FlaME -- The Warzone 2100 Map Editor

[Rman Virgil]

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The GUT of FlaME.... +1.

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[Goth Zagog-Thou]

I'll be working on the additions to the game side of things. So far the little incremental stuff I've done has proven successful (upping the maximum tile limit per set, increasing the maximum height to 512, etc). I should have Flail add the max height change as well.

[Flail13]

Goth,
Are these changes that will be supported by WZ?
An option to resize .ttp files should be easy enough. IIRC the only limit in FlaME is the 256 tiles limit. Most of the code to load extra tilesets is already there.
The terrain types will be a bit of a pain - possibly needing some rewriting.
How are you increasing the height limit? Is it not already 510? (255x2)

Rman, "The GUT of FlaME" ?

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

1) I'm working on changes to the code myself. When it's ready I'll submit those changes for review by the Dev team. I'm proceeding slowly at the moment due to some RL stuff that required my attention, but it'll end up being identical to what I've asked for in FlaME.

2) Thanks. I thought FlaME worked by loading tilesets from the .ttp file and matching them up, while dropping any that don't have a tile type set already. That's how 1.29 seems to behave. I'll take a look and make sure the 'GUTS' numbering isn't messed up.

3) Can't just add the additional tile types to Arizona's list?

4) Nope, it's 255 in stock Warzone. I've already changed that part of the code in the source (beta11) that I've been working on to 510.

[Rman Virgil]

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Rman, "The GUT of FlaME" ?

A play on Goth's play.

To wit... Since Einstein's efforts at a Grand Unified Theory all attempts by other physicists since have been dubbed a "GUT". Goth called his thought "Grand Unified Tertiles" for FlaME, ergo - The GUT of FlaME. Plus "gut" has vernacular meanings like belly, bowels, innards and...... courage or bravery.

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[Flail13]

2) You're right, that is what it's doing.
3) Also true. I thought you meant the painted ground types, not the tile textures.

4) I'm not understanding this part. In FlaME, I have to multiply all loaded map heights by 2 to get to the heights shown in editor. If it is the 0-255 byte data that you're changing, I wonder: why not just multiply the bytes by a higher number?

Ok Rman, thanks for explaining that

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

4) Well, there's two ways that this is handled in the Warzone source. We either set the maximum tile height number or we can use a multiplier. The default is 255 and multiplier is 2. So yes, technically it's already at 510. This isn't a really big deal to change up, but I figured since I was tinkering with things anyway we could get the double heights in. Setting it to 510 in the source code will end up with 1020 height. Like I said, no big deal and it's fine if left alone.

@Rman: hehe ... da GUTS. I thought it was appropriate.

[NoQ]

I've just been thinking how hard it will be to add a support for more than three tilesets instead. But you're doing the same thing the other way, and it also sounds pretty promising.

Some things make me worry though.

I'm now thinking about extensibility. All the textures of all tilesets we now have will easily fit into VRAM. But if we add more new amazing textures to the game, this might become false at some point, so we'd need to again find some way to load only a few textures into VRAM to overcome this limit.

Another thing i'm thinking about is decals. When i'm, for example, replacing textures in the paradise tileset, it's easy for me to replace the base texture below decals. So i get arizona cliff decals painted on top of rocky brown terrain without a problem. But it's not possible with a unified tileset, because the color below each decal tile is pretty much fixed. You'd need to make multiple decal tiles different not in their texture but in their base coloring to achieve the same effect, and you'd have to make a lot of them.

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

Well, there's always the option to make the maximum 384 tiles. My approach is just getting the three primary ones together.

Decals (at least the ones we've used in-game, like cliffs and tracks) are transparent, are they not? All we need are a few different cliff ones, the others (tracks) can default to the Arizona ones. Same with roads -- we only need one full set of the roads. I would like to have some curved roads though, and diagonal ones. Squared-off is SO 2001, and I think we could do way better.

I think having multiple-colored decals would be fine, myself. Allow for mix-n-match. Like Mysteryem's Green Cliff tile -- that one is particularly nice -- mixed with some of the grey Rocky stuff. It'll pop.

[NoQ]

Decals (at least the ones we've used in-game, like cliffs and tracks) are transparent, are they not?

You don't understand. Each tile knows exactly what terrain should be below it, no matter how much transparent it is, see /tileset/*ground.txt. So you can't use any decal over any terrain. Only over its native terrain. That's the limitation. You won't be able to make the paradise tileset if you just mix the three tilesets together that way. Even if you do mix, you'd still need three decal tiles, even if they use the same tile-*.png texture. You won't be able to use the green cliff texture in rockies for the same reason.

[NoQ]

Anyway, i'm having some sort of success with multiple tilesets support already. I guess we could have both a unified tileset and more than three tilesets? (:

[Andrie]

I don't get any Features, Structures or Droids under Place Objects HELP!!!!

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

You need the objectdata. The download should be on the first post. Then tell FlaME where to find it, and you should be good to go.

MonoDevelop won't install for me. It says I need the .Net Framework 4.0, but I've already got it as well as the Client Profile stuff.

Hrmph.

[Andrie]

I cant download the objectdata.

[Flail13]

Really? Why not?

There's a bug in 1.29 where it wont load object data, unless you make the object data you use the first one in the list.
If downloading isn't causing the problem, maybe that is it.