Mapdev:Tutorial Simple

Beginners Tutorial Stage 1

This beginners tutorial is aimed at getting you from nothing, to something simple, from which you can then extend by looking through the more detailed technical documentation.

What you will need

• A raster image editor, such as GIMP or Adobe Photoshop, etc
• 7zip
• MapConvNG
• a copy of the map blueprint

There are a multitude of other tools you can use to make maps, however for the purposes of this beginners tutorial, these are the only ones you will need. Check the tools section for more information.

Preparation

1. Extract the mapcontainer.sdd folder from the blueprint archive into your working directory.
Your directory structure should look like this:

working directory
  |-mapcontainer.sdd/
    |-mapinfo.lua
    |-mapoptions.lua
    |-LuaGaia/
      |- ...
    |-mapconfig/
      |- ...
    |-maphelper/
      |- ...
    |-maps/
      |- ...

2. Rename the mapcontainer.sdd folder to the name of your map, eg. mymap.sdd
3. Edit the following fields in the mapinfo.lua file, ignore the rest for now.
   • name
   • shortname
   • description
   • author
   • version (just put like v1 or something in here)

Create Height map

For this tutorial we will be creating a 4x4 size map, which is relatively small.

1. Check the height page to get our image dimensions. In our case a 4x4 map yields a image resolution of 257x257 pixels
2. Create a 257x257 greyscale image in your image editor
3. Draw the terrain.

	Tip
	Black represents the lowest elevation on the map, white represents the highest, in between lies all the shades of grey. Hard edges in the image will be cliffs, and smooth gradients will be ramps

Example

(picture of greyscale height map)	(picture of resulting game terrain )
Example Height Map	Ingame Result

4. Save the image to your working directory, call it heightmap.png

Create Texture Map

we need to create an image that defines the colour of the ground, checking the diffuse map page our diffuse image dimensions will be 2048x2048

1. create a 2048x2048 sized image, paint it in such a way that it compliments the height map
2. save it as diffuse.png

Create Resource Map

blah

Create Mini Map

blah blah

Download example

Here is a link to the map we have shown in these instructions.

Finalizing

continue to this page to compile and archive your map for play

I want more

continue to stage two