The new map editor

[sburke]

Figured I'd start a thread on this as it hasn't been getting much air time here on the forum and almost nothing in the reviews.

So here is a screen shot - I took the Veghel map from the link Broadsword provided (http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=105867) and cut out a 4x4 map of Veghel and the vicinity

that was the attack direction of the 107th Pz Bde. Saved it as a BMP and renamed "special editor overlay" then put it into the mods folder.

Is this perty or what? This is fully zoomed out. It gets a bit blurry if I zoom all the way in, but I think I could manage quite a bit of the basic map

creation with this. Yes I said 4x4, those are 1k grid lines.

[Fenris]

Pretty awesome. See you next year. Just kidding.

But seriously I was quite happy to see this in the 2.0 feature list. Making it easier means more and better maps. Good for everyone.

-F

[sburke]

yeah it will be a really great time saver. 4x4 is a ridiculously large map to do, but trying to do it by hand prior (and yes I was working on a 4x4 map by hand of this same area) is even more ridiculous.

[MikeyD]

One small tip. If you've got a map with most of the roads running up at a 5 degree angle try counter-rotating the source map a bit to increase the number of roads/walls running straight before cropping. It'll save you a lot of headaches down the road. And nobody's ever going to notice the map has been skewed 5 degrees from true north.

[Broadsword56]

One small tip. If you've got a map with most of the roads running up at a 5 degree angle try counter-rotating the source map a bit to increase the number of roads/walls running straight before cropping. It'll save you a lot of headaches down the road. And nobody's ever going to notice the map has been skewed 5 degrees from true north.

That might be good advice for a stand-alone map, or if you just want it to look prettier, but think carefully before doing that if you have any wider ambitions of doing a series for a campaign, etc.

Once you start skewing the orientation of reality-based maps from a true N orientation, it becomes more difficult to match them up to adjacent areas, extend them, etc., especially for other people who might want to locate the exact boundaries of your map and build on your work.

(Having learned this the hard way from my 4km x 4km hand-drawn corps level map in Normandy)

[sburke]

One small tip. If you've got a map with most of the roads running up at a 5 degree angle try counter-rotating the source map a bit to increase the number of roads/walls running straight before cropping. It'll save you a lot of headaches down the road. And nobody's ever going to notice the map has been skewed 5 degrees from true north.

and cropped to not include too many RR bends.

As you may have noted Broadsword has very ambitious plans for an OP layer for MG. I just hope whatever I churn out is good enough. The bar is kind of high in the maps I have been fighting on from the Normandy Campaign.

[Apocalypse 31]

Now if the map editor only handled roads more fluidly. I'm finding it hard to replicate real life maps due to the fact that the roads in the map editor are very limited.

[Double Deuce]

Nice, I've been waiting for someone to start posting more on the Map Editor.

[Broadsword56]

True about the limitations of the road tools. But don't let them deter you or make you feel there's no point trying to make accurate battle maps. It's a trade-off decision you make: have the roads a bit curvier but following close to their real life paths, or skewing the map orientation to make more roads run straight and make then easier to place.

If you choose straight roads, you get a prettier map. But the scale of the map will gradually get put of whack too. if you choose wavy roads, you lose some aesthetics but will find it easier to make a map that follows the real terrain at the accurate scale. Just select certain key junctions or intersections or points where the road actually ran, as checkpoints to keep it on track. Then use whatever curves you have to use to get it from checkpoint to checkpoint.

I always go the curvy-road route, personally. But I wish we didn't have to make this choice.