Mapdev:Tutorial Intermediate

Beginners Tutorial Stage 2

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

• An image editor, such as GIMP or Adobe Photoshop, etc
• 7zip
• MapConvNG
• A copy of the map we used in the first tutorial
• This archive which contains a couple of things you will need.(features)

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.

Download example

• Here is a link to the map from the first tutorial to continue on with
• Here's a link to this finished tutorial

Map Features

Map features are the extra bits and bobs added to a map that give it extra bling eg. bushes, trees, houses, rocks etc. You can bundle them with your map, or you can create a dependency to external archives like SpringFeatures. For this tutorial we will be bundling the features with the map.

	Tip
	There is not a simple, solid, mature way to cover your map with features yet. Provided here are instructions for the simplest method, but its very time consuming and tedious. There are better methods that yield good results, you can find them listed in the features page.

Example

(example without features)	(example with specular)
Without Features	With Features

1. Unzip the additional stuff archive into your working directory
2. Copy the ... folders into your map.sdd directory
3. Edit the set.lua file to contain references to the map features

Specular Map

The specular map defines how shiny and the colour of the shine that the terrain is, it is useful for ice & snow, polished rock, metal, or wet ground types. The Specular map can be any size, and is stretched over the terrain.

Example

(example without specular)	(example with specular)
Without Specular Map	With Specular Map

1. Create a 1024x1024 RGB image
2. Paint it white

   	Tip
   	It is most often the case that you will leave the texture full white as most specular reflection is white, in certain circumstances though you will want to have coloured reflections.

3. Save the image to your working directory as spec_color.png

   Example

   (picture of specular color map)
   Example Specular Color Map

4. Create another 1024x1024 greyscale image
5. Paint it such that black is matt finish, and white is full specularity. you will probably want to keep it mostly black, with some slight grey around specific areas.
6. Save the image to your working directory as spec_value.png

   Example

   (picture of specular Value map)
   Example Specular Value Map

7. Combine the two images into one 1024x1024 RGBA image
8. Save the result as "working directory"/mymapname.sdd/maps/specular.png

Detail

Detail maps make the ground look great even when you are really close to it.

Example

(example without detail)	(example with detail)
Without Detail Maps	With Detail Maps

Creating the details map

1. Collect 4 detail textures that you would like to apply to your terrain and save them to your working directory. The detail textures will need to be tilable, and of the same resolution, resize them if necessary.
2. Save the detail textures to your working directory as detail_1.png (detail_2.png etc.)
3. Combine the 4 detail textures into an RGBA image.
4. Save the combined result to "working directory"/mymap.sdd/maps/details.png

Example

Individual Detail Textures	Combined Result

Creating the details distribution map

4. For each of the four detail textures:
   1. Create an 512x512 greyscale image
   2. Paint where you would like the detail texture to show, white for full strength, black for zero strength.
   3. Save the image to your working directory as detail_1_dist.png (detail_2_dist.png etc.)
5. Combine the 4 detail distribution maps into one RGBA image
6. Save the result to "working directory"/mymap.sdd/maps/details_dist.png

Example

Detail Distribution maps	Combined Result

Edit mapinfo.lua

1. Open mapinfo.lua in a text editor
2. blah

• tweak splat scales and multipliers

Splat Scales Illustrated

Lighting

could be fun to explain link to Mapdev:lighting

Examples

(Code goes here)	(example image goes here)
(Code goes here)	(example image goes here)
(Code goes here)	(example image goes here)
Example lighting variables	In game result

Review

From this tutorial you have been able to really increase the detail level of your map using: features, specular highlights, detail splatting and lighting.

Working directory should look something similar to this:

working directory
  |-mymapname.sdd/
  | |-features/
  | |-LuaGaia/
  | |-mapconfig/
  | | |-featureplacer/
  | | | |-set.lua
  | |-maphelper/
  | |-maps/
  | | |-details_dist.png
  | | |-details.png
  | | |-specular.png
  | |-objects3d/
  | |-unittextures/
  | |-mapinfo.lua
  | |-mapoptions.lua
  |-heightmap.png
  |-metalmap.png
  |-diffuse.png
  |-minimap.png
  |-detail_1.png
  |-detail_2.png
  |-detail_3.png
  |-detail_4.png
  |-detail_1_dist.png
  |-detail_2_dist.png
  |-detail_3_dist.png
  |-detail_4_dist.png
  |-specular_color.png
  |-specular_value.png

Finalizing

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

I want more

This concludes the Beginners tutorial, there are loads more things you can do with maps so have a look through the documentation and think out of the box (show pictures of novel concepts, like bridges, scripted terrain, map borders etc.