Mapping Mission 1.0 released

[L.Tankersley]

[Reposted here because this should be of greater interest to the scenario creation community,

and because topics scroll by so durn fast on the main CMBB forum.]

I am pleased to announce the release of version 1.0b of Mapping Mission, a third-party

CMBB map editor.

Features of Mapping Mission include:

* exports data to Combat Mission:Barbarossa to Berlin map editor

* scrollable windowed interface

* support for extremely large maps (thousands of tiles per side)

* streamlined user interface including ability to "gesture-click" to

orient terrain features and a simple but powerful road tool

* copy-paste

* support for 256 elevation levels (at 1.25m increments)

* open file format to allow other programmers to develop compatible mapping tools

* support for importing "terrain mask" bitmaps encoding terrain and elevation (letting

map makers "paint" terrain in their paint program of choice and import the results

into Mapping Mission)

* limited undo function

In a nutshell, this is a map editor that builds maps for CMBB, but in a new (open)

file format. Naturally, CMBB can't read these files directly. But, Mapping Mission

provides an export function that uses the map file as a sort of event script to

recreate the map in the CMBB map editor. Mapping Mission cannot open CMBB maps since

these are in CMBB's proprietary format. But if map makers build maps using Mapping Mission,

they will better be able to reuse and exchange map data (and hopefully map making will be

less laborious than before).

The impetus for development of Mapping Mission was the Combat Mission Meta Campaign

(CMMC), which has recently concluded its first campaign using CMBO as the combat engine

and is currently organizing for campaign two (set on the eastern front using CMBB). The

campaign will take place over an area more than 30km (1500 CM map tiles) on a side. One

of the difficulties encountered in CMMC1 was the amount of time needed to build and modify

CM maps. By using Mapping Mission, the entire campaign map can be built before the campaign

begins and arbitrary swaths of terrain data can be exported on demand for battle requirements.

Currently, Mapping Mission is hosted on the CMMC2 website, www.cmmc2.org . Right now a link

to the download (about 90 kbytes zipped) can be found in the site forums, in the "Mapping

Mission 1.0 released" topic in the "General CMMC2 Discussion" folder. In the future this

download may be hosted at some other location. For now, the link to the appropriate thread is:

http://www.cmmc2.org/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=480

Be warned that, although it seems to be quite stable, the software has not been exhaustively

tested. Bugs may still be present. You use the software at your own risk. In particular,

users should be sure to read and understand the information about exporting map data to

CMBB, as the Mapping Mission software will generate a large number of synthetic events that might

cause some consternation on your computer if you are not properly prepared.

This version is PC only; I hope to begin work on a Mac version soon.

Enjoy!