Stairs

[Floyd is Pink]

with the near completion of my first map, i started consept arting for my second. But this time i need stairs/ramps. If anyone could give me help on how to make them (smooth stairs like great library, but in all sizes)

if anyone has played AHX, a ww2 map, it had awesome little stars on each side of the bridge. i loved that detail

and whats the maximum size (pixels in photoshop) for a map?

thanks for your time!

[mauglir]

Max size for a square map 2304 x 2304. For a rectangular map, you can exceed that (a little) in one direction, provided you shrink the other. The two don't have to be directly porportional however. For example, you could make a 2560 x 1024 if wanted. Whatever you do, just make sure you stick to multiples of 256.

[Floyd is Pink]

ah right on



and uhhh ramps and stairs question, anyone?

[ozone]

Are you talkign about doing the dis map or the cmap?

anyway...PM me on aim or HL...

Ill try and help

[haravikk]

Colour-map stairs are straight forward, I find the easiest way is to do the displacement first. You can use the terrain filter for this to make a nice smooth set of stairs, just set it to a small size (0.5 WU square for individual points) and set to "Absolute height" then enter appropriate heights.
For example, if the ground your ramp comes out of is height 1.000 and you want it to go up to 5.000 then you want to go up by 4 WU. So, if your ramp is 8 WU 'long' (from lowest point to highest) then you will want to go up in 0.5 'steps'.
So, leaving the bottom of your ramp at 1.000 height, you set the next points to height 1.500, the ones after these to 2.000, then 2.500 and so-on. The end result is a perfect ramp.

For adding it to the colour map I find it easiest to fill the ramp with some kind of terrain that you can distinguish from the surrounding area. Export the terrain map and copy/paste it onto a layer above your colour map in Photoshop, you can now use the magic wand tool to isolate the stairs in a selection box, hide the terrain map layer and make colour map changes as required. Simply adding regularly spaced lines will do it, just making them a slightly different shade of the ground colour for the ramp/stairs, don't want them to be too bold.

I actually have an experiment for a stairs model that I made for a plug-in, I should finish it and see how it comes out actually. It would allow for "proper" stairs, the units would still walk up them like a ramp but it would be an interesting effect.

[haravikk]

and whats the maximum size (pixels in photoshop) for a map?

Also, if I remember right the sizes don't have to be reduced as one is increased. The max width is 2304, however your map can be much higher than this, almost ten times as much if I remember right.
It's just that it'll be a fecking huge download if you go too large.

It's not even a Myth limit either, you can make maps of any size that are multiples of 256, it's just that when you build the plug-in via Fear, for some reason it breaks if the colour map is a size that it doesn't like.

I spent almost 2 months on tweaking and perfecting a plug-in which had a map of 2560 x 2560 pixels, and ended up having to release it as a local folder because Fear made a broken plug-in from it.