in the terrain map smaller, will that avoid having structures jammed into each other?

2) If I want to add noise to the whole map, will pressing the noise button do that? Or do I need to press the moise button then move my cursor of areas to make those areas noisy (haven't gotten to this point yet but thought I"d ask). EDIT: RTFM - yes the noise and smooth work on whole map (but apparently the filter button will work to smooth particular areas).

3) I notice that the hills aren't jumping out at me when I view the map - will this change much when I start working with the skybox?

4). I seem to have put a number of texture layers in thisthing. I'm thinking about adding some more to give a slight change to the snow cover on the hills, but is there any way to quatitatively determine the impact this will have on performance?

Thanks!

Rick

[Stridor]

ORIGINAL: Rick
Couple of questions and a pic for those of you a bit better at this.

1) If I make the areas of structure color in the terrain map smaller, will that avoid having structures jammed into each other?

Rick, change the structure density value. Whilst the MM can do random structures it is probably best if they are hand placed. Use the autogen for other stuff.

2) If I want to add noise to the whole map, will pressing the noise button do that? Or do I need to press the moise button then move my cursor of areas to make those areas noisy (haven't gotten to this point yet but thought I"d ask). EDIT: RTFM - yes the noise and smooth work on whole map (but apparently the filter button will work to smooth particular areas).

Set the magnitude value to small, medium or large. The smooth and noise buttons then apply to all non locked areas. You can independently smooth only the areas you want with the mouse and the filter option (left mouse to smooth, right mouse to add noise)

3) I notice that the hills aren't jumping out at me when I view the map - will this change much when I start working with the skybox?

??? You can set the height values with the gray scale controls. So you can turn a mole hill into a mountain. The problem is that all white snow areas (or big blocks of colour) are naturally hard to see elevational changes, change the textures on the hill a bit (esp on the sides) to get the height effect you are looking for. Every 3D engine does this, even minis terrain boards do it (see the excellent flames of war boards)

4). I seem to have put a number of texture layers in thisthing. I'm thinking about adding some more to give a slight change to the snow cover on the hills, but is there any way to quatitatively determine the impact this will have on performance?

No just run it and see what happens. I think performance will vary depending on vid gard and amount of gfx memory they have anyway.

Thanks!

Rick

NP

Regards

S.

[rickier65]

ORIGINAL: Stridor

??? You can set the height values with the gray scale controls. So you can turn a mole hill into a mountain. The problem is that all white snow areas (or big blocks of colour) are naturally hard to see elevational changes, change the textures on the hill a bit (esp on the sides) to get the height effect you are looking for. Every 3D engine does this, even minis terrain boards do it (see the excellent flames of war boards)

Yeah - I used those controls to build the hills - There pretty close to what I think they ought to be now (I'm acutally building a replica of some Squad leader mapboards. I'm going to finish with the skyboxes, then I'll go into scene edit and finish the structures. Working this in between a couple of other projects.

When I first started building the height map with MM, it was pretty slow going, but by the time I finished it was working fairly well (well - I was working it fairly well - I dont think MM changed -g-).

Thanks again.

Rick


Thanks for response!

Rick