I'll throw in a few not map editor related remarks while I think of them, sorry for the mess.
0. The Modding Guide. Should probably be stickied in the Beta or General forum rather than only in Dev Journals. Very hard to find when you look for it.
1. Why do all default sovereigns start with at least 10 everywhere? Stat-wise, they are mostly bland and similar to each other, except for Procipinee. All the others have too similar stats. Hardly any other sovereign has a 15. None has a 9 or less. It looks like the proposed sovereigns are all in the same niche, and none of them excels at anything except for Procipinee. Give a 15 or two to those brutes and lower their intelligence. Make the leaders stats interesting!
2. Map editor: Terrain Tools. Using right click to put land is unintuitive. It's actually awkward because you can't drag and paint a lot of the area with your land. It looks like you have to click, click, click and click again. Really painful. Where do you change the size of the brush? Where do you change the shape of the brush? Click is also not very fast to respond. So it's too slow to be enjoyable. Map-making alone in civ or wesnoth is fun. It should be in Elemental too. Speed is a very very real issue here.
3. Map editor: Terrain Tools. To put a forest somewhere, you must first put land. That's way too long and awkward. If I plant a forest in the sea, please put some land under it without requiring me to first put the land and then change the tool and then put the forest. The way it works right now, you more or less have to have drawn your map beforehand and copy it into the game if you want to draw it without too many wasted moves and clicks.
4. Map editor: Object Tools. Apparently does something when I type key x. Contrary to Terrain Tools, these shortcuts aren't explained in the tooltips and must be guessed.
5. Map editor: Selection wand and selection cursor: Both of these seem to do nothing. Get rid of them? Particularly if you never use the wand?
6. Map editor: New Game trigger etc: Icon is below the rest of the icons. Look ugly.
7. Map editor: Beaches can be created inland. Same for cliffs. I can accept that for cliffs, though they'd be hills or mountains, but beaches? They are very hard to make out and differentiate from flatlands on the cloth map, meaning a mistake will likely be very hard to find.
8. Map editor: New stamp. Missing a name or something. No idea what it is supposed to do. How do I define the stamp?
9. Map editor: River tool. Manage to create a river by clicking once. Subsequent clicks make it impossible to put a river again in the tile. No idea how to get the river to run into the sea. Unable to do so with cliffs. I guess there's still some work scheduled there.
10. Map editor: Road tool: Quite nice actually. If river tool was like that it would be great. Drawing by dragging the mouse would be nice too.
11. Map editor: Environment tool. Hardly usable with such a small selection size.
12. Props. I think these should be removed from the game as an option because when you get near one, you don't know what it is, have to zoom out to the cloth map, realise it's just fluff. Add an option to remove them.
13. Map editor: When clicking New map, you should keep the kind of map (islands,...) that was selected in the field below rather than reset it.
14 Map generation: Seriously, you should open up this to modders. Importing maps from a text format will allow to write fast map generators as external tools, but it would be nice if you explained the format. I'm just guessing at what the figures between the comas mean. I'm probably going to crash the game soon by putting tentative figures there.
15. Map editor: When you have named the map (saved it), the name should appear on screen.
16. Gameplay: what about X-Y Wraps? Playing on a cylinder feels more earthlike and better for quite many players. Lack of corners which are easily defended make for more strategic/challenging games.
17. Map generation: New blank map generation is slow. It's pretty bizarre. It should feel mostly instantaneous.
18. Map editor: why does adding a mountain remove all the land tiles around it? If you click 1 tile to create land, you get a land tile with cliffs around. If you want to put a mountain in the middle of the cliffs, the cliffs disappear. Actually, the tiles are still cliffs, but they don't show except maybe as reefs. Quite strange. I still don't get how I can create a mountain surrounded by cliffs that are visible.
Suppositions about map file format. I don't care about NPCSpawn and the like for the moment, just tile data.
<TileData>12288,1,0,0.000000,0,6</TileData>
First figure = number of tiles (listed in rows).
2nd = ? 1 for water, 0 for land, 2 for mountain, 3 for forest, 5 for cliff as far as I can see.
3rd = ? Always 0 in my first checks.
4th (float) = altitude???
5th = ? Always 0 in my first checks.
6th = Terrain type from list above.
Props are MapObjectDatas. Forests have their own tag too but also change two of the figures in TileData.
Rivers are RiverTileData.
So 2nd and 6th figures seem to mean the same thing, and they're likely not to work well if you don't also put other tags like ForestData a bit farther.
An explanation of the format would be great.
Love it.
This is the official map feedback thread. Stickying.
A quick hint with placing land tiles: hold SHIFT and click to have it ignore the autogeneration of cliff tiles. Cliff automation needs to be the default, cause otherwise it's a huge pain to place them, but there are several times where just placing 1 simple land tile is necessary.
I agree with most of this. One thing I would really, really like is the ability to click+drag to fill a large area with land or forest or whatever. I'm trying to make Middle Earth on a HUGE map (the dimensions are twice the default large map's) and filling in the land, even with the tool as large as I can make it, took forever.
Clicking+dragging to raise mountains seems buggy. I click, drag, and half the time it will raise a new mountain where my cursor was dragged to, instead of where I clicked (if that makes any sense). But it doesn't happen all the time, which is weird. Something that does happen all the time, though, is if you click and drag your cursor onto another mountain, and the second mountain is the one that will raise.
More mountain related stuff, it would be nice if one of the default mountain types was a tall, snow-capped one. If I want to make a chain of snowy mountains, I don't want to have to raise every one of them to be high enough.
Terrain tool shape: A circle can be useful at times, but a square would be nice too. Especially when filling in large area of land. The option to switch between the two would be great.
Performance: I'm sure this is partly due to the fact that I'm creating a huge map, but even on the smaller ones it's present. There is a very noticable delay between when you click and when something is actually placed on the map. My computer isn't a total peice of junk either, 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, 512 MB Nvidia 8600, etc.
Trying to get rid of volcanoes does weird things. If you place a volcano, then decide you don't want it and put regular land there, the rocks and stuff at the top of the volcano don't disappear, they just float there. If you place another volcano nearby, they go away. Speaking of volcanoes, I'd like to know how to make them a tile (so I can turn it into a resource or whatever) but that's another topic.
An undo button would be really nice. Accidentally put land where you didn't want it, and you have to switch to the water tool to fix it, then go back to the land tool to contiue what you were doing.
I'm sure there will be more, but that's it for now.
Would it be too much to ask to have a slider in-editor to change brush size? If there is one, I can't find it, and I can't figure out how to change it at all. I hear + and - are supposed to do it, but they don't do anything when I hit them on either my number pad or in the number row. I'm on an HP laptop, in case that makes any difference.
Try pressing the fn (function) key while pressing + or -. That seems to have worked for some people.
1. Having a draw or area fill funtion would be nice...clicking one square at a time is painful. Also when converting water to land one click at time, missing a square causes an invisible cliff to form which mean that square can't be moved through. Seems to cause some pathing issues. Would be nice to have a tool to look for these invisible cliffs.
2. The gane automatically adds random resources when I play a map I have created. Is there a way to turn it off so only the resouces I placed will appear on the map?
It might be nice to put a +/- somewhere in the interface for those who don't have a 10-key (for example notebooks) or else an option to change key bindings could be a nice addition as well.
I agree that this is an issue. I have a numpad +/-, so I tried it, but since it's the most important thing, there should be a button for this. A problem is that, using the biggest brush resulted in very slow performance the first and second time, the screen becoming black the third time, and a crash of the game the fourth time:
CRASH info here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8046784/Elemental0_98-2010-07-31T13-32-14-911.zip
LDiCesare 100% Agree!
When you create a new map, there is no feed back, "Map being created" , "World being created". etc. with out looking for hard drive activity lights, one might thing the Map Editor as hung because it take several minutes to create a map.
Very much agree. In it's current state it is very agonising to use.
One thing I would like to see is the ability to add some decals to the cloth maps - "Here be Dragons" or a swirly compass in the corner like old maps. I understand there might be some issues with this, particularly if players can edit the terrain significantly in game, and thus make your sea monster image suddenly be in the middle of an island, but I think it could add a lot visually to maps and give some nice modding options.
Not doing it. I've got an honest-to-god number pad, but when I hit the + or - on it, either with or without fn, it doesn't resize the brush. I know I'm on the latest version since I can do tactical battles.
EDIT: Oh, and it doesn't work with the keys in the number row either.
Here's a quick Westeros map I knocked up in around an hour or so. After some fiddling I realised the + and - keys were working for me, which sped things up no end.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5838104/ElementalMap_1281001496.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5838104/Westeros.xml
A few comments -
The maximum zoom level does not allow me to see all of a large map. This means that it's hard to keep it all in proportion, and so The North looks a little wonky in my version.
The graphical delay in things appearing looks nice but isn't very functional. Should be able to have things appear instantly rather than fade in as an option.
Making coasts are fiddly (particularly fjords ) with the balance between wanting to control harbour places but also have maximum control over coastlines. Not so much a criticism as an observation, as from my experience with making maps for games is that there is usually a bit of a compromise between nice looking coastline and gameplay anyway.
Couldn't get rivers working, so Riverrun is Plainsrun at the moment
Environments work very nicely and quickly.
Took me a while to realise that when loading a map, I need to click the map name before load . I only had one map in the directory, so it looked like it was already selected, and I began to worry that loading maps was broken/not implemented. Might be me having a moment though.
Got a couple of bugs to do with the map updating improperly. After I had removed islands, I was left with coastal waves in the middle of the ocean. Also, when I ran the map editor the first time, adding forests and mountains didn't update on the cloth map. It was only when I started the editor that they appeared.
Westeros is long and tall. Different map proportions would be useful.
Really a few minor gripes though. Once I got to grips with it, could work reasonably fast to create something imperfect but usable.
I think you could save an empty map, then edit the xml to alter the shape and reload it.
Oh, how different it would've been if they didn't need the Twins, because there was no Trident to cross.. I like your Westeros better.
There doesn't seem to be any method for editing stuff which has been placed on maps in the editor. Ideally map makers should be able to edit "basic" properties of monsters, buildings, quests, structures, triggers and events without turning towards XML editing. I've played with the editor and if some method exists it's either broken or not easily found.
I've run into a few issues with rivers:
1 - They don't seem to merge. It's impossible for me to have a river flow into another one, so no Mississipi plains map. I haven't been able to create a delta either.
2 - When you delete a river (by clicking river again), you can never put another river here, which means you'd have to reload the map in case you made a mistake.
3 - Rivers don't show on the cloth map.
Okay here's my list of problems with the map editor... first whoever is working on the map editor please take a glance at the Heroes_3 and AgeofWonders:ShadowMagic editors. These editors are easy to use and still quite powerful please just take a look at them so you're not trying to reinvent the wheel.
1) Allow map makers to edit stuff which is placed on the map. It should be easy for map makers to edit the properties of a quest, structure, creature, resource, etc., etc., . It should be easy to edit the properties of a creature and give it an extra 5 hitpoints and a shield. It should be easy to edit a resource and specify when a resource is available during a game and/or the number of turns it can be used.
2) Allow all stuff to be visible in the editor instead of those ugly letters. After spending 4 months creating a map I don't want only to see a bunch of letters I want to know where the trolls, dragons and ogres are waiting! The letters should only be used if it's something which will be randomly selected.
3) If a road crosses into water squares it should automatically create a bridge even if it's 5 water squares in length. Different types of bridges would be nice, but can we start with at least one.
4) Allow map makers to place quests, structures, events, creatures, and basically anything into the forests, mountains and even the water! This makes it much easier for creating hidden rewards and dangers on the map! This is important!
5) Allow anything on the map to include "Turn Timers" which limits its usage. Basically this is the timeframe for how long this will exist on the map which includes the turn it first appears and then the turn it disappears. This means it's possible to have a creature, structure, quest, resource, etc., only exist on the map between turn_30 and turn_38.
6) Allow creatures to have more than just a wandering behavior type which will allow more creativity for map makers. Please consider more types as described within this topic: https://forums.elementalgame.com/337474
7) Allow map makers to create large amounts of forests, grasslands, mountains, water, etc., very quickly. Why on earth do you "only" have a single click for each square?
8) Allow creatures, NPCs and units to be placed on the map where the map maker can assign whether it belongs to one of the minor races, a specific player or an independent. If I want an enemy opponent starting with two trolls it should be a quick 20seconds to complete in the editor.
1) Allow the creation of Grouped Objects. Once grouped, they act as a single unit.
2) Allow the Saving of a Group(s) as new Objects that can then be selected for use as any other.
3) Allow on Tile objects to be Copied and Pasted. It is painful to heavily modify an object, only to find you need another "exact" one 30 minutes later and have to try to replicate the perfect settings a second or third time.
4) Please add a Numeric Mouse Over Display to the "Offsets" and "Rotational Dials."
4) If any of this is already doable, can we please get a quick, Coles Notes version, in .PDF, of the Tool Shop Manual uploaded somewhere in the Mod Forum.
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