Help needed with Map making

Keir Maxwell · #1 January 14th, 2004, 03:14 AM

Hi there,

I'm sitting down to make my first dominions map and I realise I'm not sure where to go. I have my .tga with the physical outlay of Middle Earth with mountains, forests, roads etc and its time to prepare it for the map editor. I think I need to put in color for terrain and a white dot for each province but other than that I'm all at sea - help please!

Is there a guide to this somewhere?

cheers

Keir

#2 January 14th, 2004, 06:45 AM

Keir, I use mostly Gandalf's little helpful hints and files he has at his site:

http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion/

Try looking through and pulling anything with mapediting to see what things are and of course, just asking Gandalf when you run into a problem.

Other than that I can't give you much advise. I believe Gandalf and maybe Pocus would have more insight.

Arralen · #3 January 14th, 2004, 07:16 AM

It's all easy:

1) Make shure it has the right size for DOM .. something between 1500 and 3000 pixels wide (the standard maps are 1600, the 240-provinves "orania" is 2400). Use more pixels according to the number of provinces.

2) Draw the borders. Preferably use a paint programm that can do layers (as GIMP; you'll have to convert the image to another format, as tga doesn't know about layers). Put the landscape on the background layer, add a transparent foreground layer to draw borders on. Maybe add a third layer to add additional graphics to the map (special icons, text etc.). Add a fourth layer for the province markers.
SAVE !! (I would suggest saving often, and keeping at least one save from every step)

3) If you're satisfied, merge border and background layer and maybe do some smoothing, anti-aliasing etc.

4) Put the province designators on the 4th layer. Keep an eye on correct positioning - the base of the flags will appear right above the white pixel. Make shure nothing will be hidden by another graphic in the game.

5) Merge the special icons (which you like a little bit more crispy, I suppose) and the province designators into the background layer.
Save as .tga

6) Make yourself a .map file. Simply cannibalize the file for another map. Copy it, remove all "landname" and "terrain" commands, trim the neighbour list to the actual number of provinces you have on the map. (If you don't know and get the number wrong .. I don't have a clue what happens.). Change #imagefile to point to your .tga
Save as "mywork.map"

7) Fire up DOM. "Load map 'mywork' ", without .map extension .
Go through the endless tedious and boring work of assigning correct neighbours and terrains.
You'll really appreciate the day when Gandalf and PhilD will get that DOM2-random map generator up and running

hope this is helpful ..

A.

[ January 14, 2004, 22:48: Message edited by: Arralen ]

Keir Maxwell · #4 January 14th, 2004, 11:29 AM

Thanks heaps Arralen. This gives me plenty to work with.

Cheers

Keir

Gandalf Parker · #5 January 14th, 2004, 04:22 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Arralen:
It's all easy:
Go through the endless tedious and boring work of assigning correct neighbours and terrains.
You'll really appreciate the day when Gandalf and PhilD will get that DOM2-random map generator up and running

Heehee. Arralen should know. He manually converted an old DomMap map for play in Dom2. Excellent job (I still play it)

The new Dommap is getting closer. I will be testing a new Version today.

Arralen · #6 January 15th, 2004, 12:54 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:

quote:
Originally posted by Arralen:
It's all easy:
Go through the endless tedious and boring work of assigning correct neighbours and terrains.
...

Heehee. Arralen should know. He manually converted an old DomMap map for play in Dom2. Excellent job (I still play it)

You can bet on that.

I'm still working on that map.

Did an extended Version - added some castles for the AI to conquer, as it still doesn't build them.

Working on a eXtra extended Version .. little bit of a surprise here

Hope I get them at least partially finished and playable within the next days.

A.

[ January 14, 2004, 22:55: Message edited by: Arralen ]

Keir Maxwell · #7 January 15th, 2004, 10:51 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Arralen:

2) Draw the borders.

I read somewhere that this wasn't strictly necessary in dom2 and Sabers instructions for creating a map file for all units doesn't seem to contain any instructions to put in borders. How does it work?

Help appreciated.

Keir

Arralen · #8 January 15th, 2004, 03:03 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:

quote:
Originally posted by Arralen:

2) Draw the borders.

I read somewhere that this wasn't strictly necessary in dom2 and Sabers instructions for creating a map file for all units doesn't seem to contain any instructions to put in borders. How does it work?

Help appreciated.

Keir

You don't need borders, except for the players

Actually, the devs say borders (with a certain color) are used by the game for neighbour-guessing when using the "new map"-option, or when starting "guess neighbours" with the map already loaded into the editor.

But I found this neighbour-guessing the one and only secure way to make DOM crash .. so maybe it doesn't work that well

Simply use a transparent layer, a sharp-edged brush and a color of your liking and start drawing borders. Doing this on a seperate layer makes corrections and alterations much easier .. and you don't have to reload the map if you really screw up with a painting tool - the landscape in the background will be nice and unharmed.

Unless you merge layers accidently

A.

Gandalf Parker · #9 January 15th, 2004, 09:55 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Arralen:
Did an extended Version - added some castles for the AI to conquer, as it still doesn't build them.

I did a fun thing for Dominions 1 where I turned Man into a nation with no deity and no special units. Then I scattered castles/labs/temples all over a large map and assigned half of them to Man. Man become kindof the leader of the Independents.

Quote:

Working on a eXtra extended Version .. little bit of a surprise here

Glance at either of the .yab files in http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion/ and send me email if you have any questions or want me to setup a nightly re-run of a map file for you. (they are plain text files to you can view them with any word processor)

PhilD · #10 January 15th, 2004, 10:59 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:

quote:
Originally posted by Arralen:

2) Draw the borders.

I read somewhere that this wasn't strictly necessary in dom2 and Sabers instructions for creating a map file for all units doesn't seem to contain any instructions to put in borders. How does it work?

Help appreciated.

Keir

The game itself won't add any neighbours to those that are defined in the .map file; it will use only those that are explicitly written in the .map file. So those borders are only there as a visual help for players.

AFAIK, the only thing that Dom2 looks for in the .tga file is the white dots as capitals. I wish they had changed this so that it was all written in the .map file, and the .tga were only a visual thing: it would make it soooo much simpler... (It's probably too late to change that, though - changing it in a patch would mean old maps would become unusable, unless they let some new command override the current dom2 default... plus some simple conVersion utility... hey, it might work!)