Pictorial Map Building

[Mad Russian]

Here is my intention for this field. To turn it brown using the medium brown from the map.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

And now I have a brown field that I can add any texture to, give it any kind of an environmental assignment such as mud or wheat fields and assign the grass mods that I wish.

All of these assignments are done by color.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

And I want to make a field using a color that's not on this map. So I pull my color swatch file up go to the 4th row down and the second color from the left, the one with the yellow X in it and use the eye dropper to select that color. Then I fill in the field with that color.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

I now have 4 fields colored. 3 with colors from the map itself and 1 that I brought the color from another source.

This is what these fields look like.

They are all very distinctive colors and should be easily identifiable when it comes time to assign attributes to them.


Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

In the top 3 fields the farmer has been lucky and the ground conditions are consistent. In the reddish brown field though things aren't all one condition.

There is a spot in the ground here that's more like the field that's colored a light green. So, there is a patch of ground in this field that is the same as the ground in the light green field.

This patch could be a color all it's own and unique to this spot of ground. In this case, for now at least, I have it being the same as the light green field. Note however that whatever assignments I make to the light green color will also apply to this patch in the reddish brown field.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

Up to now you've all seen just how easy it is to generate a height map and a terrain map. While that's GREAT it's what comes next that separates Stridor's work from the rest of the world's editors.

There is no other map editor that even comes close to the texturing that MM can do. Not that I'm aware of.

There are 11 selections in the Textures features of MM.

Name - you name what the terrain feature is and then give it a texture. You can name it anything you like. From something as mundane as Main Road to Brandenburger Strasse. It's your terrain feature you name it.

To the right of the name box is the file folder that holds the basic textures. You click on the folder to get a texture. Any texture can be assigned to any color you choose.

Just to the right of the texture folder is a check mark that activates the texture and adds it to the map. You would click the check mark anytime you make a change to your named texture.

The last button on that row is an X. This is to delete this texture.

Under the name box are two selection boxes the left one is marked as X while the right one is marked as Y. These boxes are the number of times that the texture is recreated in each the X and Y textures. I normally make these numbers the same so that my textures are uniform but they don't have to be and you could create some very interesting effects by making these numbers different from each other.

This two numbers are size relative to the texturing you are going to do to your map. Consider that you can get a texture in 1 huge piece or as many as 999 pieces. That's that you can do with the X and Y texturing numbers. The 1 is a huge rough texture with 999 being a texture so smooth as to be a single solid color with no texturing at all.

The R number allows you to rotate the texture grid to be aligned in any direction you want or to give your moving water a direction.

To the right of the R box is the blur factor box. This gives an individual texture a blur factor that you determine.

The last entry box on the right is the opacity box. This allows you to set how solid the object on the map appears. For water and any other texture as well.

The C box is for setting the color on the map that will be affected by the texture and parameters that you are assigning to it. The box to the right of the C shows the color affected.

The display window shows the names of the textures. There are position arrows that allow you move a particular texture up and down the list if you want to group them.

The box to the right of the texture list box is the graphic display for the texture you have selected for this color of the map.

Put this altogether and it allows you to:
* Name your textures with any name you like.
* Use any texture you want with any color.
* Make changes to the texture after you have assigned it and save those. changes.
* To delete any textures you don't want.
* To set the texture granularity to either extremely fine or extremely course and everything in between.
* Rotate your textures in any direction you want. Control all aspects of water, whether it's still or moving.
* Set the amount of blur to the edge of a texture for each individual texture on the map. Where some edges are soft and blend in others can be hard and sharply defined.
* You set the opacity of all objects on the map. From completely invisible to completely solid and any setting in between.
* You set the color each texture is assigned.
* You can group your textures together for ease of recognition and checking settings.
* Lastly you can see what the texture looks like in the graphics display.

What does all that actually mean to you?

It means that the combination of settings in the Textures features can create an almost limitless array of display textures for your maps. There are no single tiles to deal with that always look the same. In fact, unless you were to use the default settings or you copied the exact settings, no two maps will ever be textured the same.

In the coming screen shots I'll give examples of just how differently the same textures can be displayed.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

Here are the list of available texture types. As more textures are added PC will get to a point where any part of the globe can be mapped and put in the game.

Good Hunting.

MR

[rickier65]

this is a good tutorial on Map Maker MR.

Maybe Erik could sticky it.

Thanks
rick

[Mad Russian]

Here is the place to stop for the night.

This is what the map currently looks like as I use solid blocks of color to fill in the map. 2km maps are alot of work if you rework your maps like I do but the end result is well worth it IMO.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

Here is my original Google Earth location screen shot side by side with my current terrain map.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

The colors on your map are the most important thing to consider. Each color can have a texture assigned to it.

If you only have one color you can only assign 1 texture to it. You can also only assign 1 environmental attribute to a single color.

Whether you have one field or multiple fields if they are all in the same color they get the same treatment on your game map.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

Of course the choice is yours. You can have several fields and each of them be a different color. That would allow you to assign a different texture and environmental attribute to each field.

You could still assign the same attributes to each of them if you wanted and only change the X/Y parameters, direction of the texture, the blur or opacity.

You could make them all have exactly the same texture parameters and give them different environmental attributes. One field could have tall wheat and the next could have spring flowers with the textures in both fields being exactly the same.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

Or you could do like I did with my 2km map. You can mix and match however you want. I have 34 fields on this map that have 7 colors attached to them. Then I mixed up the different color patterns and that will give me the opportunity to mix up the textures or keep them the same. Whatever I want to do with them.

Generally speaking the larger the map the more complex the terrain will be and the more colors you will be dealing with.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

Here is our original screen shot of the area just to the east of Strausberg and here is our terrain map for use in MM. I have not put in the coloring for the village or the forest yet. At the moment we'll be looking at the textures for the fields.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

There are:

9 number 1 fields.
4 number 2 fields.
1 number 3 field.
4 number 4 fields.
7 number 5 fields.
6 number 6 fields.
3 number 7 fields.

A total of 34 fields represented by 7 colors.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

What you've seen in this thread up to now has been shown in various ways before. What I'll show you now hasn't been shown before. I'll show the capabilities of the graphics selections and their impact on your ability to make a single texture display in literally hundreds of different graphic representations.


Here is the graphic display of the plowed field texture. It has been applied to all the colors in the texturing work area.

I will make changes only to the X/Y parameters of the textures, all the other parameters will be made the identical.

R will be 0
Blur will be 1.5
Opacity will be 1

Then the X/Y numbers will be:
Field 1 X/Y both at 10
Field 2 X/Y both at 50
Field 3 X/Y both at 100
Field 4 X/Y both at 150
Field 5 X/Y both at 200
Field 6 X/Y both at 400
Field 7 X/Y both at 750





Checking the looks of the textures in the SceneEdit program the cross roads fields look like this.







The gray line that divides the screen shot is the main road. Shown in the fields screen shot as the light blue intersecting lines.

You can see the major graphics display differences between the different levels of refinement. From a level 10 in Field 1 in the upper right hand corner to a level 750 in Field 7 in the lower left hand corner.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

That's a pretty dramatic difference in SceneEdit but what does it look like in the game?

Here's an ingame screen shot.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

And another in game screen shot.

Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

One last look at the in game graphics display for the fields.


Good Hunting.

MR

[Mad Russian]

It will also soon become apparent that you have a serious choice to make as to how you want your map graphics to display.

Do you want them to be course as in Field 1? Or with almost no texture showing as in Field 7?

You want a natural look? A board game map look? Or something in between?

How about a nice smooth field in one place and a rough one on the other side of the road? Or one with dirt here and one with rocks on the other side of the road?

There are 999 settings for both the X and the Y.

That translates to 998,001 choices just for the X and Y parameters for a single texture.

Good Hunting.

MR