The wiki is your friend for any documentation you want. A good place to start is in there. There are many tutorials in the Making Maps section of the wiki. Most of them are good, and some even supply pictures.

When planning a map, see aGorms excelent write-up Here.
For making a map in an image editor, see Maelstroms tutorial Here.
For a complete tutorial on everything to do with making map, go Here. This tutorial is unorganised and hard to follow, but EVERYTHING is in there somewhere.
For planning the resource balance, have a look Here.
Another tutorial is still in production:Here
Trademarks short and simple guide: here

On the subject of this... I was wondering if theres somewere I can stick Images for the tutorial I'm working on.

Currenly I'd have to host them on my space, but I dont have that much to play with and lets face it it would make more sence if tehy were hosted here or on file univers.

The problem with the second option is I'd have to upload them all using the backend of file univers and it would be a hastle to replace them and find the right images ect...

So I was thinking maybe One of you Dev's could set me up a link to a seperate folder and a password and i could just drop them in there, along with some basic map files I was thinking of adding so people can see what an unmade map is like.

Of course thats some cheek asking of FTP access, but I thought it was worth a shot

aGorm

I second that you give him accsess so he can make a proper tutorial, seeing as one is needed because unless you programed the mapconv it is pretty much impossible to make a map. I can atest to this. There isn't the bare minimum of correct data in the wiki to showing a person how to make a map. As in all the file types are not properly defined as to what they are. I hope that made since.

Anyways we need a good tutorial! aGorm, don't forget the technicle aspects of each required file.

Upload them to the wiki: http://spring.clan-sy.com/wiki/Special:Upload

And just a minor point with your post Zaphod, unless you want people asking you about my tutorial, change the "see my tutorial Here." to "see Maelstrom's tutorial Here.". Speaking of that tutorial, I have to go finish it dont I?

And my tutorial, when properly finished, will have specifications of file types, how to use map conv (in detail) and basicly everything I can think of. If anything is missing by the time I finish the tutorial, give me a yell and I will add it.

Eh sorry
I should have read it better....

Wooow, cool didn't know about that, thanks zwzsg.#

My tut will be better

aGorm

Add Inkscape to the list of tools, perhaps, or other vector graphics programs, they seem great for making metal maps (of course, you then have to convert the SVG or whatever file to BMP, but you can do so at multiple resolutions).

Oh, and mapconv works in wine on linux, it heats up your computer though, probably does that on windows too.

Windows hits 100% CPU usage when using the map conv on my computer as well. Good to hear it runs on non-windows OS's though.

Well, I use Wine, which lets some windows programs run, not the same as running it natively, though.

I used mapconv.exe under wine, too but it's much slower

Evidently it also wont handle files above 200 or so MB, I get out of memory errors when trying to make maps larger than 8 by 8.

Edit: looks like I do have swap space, back to my original plan of reinstallign wondows, linux wont do the job this time.

An 8x8 is not 200MB, as 10x10 maps are only about 75MB. Mabey your trying to make a 16x16 map, as people quite often get confused. Multiply the size by 512 to get your texture size, not by 1024. I actually wrote a program to help with this, which you can pick up here:
http://maelstrom.wik3d.com/files/Map%20 ... 20Sizes.7z

Ahh, whoops, that would explain it, I always though you multiplied by 1024.

At any rate, i cant make them big enough, I want it big enough so that an intimidator cannot hit the enemies base.

Also when compressing a map to sd7 make sure you compress it at ultra compression and make sure you are NOT making a solid archive

again:

do NOT make a solid archive

I've made some short and simple guide for making maps, mind linking it in the first post?

http://modinfo.adune.nl/map_making_guide.php

(kinda messy layout though)

When i started making maps, everything was explained too hard, etc, i find this easy to start with, since it gives only that information you need for a simple map, doesnt give you a guide how to draw textures, model features, script, etc, which would have just confused more...

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ZOMG, i replied to 3 year old thread, KILL ME