Excellent software for mapmakers

[NTJedi]

DominionsFAN said:
PS. Can you make a "basic" map in HoMM 3 [land,seas,trees,mountains], and upload it to imageshack? I would like to see it. If its possible make a 1280x1024 screenshot about it at least. Thanks in advance.

Unfortunately I'm out of town and at work and not returning home for 5 days... I'm sure one of the others here have an installation of Heroes_3 which can provide the map.

[Gandalf Parker]

If its not a format that can be converted then I usually just try for a full screen view and use alt-PrintScreen to capture it. Then I open a paint program and paste it in. Some might require multiple grabs then paste them together in a paint program.

[DominionsFan]

NTJedi said:

Unfortunately I'm out of town and at work and not returning home for 5 days... I'm sure one of the others here have an installation of Heroes_3 which can provide the map.

Ah I see. hopefully I will have HoMM3 by then. My brother will loan it to me...if he will find it in his comp room somewhere.

PS. Have you guys noticed, that it takes a long time for us to find the CD/DVD of our old games?

[Ballbarian]

Somebody may have already considered this, but Age of Kings and Age of Mythology allow you to take full map screen captures by hitting CNTRL+ALT+F12. I am not a practiced AOM map maker, but here is a thumbnail of a small test that I have been working on.


With AOM you can use the random map generator and then delete all objects of a given type that do not fit a Dom map quite easily. For this one, I created a blank one player map and just fiddled around with terrain and object placement, captured the map, opened the jpg in Gimp, scaled it to 1/4 and saved as tga. Now I need to replace white pixels and figure out how to make some easy borders that won't look to ugly. Somebody with a real knack for AOM map editing should be able to do some really awesome maps.

Previously I had looked at using Age of Wonders, but piecing all of the screen shots together is too tedious for me.

[Frostmourne27]

Previously I had looked at using Age of Wonders, but piecing all of the screen shots together is too tedious for me.

But you can zoom out in Age of Wonders... Or can you not zoom out far enough?
BTW: I think gandalf's right, no matter how good our pictures are, the maps are only as good as their .map files are. I know almost nothing about the sort of scripting that would be needed, and am just wondering, how easy would it be to do a script to make .map files. Could you maybe have it generate areas based on sudden colour fluctuations? Since water is usaully blue, and grass green, that might work most of the time wouldn't it? Then put a white pizel in center of each area? Something like that would make .map file generation much easier, since it would just be special sites, scenario stuffs, and the odd problem fix.

[NTJedi]

Frostmourne27 said:
BTW: I think gandalf's right, no matter how good our pictures are, the maps are only as good as their .map files are. I know almost nothing about the sort of scripting that would be needed, and am just wondering, how easy would it be to do a script to make .map files.

Yes the .map files will provide 85% of the starting game fun... I estimate 15% goes towards map appearance. If Illwinter included events into the .map editing manual then map makers will be able to provide so much more for multiplayer and especially singleplayer.
If no events then hopefully Dominions_4 will introduce them.

[DominionsFan]

Ballbarian said:
Somebody may have already considered this, but Age of Kings and Age of Mythology allow you to take full map screen captures by hitting CNTRL+ALT+F12. I am not a practiced AOM map maker, but here is a thumbnail of a small test that I have been working on.


With AOM you can use the random map generator and then delete all objects of a given type that do not fit a Dom map quite easily. For this one, I created a blank one player map and just fiddled around with terrain and object placement, captured the map, opened the jpg in Gimp, scaled it to 1/4 and saved as tga. Now I need to replace white pixels and figure out how to make some easy borders that won't look to ugly. Somebody with a real knack for AOM map editing should be able to do some really awesome maps.

Previously I had looked at using Age of Wonders, but piecing all of the screen shots together is too tedious for me.

Hm not bad, however this isn't 2d. I think we gotta use a 2d based map editor. 3d based overland maps are just not good for Dominions. Well imho at least.

[Nerfix]

Well, I don't know. It could look cool.

Could.

Hmmm...perhaps I'll try to make something out of that map...

[Ballbarian]

I finished border and pixel placement last night. Finished the map file this morning, but now don't have time to upload it. Either this afternoon or tonight after work will post finished product in Dom2 map forum. Will also make the base image available (before I drew on it) if you would like.

[Nerfix]

Ok then.