Welcome
Welcome
to v2.1
of the epic
Homeworld Map Makers Primer. This
Primer contains all the information I know and could find pertaining
to maply creation for Homeworld. Everything
is here, you need go no further to learn every aspect of maply
creation.
Throughout
the course of the Primer I am going to take you through every
single aspect in making maps for Homeworld, absolutely everything
is covered. So make yourself a coffee, sit back and relax as
we begin to trawl through the various aspects of maply creation.
This
Primer was inspired by ‘An introduction to Map Building’ By
TAKER and is a vastly edited collection
of all relevant data I have so far discovered pertaining to
Map Making. Everyone who has released documents that has been
used in this file has been credited in the Bibliography section
of Appendix C, if your names not down, then I’m truly sorry
but it wasn’t available with the help files that I was working
with to compile this, please, contact the author to correct
any omissions or misquotes.
This
is an updated version of the v2.0 html release hosted on Dylov’s
now defunct site ‘The Homeworld Map Makers Archives’. Now moved
to its new home in the Project Red Site, specifically in the
Engineering section, which backs this primer up with all the
associated files you could possibly need to get you building
maps, and building them well.
Dont
assume that I have not accidentaly missed anything out in the
Primer, while doing this update I discovered I had not really
mentioned Nebulas at all. I have covered everything that
I know of, and there may still be stuff that I dont know or
may have just plain got wrong. Take Rectangles for instance,
I have never really worked much with these resource shapes and
Aged has recently informed me that
some of my assumptions were wrong. So if you think of anything
I have omitted or should change, again contact me and I will
set the record straight, as well as adding your name to the
credits.
The
Tutorial
The
included tutorial ‘Revelations’, will take you through each
stage of map creation in a step by step process, covering as
much of the nuts and bolts as possible. I would suggest you
follow each step carefully, as set out, so you can get a good
grounding in the process of building maps for Homeworld.
Even
if you have no intention of actually making the map (although
I strongly suggest you do), read each part of the Tutorial as
its pretty much exactly how I went about the creation of the
map and they are full of really Top tips.
The
Map Makers Tools
MS Excel
2000
and TextPad (v4.4), and thats it. And I cannot recommend
them enough.
If
you can’t get hold of MS Excel any spreadsheet utility
that supports comma delimited files (‘.csv’) will do fine. Using
Excel helps unbelievably, especially when making sweeping changes
to your map, I will cover use of Excel later [See
Useful Tools].
‘TextPad’
was a revelation, recommended to me by TAKER I downloaded after
I had completed my first map (I used notepad at first), now
I would not dream of using anything else, for the purposes of
maply creation it is invaluable. Happily, its shareware too,
you can download and use it for free while you evaluate the
product, and I guarantee you register soon after. Or at least
agree that’s it’s a good product and feel bad for not
registering... You
really should get down to the Helios Website and download a
free Evaluation copy.
[See
Useful Tools].
Every
Map I mention in this document is available from the Project
Red Map Archives and BPLlama’s superb web site; ‘The Homeworld
Map Archive’. [See
Appendix C].
Good
Luck and Happy Map Making!
Dylov
[12/12/00]
Some
points to Remember:
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‘CaSe’
is Important, I will be constantly reiterating this point.
It’s really important. It really
is. Truly. I kid you not. Important.
If your map crashes you should always check your case first.
Check your capitalisation at all times!
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Format
is important. This too is really
important, try opening up all the Description.txt files
you can find (every map in your homeworld/multiplayer folder
will have one) See how none deviate from the Format? They
may deviate a little in the first five lines beginning with
Description<tab>, amounts but nothing else. Try it
with every *.level file and you will see they only deviate
in the amount of ‘MissionSphere’ lines present, but the
Format is the
same. By Format I also include Spelling,
make sure everything is spelt the same. Take note. I spent
ages trying to figure out why the 6-player version of the
included map Revelations kept crashing and I finally traced
it to the formatting in one of the Mothership files, I had
replaced a comma with a full stop. That simple mistake kept
crashing me back to desktop.
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Case
and Format and Spelling
of all the lines in all the files and all the names of
all the files that make up your map is really massively
important. Take care of them.
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