MapEditing Faq anuwhere?

[Edi]

Are the unit number lists available anywhere? It's a real ***** trying to assign some national units to indy provinces (such as Ulmish infantries) without having any idea of the id numbers.

Edi

[PDF]

Maltrease,
Your list is wonderful work !
As for your question, I don't know exactly what happens if you specify a unit name that is not unique, but I think it takes the first corresponding id (so id 19 for Heavy Cav).
Thuis has to be tested though.

But anyway it's relatively rare to need to have *that exact* sort of indy light inf , usually you want a Bane Lord, a Niefel Giant, a Vampire, or a group of Hoplites, and in this cases using the unit names is way easier and easy to read

[Edi]

Maltrease, I bow down before your awesomeness! Thank you, this list absolutely kicks arse!

*copy-paste, save as*

Gandalf, expect to hear from me sometime next week. The ice hocky world championships elimination round games today and my grandmother's funeral on Saturday are going to keep me busy, but I should be able to get the map ready in about a week and a half at the most, at which point I'm going to need some help getting it Online. Or more appropriately, my friend will, because there is no way I'm going to try and upload a 20 MB file through a 56k modem connection.

Edi

[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

[Merry Jolkar]

I am editing a map and would like to have the King of Banefires occupy a province, and cast high level magical spells when attacked. I can get him into the province using the .map file below, but he doesn't cast spells, presumably because he is level 0. How do I set his level? Thanks, Merry

#land 136
#nostart 136
#owner 0
#defence 0
#population 20000
#fort 21
#commander "King of Banefires"
#additem "Bone Armor"
#additem "Demon Whip"
#additem "Bane Blade"

[Kristoffer O]

Unfortunately he is stuck with puny research and doesn't have any meaningful spells to cast. Currently there is a default grimoire available to independent commanders, but it is likely that he decides that fire flies is less meaningful than attacking. A few commanders have special grimoires (mostly those that appear in special independent lands such as liches, divine mummies and frost fathers), but they are rare.

A new indep grimoire would of course be a nice thing to have in map editing.

[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?