Spring RTS Engine

Hi, this is my first post on this great forum for this great game based on the great game made by those great people etc etc... I've read the wiki on the net on how to make maps, I've done the heightmap for it, but it says the texture map is 8x larger than the heightmap, or that is how I've interpretated it. What's got me bugged is if that is true, how am I supposed to tell which surface I am creating a texture for because the texture map is 8x larger than the heightmap?

Please help me.

Heightmap is for giving Y values for a grid, each of the squares in that grid gets 8x8 pixels from the texture.

Nutty wrote:... What's got me bugged is ... how am I supposed to tell which surface I am creating a texture for because the texture map is 8x larger than the heightmap?
...

The heightmap and the minimap should be 1/8+1 of the texture, yes. I think...

About how you can syncronize you drawing of the texture with the rest (metal placement and hills and stuff), you can:
- pick up the height/metal maps and resize them to the size of the texture.
- copy them and paste them in the texture image as a new layer. (you'll need a program that's not crap and suports layers. Gimp is free. Photoshop is the best but expensive)
- now, you can either alternate from viewing the maps or not so you can draw the textures from memory or (my favourite method) you can choose to be viewing the map special layer but draw in another layer, the texture one.

Still, things aren't going to be perfectly alligned.

The texture isnt quite 8 times the size of the height map. It is the size of the heightmap, minus 1 pixel, then times 8.

THe easiest way to get the texture, height and metal maps all lined up is to paint over them. Save another copy of your height map, and then scale it up to the correct size, as mentioned above. Then just paint over the height map. You can line everything up easily this way. Also, if your using an image editing program that supports layers (which is basically everything that came after MS Paint), you can put the height map on a layer behind the layer you are drawing on. A bit like what has been done in the Maps:Tutorial in the wiki for making the height map from the texture.

Nutty, go download this app, its the easiest to use, you can import your heightmap and render a terrain texture that you can change however you like.

http://bundysoft.com/L3DT/downloads.php

THanks guys, and I am aware of the 1+ pixel thing, I couldn't really be bothered writing that in. But telling me that shows that you are eager to help .

Just my 2 cents. This is how I go about doing things.

I first create my Height map making it the size of the Texture map I wish to use. Then when I am done drawing the Height map, I resize the height map to 1/8 +1 pixel and save it. Then I Undo the resize and and create a new layer. On this new layer I draw the Texture map right over the Height map.

This way has worked well for me and seems to be quite easy. The art apps I use are Bryce 5, Paint Shop Pro 8, Adobe Photoshop 7, and Rhinoceros 1.1

Or ofcourse... to save redrawing teh heightmap at full size, just scale the thing up... (or is that to easy? )

aGorm