tain.totalcodex.net

Okay so I'm trying to make a netmap

Manually applying terrain type is a PITA, and I have no idea how to make a terrain map with photoshop. Any pointers?

Left click as you know does the filling of the circle tool. Right click fills the single triangle your cursor is on. Shift left click does like a bucket fill effect but only for like 904 or so triangles at a time. You could use right click to make a Steep outline square thick around say a hill... and use shift left click on the middle to fill it up. If there is a gap the fill effect will "spill out" as well.

Well, Pyro wrote how to do it in Loathing, not in Photoshop, but yeah, if you follow these rules, you'll see that making terrain map is really easy and can be made really quickly (in Loathing! ).

And I've never made terrain map in Photoshop, so I am no help in this case.

It's not that fast, but certainly easier than color and displacement maps

thanks pyro, this makes my life easier!

Oh also, how would I go about getting a uDogs box to upload stuff?

oh also, i try to load and it crashes
wuzgoingon

edit: omap is my overhead map. does the size of the picture matter? I imported it with fear

(lolwut 8 button mouse)

The Overhead map (last I knew) dimensions had to be multiples of 128pixels though the map doesn't have to be square. Also the overhead has to be stored as a bitmap (PICT-mac, or BMP-Windows) indexed image @240 colors.

There's lots of info you might find useful (like the particulars of size and format of overhead maps) at
http://mything.org/index.php?a=article-read&o=02068

Click the Myth 2 Mapmaking articles and then check out either Heal with Steel's Mapmaking for N00Bs (VERY thorough walkthrough) or Cydonian's mapmaking tutorial. They'll answer lots of basic questions and save you some time redoing things (like the overhead map) when you find out you did something wrong.

As for making Terrain maps outside of Loathing, you can in theory export the terrain map and the colormap then import those into Photoshop (or Gimp) as seperate layers, selecting areas on the colormap you want to be a specific terrain then switching layers to the terrain layer and filling the area with the proper grey for the terrain you want there. Continue until you have finished the map, then save it as a PS document (so you have it to edit easily later), then flatten the image to an indexed (16 colors I think) document save it as a bitmap and import that back into Loathing using the Map->Terrain->Import option (think that's the menu path - or is it called 'Passability' there? I always forget).

I say "in theory" you can do this because I've tried it and always end up fubaring something. Plus if your map has many terrain types you are still going to need to do a LOT of hand tweaking in Loathing to get all the transition areas right - at least anywhere you have edges of steep/walkingImpassible/flyingImpassible areas.

So, this technique MIGHT work for a rough draft of a terrain map (saving you a lot of manual filling of large areas) as long as you tweak it in loathing, but if you ARE going to do this you should paint some of each terrain you want to use on your map before you export it so once you are in PS you can use the eyedropper tool to choose the correct color grey for each terrain.

The overhead map doesn't have to be indexed at 240 colors, that is for color maps. Every other collection can use the full 256 colors. Of course the first 3 have to be specific ones. The 1st for the background color that will be made transparent. The 2nd for the separation of images in a collection which normally can only be seen if you export a color plate (a big combo image of all images) out from a collection editor. The 3rd color is used for certain textures just like the bowman's arrow projectile. Those have to be a specific dimensions. I never use Fear to import overhead maps. I can't recall, but I think that feature is messed up. I just make a new collection or duplicate an overhead map collection and modify it to my will. You can use Jade for it as well.

thanks for the clarification Pyro. I always forget which maps can be how many colors, but since the terrain map is only going to be like 16 shades of grey (and B&W) the important part is that the image has to be INDEXED, and not a RGB or grayscale image. at least I THINK that's the most important bit.

Also - importing overheads - it's been awhile, but I think some old(er) version of Fear for Windows might have not have handled overhead map import correctly, but I am prettys ure the Mac one works fine. I _think_ the only 2D map related image I didn't use Fear to import was the pregame image - I remember doing that with Amber - replacing an existing pregame with a new image and saving it.