Help needed with Map making

[Arralen]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:

quote:

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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)

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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]

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]

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:

quote:

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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

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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]

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.

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]

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:

quote:

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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

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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!)

[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by PhilD:

AFAIK, the only thing that Dom2 looks for in the .tga file is the white dots as capitals.

Good to know.

Ok so its focus on the white dots . . . thats right the really, really, small white dots.

Keir