MapEditing Faq anuwhere?

[Edi]

General question regarding map editing resources: Is there collective interest for an improved Version of Maltrease's list?

I was thinking along the lines of one where the different units with the same name (e.g. Heavy Infantry, 8 varieties, or the various black plate infantries) have their equipment listed alongside the unit ID number, makes it easier to slap whichever you happen to need without needing to laboriously find out what you're in fact getting by firing up test games all the time.

In other news, the FR map is almost ready, just a couple of more days. I'm just basically tinkering with superfluous details until it fits *my* idea of how an FR map should be.

Edi

[DrPraetorious]

Baseline questions - I have a map, saved a .tga file.

When I open it in the map editor I get a row of extremely closely spaced banners across the bottom of the screen.

How do I specify provinces, how do I add and/or delete them? Even a province with no neighbors is still part of the game.

The .map file doesn't seem to include any coordinates whatsoever - just province names and numbers. So the map editor is somehow interpolating the locations of provinces from the map I supply it as a background?

Any advice on how to get that algorithm to behave well, if that is indeed the case? Should the borders be some particular color? I notice that they are always either dark red or dark blue in the maps that came with the game.

Why on earth didn't they just let you plant the flags wherever you want by clicking on them and dragging them around?

[Chazar]

DrPraetorious said:
The .map file doesn't seem to include any coordinates whatsoever - just province names and numbers. So the map editor is somehow interpolating the locations of provinces from the map I supply it as a background?

The mechanism is actually pretty inconvenient for the map-maker and pretty convenient for the programmer:

Every pure white pixel represents a province; all white pixels are then numbered from bottom left to top right.

So Dom2 is only looking for white pixels, everything else is ignored by the program.

The map editor however tries to interpret province boundaries if they are in some unknown kind of red color, but I would not rely on that. Just remove all neighborships with the button and then set them by hand (left click sets neighborship, ctrl-left click removes - I wondered quite for some time until I figured that out).

I think a mapmaking FAQ would be very helpful!

[Chazar]

PS: It is a good advice to keep the white pixels in a different layer of some more advanced multilayered graphics file! I have not done this, thus I cannot easily edit the mapfile without taking care to relocate white pixels.

In any case, altering provinces after making the mapfile means renumbering the .map file too! Keep that in mind!

[DrPraetorious]

Okay, so the project is -

I take my map, which can be anything. I might try to add red borders if I want to have the automapper draw province connections for me but this doesn't actually work.

I make sure that the map contains no pure-white pixels (a global color swap should take care of this.)

I add another layer, and on this other layer I place a white square everywhere that I want to have a province? When the map is played, you have to click on these white squares to select provinces, so they should be fairly big, yes?

Can anyone recommend a free (as in beer) piece of software I could use to do this natively in .tga files?

[Chazar]

DrPraetorious said:Can anyone recommend a free (as in beer) piece of software I could use to do this natively in .tga files?

As far as I know, .tga files do not support layers, sorry! I meant that you should keep your layered mapfile in your favorite file format and export it to .tga whenever needed. At least that is what I figured so far that I should have done. I havent, so I am stuck with either redoing everything or fiddling around with my tga file...

[DrPraetorious]

I should add - my problem now is when I convert from .jpg to .tga some of my squares get fuzzy for some reason.

[Chazar]

DrPraetorious said:
I should add - my problem now is when I convert from .jpg to .tga some of my squares get fuzzy for some reason.

Maybe because of jpg compression? Make sure that the exported tga has the same resolution as your source jpg file, for otherwise resampling destroys the white pixels.

You can turn on tga compression, for it is loss-less and therfore does not kill white pixels, but jpg-compression will smoth colors and implies harmful artifacts, so turn jpg compression and color smoothing off entirely.

Another source of trouble could be a conversion of the color-depth 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit. Try to open the .tga file after an export...

[Chazar]

DrPraetorious said:
When the map is played, you have to click on these white squares to select provinces, so they should be fairly big, yes?

NO! Per Province you should place a single white pixel only: When clicking on the map, the game simply selects the province of the nearest white pixel to the click point!

Furthermore, the province flags a placed on top of each white pixel, so you can easily see where provinces are. Therefore in my map, I choose a high resolution in order to hide the little white spots for esthetic reasons. However this has other problems, like being unable to zoom out to view the entire map...

...there are also people around who propose to mark the white pixel by adding a small btight yellow circle around each white pixel, so that a human can spot the provinces easily without the need for dom2 to display flags. This especially helps others to rework your .tga to create variants (At least I think that this is the reason why the map generator does it). However, the circle must be bright yellow instead of white, since each pure white pixel will be a province of its own!