Tutorial:BasicMapMaking(Maelstrom)
Basic Map making
This tutorial is designed to help people make a basic map. Things covered in this tutorial include:
- Making a basic concept drawing
- Making and using tiles
- Placing major map features
- Making use of layers to easily design and modify the map
Step 1: Concept Drawing
First things first, we need an idea of what the map will be about. For this map, I have made the
following picture:
Green areas will be grass, Grey is mountains and Blue is water. This design does not need to be a major
work of art, it just needs to convey the basic idea of the map, so that you have something to work off
later.
Step 2: Making Tiles
The secret to small file sizes for maps is tiles. A Tile is a small picture that is repeated on the
texture many times. This texture is then tiled by the map converter, and a 400mb 10240x10240 pixel big
bitmap is transformed into a 200kb map file. The tiling system is very powerfull and very handy, but we
still need to give it a hand.
Tiles in spring are based on 32x32 peices of the texture. Therefore, for our tiling to work correctly,
our tile needs to be a size that is a multiple of 32. Sizes include:
- A basic, but boring looking 32x32 pixels
- A slightly better, but still slightly repetetive 64x64 pixels
- A good size of 128x128 pixels
- A large 256x256 pixels
Tiles can also be rectangular, and can be anything between the numbers mentioned above, but still need to
be multiples of 32. To look good, tiles also need to be seamless, so when they are repeated no obvious
join can be seen between the tiles.
For my map, as it has grass, mountains and a river I need three tiles.
- A green Grass Tile
- A grey Mountain Tile
- A blue River tile
Step 3: Making the texture
- Rest unfinished, will finish later tonight -
