Spring RTS Engine

Look I'm aware that we all have to deal with our own sets of idiots. This comes with the territory, but lemmie tell you a little story.

Yesterday I am organizing a game of BA to playtest my new map.
One particular loudmouth speaks up "Why dont you learn to tile your maps!!!"

He then proceeds to link me here: http://taspring.clan-sy.com/wiki/Create_maps

Specifically this section:

Tile Map

Tiles are basically repeating images. They are exactly the same. The map compiler, by comparing peices to the texture to each other, sees which little square tiles in your texture are exactly alike. If they are the same, instead of wasting precious harddrive and bandwidth space, the compiler sets a reference from on tile to the next. If your map is made out of only one small tile, repeating for the whole texture, the map will compress extreemly well. Down to only a few kilobytes. But this would look very boring. So most map makers use a variety of tiles to make their map more interesting. A good map maker will find a balance between looks and size.

To make a tile: Open up your image editing program. Create a new image. As the Spring engine uses a 32 pixel tile engine, you have to set your image size to 32 pixels, or a multiple of 32 pixels. Therefore, tile sizes should be one of the following: 32x32 pixels, 64x64 pixels, 96x96 pixels, 128x128 pixels etc. Tiles also do not have to be square, it is perfectly possible to make rectangular tiles. Tiles should also be seamless, so that when repeated do not seem to have an obvious edge.

Once you have created your tile, do a Fill operation with a texture. The texture of course is our tile that we have made in the previous step. If you do not know how to do this, ask around. Make sure to state which image editing software you use, so we can help you easier.

Now, once you have your basic tile down, add in different features on your map, such as mountains, rivers, seas, deserts, grasslands, or whatever your map has. Remeber, for smaler file sizes make these different features out of tiles as well. If you do all of this properly, you can get your file size down very small, and this will keep everyone happy.

Now, as any experienced mapper and even most noob mappers know, there is not such thing as a "tile file" that gets fed into the compiler. The "Tiles" Whoever wrote this is referring to is Textures. Unfortunately people that do not know how to map don't understand that, and frankly being linked to that repetedly is getting very annoying, especially when it is members of the community who should know better.

For reg forum members who can't post here, listen up. You make your map in whatever program you like (for me it's L3DT). You define textures that get placed depending on the slope angle, roughness of terrain, height etc. The more detail your map contains, the larger in filesize it will be. This is truth, period.

When the compiler imports the texture map, it breaks the map into a series of tiles (These are the temp dds files that get created during compiling). It then converts each tile to dds. After it is done it puts it all back together.

There is no Such damn thing as a TILE FILE that gets fed into the compiler! The closest thing to a tile files is the .smt WHICH IS NOT EDITABLE DIRECTLY! The map is one big ass picture. It's all one piece. And frankly that wiki article is the reason I had so much trouble learning to map 1 1/2 years ago.

Would someone please, either nuke the tile file subsection, rename it, rewrite it, I don't give a damn. Just get rid of it. It is a load of common sense horsecrap that is convoluted to the point that it would even confuse someone who had a basic idea of what they were doing.

Thanks for listening, that is all.

Umm, its becasue people read it in teh wrong light... Its talking about how you can make tiles while in photoshop and that if you do the compiler will find them and make use of them (nnot becasue it knows its a tile, just it does what it normaly does but with greater sucsess). I think I wrote the original version of that but it look edited (however I was 2 years worse at english then so that may be all mine!)

aGorm