Tutorial:CompleteMapMaking(Wannes)

== Complete Map Makign tutorial == by Wannes

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Wannes, a few comments. Use the 'Show Preview' button on the bottom of the Edit page to preview your page before saving it. Each time you save a page, it appears in the Recent Changes page. As you saved the page 4 times, it made 4 entry's. Things like that can quickly clog up the page. Dont worry about it this time, not everyone notices the 'Show Preview' button, but just try to use that in future.

Also, once you have written it all, read through what you have written, looking for any spelling or grammatical errors, to save people having to come through and clean it up. Again, dont worry about it this time, as it is what we are here for, but at least proof-read your entrys before posting them in the future.

Thanks,
- Maelstrom

(PS, just delete this text next time you edit.)

Thx for the comment Mael I'll make better use of the preview function (I did notice it)

I know I make alot of typo's and grammar mistakes Problem is I don't spot half of my mistakes when I read my own text (I checked most parts for mistakes) but I'll make sure I correct everythign when ist finished and get someoen to take care of some evil grammar mistakes

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Hello everyone, In this tutorial i'm gonna try to learn you everything you need to know to make your first decent map.

First i want to thank Maelstorm and aGorm for their tutorials, they learned me alot.

Things You need:

An image editing program like Photoshop (which I will use in the rest of this tutorial), Paintshop Pro, . . .

Mapconv: This is the program that converts the Bitmap files you will be making into something that Spring can use (meaning a .smf and .smt file) This program comes in 2 versions, Mothers mapconv and the "normal" one In the rest of this tutorial I will be using mothers Mapconv

Map creation tools (optional): These programs help you making heightmaps, generate heightmaps, and apply textures to them. Examples are:

• Terragen (Mars was made with the random terrain function in terragen by SJ)
• L3DT
• World Machine.

-*add links later*-

If you are plannign to make big maps 16x16 and more you really need a good cpu and alot of memory and HD space. Especially when you are going to make everything in Photoshop.

The Parts of the Map

Each map contains 4 parts (3 parts on the normal mapconv)

The texture Map:

This defines how the terrain for your map will look. It needs to be a 24 bit bitmap, with dimensions that are a multiple of 1024. A 16x16 map (you see this at spring lobby) equals a 8192x8192 pixels bitmap. As you will soon notice these bitmaps have huge sizes. In order to compress these large bitmaps to a small mapfiles they created somethign named tiles.

A tile is a a small picture of a terrain liek grass or sand or water. when you fill up your whole map with 1 or more tiles, mapconv can see this and make good use of it to compress your map. So its important you use tiles because it makes the map sizes alot smalle but you should pay attention your maps don't get too boring because of the same tile you see everywhere.

You can't just use tiles of any size. mapconv will check your map for tiles that are a multiple of 32 pixels. So you can use 32x32 64x64 . . . bigger tiles will usually be nicer on your map because its harder to spot u repeat the same tile over and over, but this also makes you map bigger. You can even use tiles like 32x64, as long as its a multiple of 32

So it important you find a good balance between the number of tiles you use and their size.

If you wnat to use tiles in Photoshop, do this: open the tile picture resize it to a multiple of 32, do edit->define pattern then go to the terrain picture and use edit -> fill and select the wanted pattern. on large bitmaps this may take some time. When u applied a couple of tiles liek this you can make em belnd in to eachother using the eraser on a low opacity.

You can also use terragen to generate you a texture map, using an imported heightmap or one you made inside terragen. Although I can give you no further info about the use of terragen because I don't know alot about it either.

The Heightmap

This is the key part of your map. It defines everything about the heights of your map (including water).

these are the basics: you heightmap must only contain black and whiote colors, and must be textmapsizeX/8 +1 x textmapsizeY/8+1 so if you ahev a 8192 x 8192 texture map you got to ahve a 1025 x 1025 heightmap. The whiter somethign is, the higher it will be in spring and black is the lowest your map can be.

so basicly what you do is you paint your whoel map grey (usually I take 127 127 127) and then add white and black where you want mountains and valleys

I'm not very good at making heightmaps myself so maybe someone else can write some things here the way I do it: I only use photoshop , take a white brush on very low opacity and start drawling a mountain on my map. It takes alot of time and patience making it very smoot. the blur tools helps alot and teh surface blur filter helps alot too (or any otehr blut filter). if you want to make your terrain you are goign to build a little interesting you shouldn't leave it all perfectly flat. There are many ways of doing this, you can use the filter->render-> clouds or some thigns in the filer->noise menu(remember not to use colors!) after apply ing these filers you can try to put opacity of that layer low or merge it with the otehr layers (don't use this, but might be better)

The Metal Map

Aah this is an easy one : ) it uses teh same dimensions as the heightmap. The normal mapconv uses this map to place the metal and geovents on, but mothers mapconv has a special feature layer for the geo's (see later) so the metal map just keeps track of all the metal on your map.

It uses red to represent Metal , so you can use red goign from 0 -255 to defien your metal. Remember that white = all colors so when you make a white map with red dots your whoel map will be covered with metal. on the normal mapconv this will be even worse because white allso contaisn green (which it uses for geo's) so the enire map wille b full of geo's, and because each green pixel represents a geo this will cause a big error when you start your map.

so allways paint your map black (love that song) first and then add red dots (unless you are makign a metalmap)

The Feature Map

This is for Mothers mapconv only it uses same dimensions as teh height and metalmap.

GEO's: it uses green 255 to represent a geo add 1 pixel to add one geo on your map don't place alot of green pixels next to eachotehr because this will make spring crash.

TREE's it uses green color 200-215 to represent trees of 16 differant types

GRASS:

it uses blue color 0-255 0 = no grass 255 = full grass

FEATURES:

• • • taken from motehrs mapconv readme***

Red Channel: 255 - feature of type on first line of text file specified with 254 - " " second " " "

ie. fs.txt has armjeth_dead on the first line, so a pixel of 255 Blue places an armjeth_dead !

Format is one feature type per line. These features currently must be found in the .tdf files in the mods/<modname.sd7>/features filesystem.

• • • taken from motehrs mapconv readme***

Using Mapconv

ok now you have your 4 maps, copy them into mothersmapconv folder

now you have to get mapconv to work. You can edit the .bat file or do this: goto start-> run and type "cmd" this will open a dospromt for those that don't knwo dos, use cd.. to go up one level cd "mapname" to change folder and "d:" to go to your D drive navigate to the mapconv folder.