Hi all. Name's Quantum, and I bought CC a few days ago. It's great and all, don't get me wrong, but I was just wondering how to make maps. I've looked through a few promising threads, but they were either...

a: Huge lines of code
or
b: People asking for advice with a map that they've already made

Can anyone explain how I get started? The scene editor seems next to useless.

P.S. If I've missed something vital, please don't flame me


edited your title a bit and a few words in your post. Yo community, don't be a bunch of flaming imbeciles. This guy has obviously searched.

Last post had been locked, presumably the moderator who authorised it. Sorry for the double post. Anyway, I did a bit more searching and found that maps are in a .bmp format. Does that mean that I can make them in paint... Use colors to represent materials, or something?

That's exactly it, copy Grasslands.bmp into your rte, so palette is set properly, open MSPaint and edit it. When you've got that done check one the .inis in base.rte (or ask here) to find out how to get it all working, Zalo's tutorial is also good for that.

Wheh?
Sorry... could you explain that a little more thoroughly?

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5882

Pretty much a good overall resource.

An overall primer (quite possibly out of date, I haven't made a decent scene in a while):

There are two things necessary to defining a scene; a terrain, which is loaded from a bitmap, and the scene itself.

The bitmap is encoded in a specific format (RLE, if I remember right) for optimization, and each color in that format represents a specific material (dirt, rock, grass, etc).

That bitmap is loaded inside an SLTerrain definition (Scene Layer Terrain) block, which goes inside an .ini file just like everything else in CC does.

Then you define a new scene, which requires various things. First, gravity acceleration; this is a vector constantly applied to all actors on the scene. Second, the terrain, and then any terrain frostings. Terrain frostings are all the randomly placed objects in the ground, such as gold, rocks, and even the small plants and shrubs. They're defined (for first-party content) in Base.rte.

Then there's backgrounds, which for a small, user-created scene can usually just be the default ones.

What roon3 is suggesting is that you make a new .rte, copy Base.rte/Scenes/GrassLands.ini, and then modify it and the bitmap to change the terrain.

To add anything not specifically terrain to your scene (bunkermodules, actors, guns, rockets, anything at all), use SceneObjects. There's some examples of these in the other scene files in Base.rte.

Basically, what we're suggesting is that you jump into modding the way the rest of us did and/or the fun way: open it up, be bewildered, change random things around, see what happens, and have fun with it.

Then after devoting far, far too much of your life (if you're lucky) you'll get to the point where you quite literally have encyclopedic knowledge of cortex command floating around in your head.

Hey, thanks! I think I'll sorta take as much of that help as I can remember and then sort of... well, just screw around with the map files and see what I can do.