This post is basicly identical to the pdf posted in the other thread, but as I'm sure there will be a bunch of question once some of you really try to do this stuff... I made this thread.
Let's start with the bad news first, adding the topographic look to the Darkest Hour Map required a bunch of tricks that simply put break the map tools.
So we will have to provide you with some additional files to make editing with those tools possible again, to keep the game download small for the general user I'll provide you with a link to the files you need.
http://www.multiupload.com/VGHDAI4PFH
I'll explain how to use them later in the tutorial, when I talk about the DH specifics for mapediting, for now just download them and keep reading.
This tutorial is mostly aimed at people that want to do largescale modifications to existing maps, or create complete new ones.
The basic tutorials out there, mostly cover small stuff like changing a provincename, or modifiying a few borders.
They are sufficient for that, and will actually be faster, but if you try to do a full map or even major changes to one major region, using those methods you better forget about finishing it in the next few months.
I'll add screenshots to explain individual steps when you request them, so just ask when things are unclear.
Just a warning, if you wanna start serious mapeditting you better bring some time and high tolerance for frustration with you, it's not gonna be easy.
There is a good reason why there are so few new maps.
You will always forget that one little detail and have to do another recompile.
The mapmaker will always crash in the worst moment.
And when everything wents well your hardrive breaks down.
Get used to it.
Important Tips:
Make backups. Lots of backups, zip your work ones a day and save it on another drive aswell. Believe me, you don't wanna lose a months work.
You can't have enough layers.
Shortcuts are your friend.
If you know how to use macrotools or have a programable keyboard/gamepad, try to think about ways how to use it.
Pressing button M1 is much faster them to click your way through 3 submenus. especially when it comes to things you have to do a few hundred times.
It's gonna be much harder then it seems in this Tutorial, most steps also require a good load of manual clean up work, which I won't mention but will probably take up most of your time.
Tools you need:
gimp
Mapmaker
(optional) Photoshop CS #you don't need it, but it can be a big help.
General Map editing
Prepwork
Step 1:
For this tutorial we assume that you wanna modify an existing map.
So the first step is to extract the map from the game, check the original tutorials on how to do that.
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?366310-Noob-s-Guide-to-Map-Modifications
If you wanna work with the DH Full map have a quick look to the Objecteditor part of this post.
The only addition I have to make at this point, is that you should choose the size for the resulting images wisely. Bigger images make the editing imo much easier, but you need a pc that can actually handle them.
In my experience an -extract(0,0,156,180,6,2) is the max setting a 4gig system can handle when compiling the map, and onyl when you close all other programs.
If you have less then 4 gigs you are better of with the basic values.
If the chosen imagesize is to big you can expect your system to freeze up and even crash, the mapmaker is nothing for the faint hearted.
Step 2:
This is where most people make the mistake of directly beginning to edit the colorscales png files. It seems obvious that you start to modify the layer you see at first, but it will actually cause you a lot of extra work.
Instead we begin with a ProvID file. Just open map_0_0.ProvID.png in gimp. You might also want to open map_0_0.colorscales.png as a reference.
Save the map_0_0.ProvID.png as map_0_0.ProvID.psd, this *.psd is the file we work with from now on.
To get things rolling we will now fill all seaprovinces with a grey tone and all land provinces with white. Use the colorscale image as a reference, you can also pick the right shade of grey with the color picker.
Here is the important thing, we don't use the bucket fill tool. Many coastal provinces are made up of little dots that are not connected with each other, and it gets really tedious to fill them all individually.
Instead we use the select by color tool (treshold = 0, no special options selcted), and the fill with FG color command.
To speed things up i recommed setting an easy shortcut for the fill command so you just have to click the province, hit a b utton and move on to the next.
You don't have to wait to see to color cahnge btw, you can just do this step for 10-20 provinces and gimp will work them up as fast as it can.
Once you are done you should have a nice white on grey shape of all land masses on the map. Let's call this layer "base"
SAVE
Step 3:
Now create a new transparent layer. Lets call it *coastal borders*.
Select the the water (grey) with the color select tool.
Switch to the paint brush tool, configure it to Circle Fuzzy (05) brush, and change the foreground color to black.
Select the new layer.
Select edit -> stroke selection and switch it to stroke with a paint tool, and pick the paintbrush we set up just a second ago. Hit stroke, and we are done here. Rename this layer coastal borders.
Now we have to do some cleanup work, grap the erase tool and remove the black lines and the image edges of the coastal provinces.
SAVE
Concept Phase
*new layer*
The image we created in the preparation, will be essential now.
Use it to draw the new borders on, nothing fancy, don't waste a lot of time here. Draw the provinces in the shape you want but it doesn't have to be very clean or nice looking its only a sketch.
*new layer* land names
*new layer* sea names
Add provincenames to the map, you can do this later aswell, it's not really important for the map editing process per se at this point.
Actually this is the only step of general map editing I suggest to do in Photoshop, the ctrl+click/drag option it offers to modify reposition text is much more comfortable then gimp.
SAVE
Map Creation
Step 1:
*new layer* provid
Either you import a existing provid file, to edit it, or you need to start from scratch, in the end all you have to do is to match the colored background with concept borders we created before.
Step 2:
Now we add the actual borders.
Play around with different pencil strengths and styles until you find something you like. Paintbrush Circle Fuzzy (3) is a good choice, You can use the color from gradient option to create non continous borders.
*new layer* landborders
*new layer* seaborders
Pick the fuzzy select tool, select a province and use the stroke selection tool to redraw the selection on the new layer.
And repeat until all provinces have a new perfectly drawn border.
If you wanna create noncontinous borders, you will have to use two layers so the borders of neighbouring provinces don't overlap in the end. "Just" delete the double drawn borders on one layer.
Remember to use one layer for seaprovince broders and one for landprovince borders.
And of course once again cleanup work on the edges of the image, delete all black lines on the edges and coastal provinces (also those bordering lakes).
It might actually be easier to select the whole layer, reduce the selected area by 3-4 pixels, inverse the selection and hit delete. You will have to redraw some borders on the connection points of the indivdual map parts, but you will have to check those anyways.
Step 3
*new layer* national borders
Use the select by color tool on the land borders layer and select your new drawn border lines.
now switch to the new "national borders layer.
Select -> grow (1 pixel) and fill the selection with the blue 255 true blue.
Use the select by color tool on the new blue border lines.
Set the foreground color to truee red, red 255.
Set your pencil too 1 px strength.
edit -> stroke selection and you have the initial version for your borders png file.
Now we have to clean it up.
Use the color select to on the base layer to select all water provinces.
Switch back to national borders layer and hit delete, this should remove all borders sticking out in the sea effects. If you don't clean this layer up properly you end up with little red (border colored) dots along the coasts.
As a sidenote, when you remove the connection between two provinces, with help of the adj-mod.txt and the mapeditor, the engine will NOT draw this national border between those two provinces.
So if you are not sure, if it's better to make a connection between two provinces, impassable or remove it completly... stick with the impassable connection.
Step 4
Now we switch back to the landborders layer, use the colorselect tool on the drawn borders.
Go to Filters -> Light and Shadows -> Drop Shadow
Set both Offsets to 0, the Blur radius to 15-20, opacity to 100 and deactivate resizing allowed.
Go to Filters -> Repeat Drop Shadow
Go to Filters -> Repeat Drop Shadow
You should have now three Drop Shadow Layers, which can be merged.
Step 5
*new layer* Rivers
Pretty straight forward, just grab the pencil tool (circle 5) and draw the rivers you want to see on the map using one of the color in the index.
Once you are done use the color select tool on the river.
Set the pencil to 1px and switch to an darker color on the index.
Edit -> Stroke selection -> Stroke with Paint Tool: Pencil
Thats it.
Step 6
Now we save copies of the file with different layer selections to create the files necessary for the mapmaker.
layer: national borders -> map_x_x.borders.png
layer: rivers -> map_x_x.tiles.png
layer: provid -> map_x_x.ProvID.png
layer: land names + sea names + land borders + sea borders + Drop Shadow + Base + coastal borders -> map_x_x.colorscales.png
Open the new map_x_x.colorscales.png
image -> mode -> indexed -> use custom palette (use the one attached) -> deactivate remove unused colors.
You should now have everything you need to compile the map with mapmaker.
Chances are high that something went wrong and the mapmaker crashs on the first step, this is probably caused by a colorscales file, that is not not properly indexed.
The easiest way around that is to use an older colorscales file that works, switch it to rgb, copy the new one in, merge the layers, reindex it and save again.
Advanced Editing
This part will be much shorter and more general, as I assume you already have a general understanding of what you need to do and only need some hints or a nudge in the right direction.
Cleanup work with Photoshop.
Once you finished proudly compiling your map, you will soon notice ingame that the individual parts of the map don't fit quite right, the borders are slightly displaced, you used the wrong id color for a province on one side of the map, etc.
You can either clean it up in the original files, or use Photoshop.
Photoshop is much better at working with huge files, so you can create a psb file and copy everything in it.
That makes it much easier to spot things that don't "fit".
Creating Darkest Hours Topographic Map look.
Prep Work again.
There is no topographic map that really fits to the used ingame maps, and all of them use different continental shapes, so you have to create your own, using a base topographic map like this one:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/global.html
Now you "simply" have to copy&paste parts over you map, resize, transform etc. until you have two fitting layers for the whole world.
One for seaprovinces and another for landprovinces. This should keep you busy for a while.
Map creation
!!!MAKE BACKUPS OF EVERY PNG FILE THAT IS USED IN THE COMPILE PROCESS IN INDIVIDUAL FOLDERS FOR EACH STEP!!!
You will need a "finished" normal map before you start here, if you are still changing large aspects of the map you pretty much triple yur workload with the implementation of the topographc look.
Step 1
Now the real fun starts.
DH basicly doesn't use 1 Map but parts of 4 individual maps.
The first one is the most important, and luckily also the easiest one to create.
It is basicly identical to the normal maps that have been created until now.
One good idea is to adjust the color of the land and seabackgrounds on the base layer so they closer to the predominant color on the topographic layers you created before. Otherwise the jump between zoomlevels becomes rather harsh ingame.
You can later create some nice effects with province
Make a backup of all files created by the map maker, you will need them later for your work with the objecteditor.
Now copy all files to your game map/map_x folder.
Step 2
New map for Zoom level 2
The main difference to the first one is that I activated the Topographic sealayer and place it above the base layer.
I also changed the map_x_x.borders.png. You may have noticed that the the black outline of national borders on higher zoomlevels doesn't look quite right. Parts are missing it looks a bit pixelated.
So use the colorselect tools to select the red outline and fill it with blue, to create smooth onecolored national borders.
You only need the lightmap2 layer from this map.
Step 3
This one is a bit more interesting.
First activate the landtopography, and deactivate the names.
I recommend to make the national borders a bit wider, colorselect and stroke selct of 1-2px is about right.
It also looks better if you remove the "name tags" attached to islandprovinces on this layer, which requires to edit provid layer and parts of the colorscale layer.
Make sure to tweak the sea topography layer to account for the removed parts.
You only need the lightmap3 layer from this map.
Step 4
Here we deactivate the two borderlayers aswell.
I recommend to make the national borders a bit wider again, colorselect and stroke selct of 1-2px is about right.
On this layer we also removed the "zoomed in" provinces, which means editing colorscales and provid layer. You can ofcourse remove those earlier, if you even have them.
You only need the lightmap4 layer from this map.
And thats it.
Sounds easy, but it heavily relies on proper preparation and even then you are facing a lot of work and recompiles to get it right.
DH specifics to Mapediting
This part is also in the Guide to Modding with DH, which should come with your game, but I think it can't hurt to have it here aswell.
The general editing for DH is identical to all other Europa games, but we did some changes to the folderstructure in regard of map files that makes it easier for "normal" mods to use new maps, and also cuts down on the size of the game.
All in all a great improvement for everyone except for us working on the map, but when you can handle the mapmaker you can handle this too. ^^
All map related files are now in the map folder, or in the subfolders there.
If you wanna use the object editor to edit a new map in a subfolder, you need to move the db files to their vanilla location, province.csv to db, province_names.csv to the configfolder, and the mapfiles out of the subfolder directly to the /map folder.
!!Make a backup before you do that or mods using the vanilla map will no longer work!!
The object editor doesn't work with the topographic map for DH, it simply can't handled a patchwork of different maps without throwing errors around.
As a workaround you have to use a Zoom level 1 full map and use it for the work with the object editor. Remember I told you to save all your files from Zoom 1.
You can find the aditional layers of the DH Full map here:
You should alread have copied the mapfiles from the /map/map_1 folder to the /map folder, now copy the three layers in the archive into the /map folder aswell.
If you have setup your maptools right (pointing at the darkest Hour root folder). If you have done everything right. you can now use the object editor, and the mapextractor again.
!!Remember to copy the changed province.csv back to the map/map_x subfolder once you are finished.!!
!!Remember to copy your backup of the /map folder back once you are finished.!!
DH specifics distance.csv
This is something new for DH, it means a lot of extra work for you, but it's worth it in the long run.
At the end of the misc.txt you will find the following line:
If you leave it at 0 you won't need a distance.csv file at all, so this is basicly where we are at with other games, the distance are calculated via pixel distance. which meeans you have totally wrong distances in the oceans and everywhere else where provinces are scaled up for better playability.
This gets more extreme in mods that use new scenario maps for individual regions.
The new calculation model also handles distance calcualtions considerably faster, which means the game run faster in situations with lots of units moving around. MidWar situation like when the allied bombing campaings start benefit from this.
When you turn it to 1 in the misc.txt you will need a distance.csv file.
It's pretty straight forward:
Simply get the necessary data out of goggle earth or your prefered GIS.
Once you are finished, delete the airdist.tbl and the navaldist2.tbl from your map/map_x folder.
Once you start the game, the exe will generate a new airdist.tbl. This should be pretty quick, but might take a few minutes depending on your hardware.
Once you load a scenario, the exe will generate a new navaldist2.tbl. This will take some time, even on a fast system around 5 minutes, or considerable longer on old systems.
WARNING: the engine will also recompile the navaldist2.tbl when you change seaprovinces assigned to landprovinces and harbors in the province.csv.
DH specifics provincenumber
There are three values that need to be IDENTICAL.
Maptools folder:
/settings.txt
/mods/x/db/misc.txt
/map/map_x/distances.csv
The distances.csv file will only work when its not longer then ****+3 lines.
So when you have a map with 2608 provinces, the distance.csv has to be 2611 lines long.
DH specifics mapdebuglogs
In the settings.cfg you can activate debuglogs, specifically added for mapediting.
2 # Extra debug logs (savedebug.txt): 0 = disabled, 1 = enabled, 2 = enabled + extra map statistics
Will give you pretty much all the information you will need while setting up your db files properly.
Warnings when mapicon like aa and forts are placed in the wrong provinces.
Warnings when coastalprovinces have no or the wrong seaprovince defined.
Warnings when when something is wrong with the distance between two provinces.
Warnings when the amount of connections for a province seems wrong.
Warnings when a province id is not used on the map.
And a lot more.
Everything I needed a log function for while creating the new map, was included. So pretty much everything you run into should get logged.
Let's start with the bad news first, adding the topographic look to the Darkest Hour Map required a bunch of tricks that simply put break the map tools.
So we will have to provide you with some additional files to make editing with those tools possible again, to keep the game download small for the general user I'll provide you with a link to the files you need.
http://www.multiupload.com/VGHDAI4PFH
I'll explain how to use them later in the tutorial, when I talk about the DH specifics for mapediting, for now just download them and keep reading.
This tutorial is mostly aimed at people that want to do largescale modifications to existing maps, or create complete new ones.
The basic tutorials out there, mostly cover small stuff like changing a provincename, or modifiying a few borders.
They are sufficient for that, and will actually be faster, but if you try to do a full map or even major changes to one major region, using those methods you better forget about finishing it in the next few months.
I'll add screenshots to explain individual steps when you request them, so just ask when things are unclear.
Just a warning, if you wanna start serious mapeditting you better bring some time and high tolerance for frustration with you, it's not gonna be easy.
There is a good reason why there are so few new maps.
You will always forget that one little detail and have to do another recompile.
The mapmaker will always crash in the worst moment.
And when everything wents well your hardrive breaks down.
Get used to it.
Important Tips:
Make backups. Lots of backups, zip your work ones a day and save it on another drive aswell. Believe me, you don't wanna lose a months work.
You can't have enough layers.
Shortcuts are your friend.
If you know how to use macrotools or have a programable keyboard/gamepad, try to think about ways how to use it.
Pressing button M1 is much faster them to click your way through 3 submenus. especially when it comes to things you have to do a few hundred times.
It's gonna be much harder then it seems in this Tutorial, most steps also require a good load of manual clean up work, which I won't mention but will probably take up most of your time.
Tools you need:
gimp
Mapmaker
(optional) Photoshop CS #you don't need it, but it can be a big help.
General Map editing
Prepwork
Step 1:
For this tutorial we assume that you wanna modify an existing map.
So the first step is to extract the map from the game, check the original tutorials on how to do that.
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?366310-Noob-s-Guide-to-Map-Modifications
If you wanna work with the DH Full map have a quick look to the Objecteditor part of this post.
The only addition I have to make at this point, is that you should choose the size for the resulting images wisely. Bigger images make the editing imo much easier, but you need a pc that can actually handle them.
In my experience an -extract(0,0,156,180,6,2) is the max setting a 4gig system can handle when compiling the map, and onyl when you close all other programs.
If you have less then 4 gigs you are better of with the basic values.
If the chosen imagesize is to big you can expect your system to freeze up and even crash, the mapmaker is nothing for the faint hearted.
Step 2:
This is where most people make the mistake of directly beginning to edit the colorscales png files. It seems obvious that you start to modify the layer you see at first, but it will actually cause you a lot of extra work.
Instead we begin with a ProvID file. Just open map_0_0.ProvID.png in gimp. You might also want to open map_0_0.colorscales.png as a reference.
Save the map_0_0.ProvID.png as map_0_0.ProvID.psd, this *.psd is the file we work with from now on.
To get things rolling we will now fill all seaprovinces with a grey tone and all land provinces with white. Use the colorscale image as a reference, you can also pick the right shade of grey with the color picker.
Here is the important thing, we don't use the bucket fill tool. Many coastal provinces are made up of little dots that are not connected with each other, and it gets really tedious to fill them all individually.
Instead we use the select by color tool (treshold = 0, no special options selcted), and the fill with FG color command.
To speed things up i recommed setting an easy shortcut for the fill command so you just have to click the province, hit a b utton and move on to the next.
You don't have to wait to see to color cahnge btw, you can just do this step for 10-20 provinces and gimp will work them up as fast as it can.
Once you are done you should have a nice white on grey shape of all land masses on the map. Let's call this layer "base"
SAVE
Step 3:
Now create a new transparent layer. Lets call it *coastal borders*.
Select the the water (grey) with the color select tool.
Switch to the paint brush tool, configure it to Circle Fuzzy (05) brush, and change the foreground color to black.
Select the new layer.
Select edit -> stroke selection and switch it to stroke with a paint tool, and pick the paintbrush we set up just a second ago. Hit stroke, and we are done here. Rename this layer coastal borders.
Now we have to do some cleanup work, grap the erase tool and remove the black lines and the image edges of the coastal provinces.
SAVE
Concept Phase
*new layer*
The image we created in the preparation, will be essential now.
Use it to draw the new borders on, nothing fancy, don't waste a lot of time here. Draw the provinces in the shape you want but it doesn't have to be very clean or nice looking its only a sketch.
*new layer* land names
*new layer* sea names
Add provincenames to the map, you can do this later aswell, it's not really important for the map editing process per se at this point.
Actually this is the only step of general map editing I suggest to do in Photoshop, the ctrl+click/drag option it offers to modify reposition text is much more comfortable then gimp.
SAVE
Map Creation
Step 1:
*new layer* provid
Either you import a existing provid file, to edit it, or you need to start from scratch, in the end all you have to do is to match the colored background with concept borders we created before.
Step 2:
Now we add the actual borders.
Play around with different pencil strengths and styles until you find something you like. Paintbrush Circle Fuzzy (3) is a good choice, You can use the color from gradient option to create non continous borders.
*new layer* landborders
*new layer* seaborders
Pick the fuzzy select tool, select a province and use the stroke selection tool to redraw the selection on the new layer.
And repeat until all provinces have a new perfectly drawn border.
If you wanna create noncontinous borders, you will have to use two layers so the borders of neighbouring provinces don't overlap in the end. "Just" delete the double drawn borders on one layer.
Remember to use one layer for seaprovince broders and one for landprovince borders.
And of course once again cleanup work on the edges of the image, delete all black lines on the edges and coastal provinces (also those bordering lakes).
It might actually be easier to select the whole layer, reduce the selected area by 3-4 pixels, inverse the selection and hit delete. You will have to redraw some borders on the connection points of the indivdual map parts, but you will have to check those anyways.
Step 3
*new layer* national borders
Use the select by color tool on the land borders layer and select your new drawn border lines.
now switch to the new "national borders layer.
Select -> grow (1 pixel) and fill the selection with the blue 255 true blue.
Use the select by color tool on the new blue border lines.
Set the foreground color to truee red, red 255.
Set your pencil too 1 px strength.
edit -> stroke selection and you have the initial version for your borders png file.
Now we have to clean it up.
Use the color select to on the base layer to select all water provinces.
Switch back to national borders layer and hit delete, this should remove all borders sticking out in the sea effects. If you don't clean this layer up properly you end up with little red (border colored) dots along the coasts.
As a sidenote, when you remove the connection between two provinces, with help of the adj-mod.txt and the mapeditor, the engine will NOT draw this national border between those two provinces.
So if you are not sure, if it's better to make a connection between two provinces, impassable or remove it completly... stick with the impassable connection.
Step 4
Now we switch back to the landborders layer, use the colorselect tool on the drawn borders.
Go to Filters -> Light and Shadows -> Drop Shadow
Set both Offsets to 0, the Blur radius to 15-20, opacity to 100 and deactivate resizing allowed.
Go to Filters -> Repeat Drop Shadow
Go to Filters -> Repeat Drop Shadow
You should have now three Drop Shadow Layers, which can be merged.
Step 5
*new layer* Rivers
Pretty straight forward, just grab the pencil tool (circle 5) and draw the rivers you want to see on the map using one of the color in the index.
Once you are done use the color select tool on the river.
Set the pencil to 1px and switch to an darker color on the index.
Edit -> Stroke selection -> Stroke with Paint Tool: Pencil
Thats it.
Step 6
Now we save copies of the file with different layer selections to create the files necessary for the mapmaker.
layer: national borders -> map_x_x.borders.png
layer: rivers -> map_x_x.tiles.png
layer: provid -> map_x_x.ProvID.png
layer: land names + sea names + land borders + sea borders + Drop Shadow + Base + coastal borders -> map_x_x.colorscales.png
Open the new map_x_x.colorscales.png
image -> mode -> indexed -> use custom palette (use the one attached) -> deactivate remove unused colors.
You should now have everything you need to compile the map with mapmaker.
Chances are high that something went wrong and the mapmaker crashs on the first step, this is probably caused by a colorscales file, that is not not properly indexed.
The easiest way around that is to use an older colorscales file that works, switch it to rgb, copy the new one in, merge the layers, reindex it and save again.
Advanced Editing
This part will be much shorter and more general, as I assume you already have a general understanding of what you need to do and only need some hints or a nudge in the right direction.
Cleanup work with Photoshop.
Once you finished proudly compiling your map, you will soon notice ingame that the individual parts of the map don't fit quite right, the borders are slightly displaced, you used the wrong id color for a province on one side of the map, etc.
You can either clean it up in the original files, or use Photoshop.
Photoshop is much better at working with huge files, so you can create a psb file and copy everything in it.
That makes it much easier to spot things that don't "fit".
Creating Darkest Hours Topographic Map look.
Prep Work again.
There is no topographic map that really fits to the used ingame maps, and all of them use different continental shapes, so you have to create your own, using a base topographic map like this one:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/global.html
Now you "simply" have to copy&paste parts over you map, resize, transform etc. until you have two fitting layers for the whole world.
One for seaprovinces and another for landprovinces. This should keep you busy for a while.
Map creation
!!!MAKE BACKUPS OF EVERY PNG FILE THAT IS USED IN THE COMPILE PROCESS IN INDIVIDUAL FOLDERS FOR EACH STEP!!!
You will need a "finished" normal map before you start here, if you are still changing large aspects of the map you pretty much triple yur workload with the implementation of the topographc look.
Step 1
Now the real fun starts.
DH basicly doesn't use 1 Map but parts of 4 individual maps.
The first one is the most important, and luckily also the easiest one to create.
It is basicly identical to the normal maps that have been created until now.
One good idea is to adjust the color of the land and seabackgrounds on the base layer so they closer to the predominant color on the topographic layers you created before. Otherwise the jump between zoomlevels becomes rather harsh ingame.
You can later create some nice effects with province
Make a backup of all files created by the map maker, you will need them later for your work with the objecteditor.
Now copy all files to your game map/map_x folder.
Step 2
New map for Zoom level 2
The main difference to the first one is that I activated the Topographic sealayer and place it above the base layer.
I also changed the map_x_x.borders.png. You may have noticed that the the black outline of national borders on higher zoomlevels doesn't look quite right. Parts are missing it looks a bit pixelated.
So use the colorselect tools to select the red outline and fill it with blue, to create smooth onecolored national borders.
You only need the lightmap2 layer from this map.
Step 3
This one is a bit more interesting.
First activate the landtopography, and deactivate the names.
I recommend to make the national borders a bit wider, colorselect and stroke selct of 1-2px is about right.
It also looks better if you remove the "name tags" attached to islandprovinces on this layer, which requires to edit provid layer and parts of the colorscale layer.
Make sure to tweak the sea topography layer to account for the removed parts.
You only need the lightmap3 layer from this map.
Step 4
Here we deactivate the two borderlayers aswell.
I recommend to make the national borders a bit wider again, colorselect and stroke selct of 1-2px is about right.
On this layer we also removed the "zoomed in" provinces, which means editing colorscales and provid layer. You can ofcourse remove those earlier, if you even have them.
You only need the lightmap4 layer from this map.
And thats it.
Sounds easy, but it heavily relies on proper preparation and even then you are facing a lot of work and recompiles to get it right.
DH specifics to Mapediting
This part is also in the Guide to Modding with DH, which should come with your game, but I think it can't hurt to have it here aswell.
The general editing for DH is identical to all other Europa games, but we did some changes to the folderstructure in regard of map files that makes it easier for "normal" mods to use new maps, and also cuts down on the size of the game.
All in all a great improvement for everyone except for us working on the map, but when you can handle the mapmaker you can handle this too. ^^
All map related files are now in the map folder, or in the subfolders there.
If you wanna use the object editor to edit a new map in a subfolder, you need to move the db files to their vanilla location, province.csv to db, province_names.csv to the configfolder, and the mapfiles out of the subfolder directly to the /map folder.
!!Make a backup before you do that or mods using the vanilla map will no longer work!!
The object editor doesn't work with the topographic map for DH, it simply can't handled a patchwork of different maps without throwing errors around.
As a workaround you have to use a Zoom level 1 full map and use it for the work with the object editor. Remember I told you to save all your files from Zoom 1.
You can find the aditional layers of the DH Full map here:
You should alread have copied the mapfiles from the /map/map_1 folder to the /map folder, now copy the three layers in the archive into the /map folder aswell.
If you have setup your maptools right (pointing at the darkest Hour root folder). If you have done everything right. you can now use the object editor, and the mapextractor again.
!!Remember to copy the changed province.csv back to the map/map_x subfolder once you are finished.!!
!!Remember to copy your backup of the /map folder back once you are finished.!!
DH specifics distance.csv
This is something new for DH, it means a lot of extra work for you, but it's worth it in the long run.
At the end of the misc.txt you will find the following line:
Code:
# Distance calculation model. 0 - use the old, map based calculation (slower and incorrect); 1 - use real world distances from airdist.tbl (based on distances.csv) and navaldist2.tbl files
0 #0
If you leave it at 0 you won't need a distance.csv file at all, so this is basicly where we are at with other games, the distance are calculated via pixel distance. which meeans you have totally wrong distances in the oceans and everywhere else where provinces are scaled up for better playability.
This gets more extreme in mods that use new scenario maps for individual regions.
The new calculation model also handles distance calcualtions considerably faster, which means the game run faster in situations with lots of units moving around. MidWar situation like when the allied bombing campaings start benefit from this.
When you turn it to 1 in the misc.txt you will need a distance.csv file.
It's pretty straight forward:
Code:
2761;Total Provinces;ID;ENG;Region
Latitude;Longitude;;;
0.00000000;0.00000000;PROV0;(Embarked);Embarked
63.15248611;-21.05238056;PROV1;Reykjavik;Iceland
62.01770833;-6.77187778;PROV2;Torshavn;Iceland
65.01720000;-18.10212778;PROV3;Akureyri;Iceland
58.21600000;-6.38593056;PROV4;Stornoway;Scotland
58.98036944;-2.95631389;PROV5;Scapa Flow;Scotland
Simply get the necessary data out of goggle earth or your prefered GIS.
Once you are finished, delete the airdist.tbl and the navaldist2.tbl from your map/map_x folder.
Once you start the game, the exe will generate a new airdist.tbl. This should be pretty quick, but might take a few minutes depending on your hardware.
Once you load a scenario, the exe will generate a new navaldist2.tbl. This will take some time, even on a fast system around 5 minutes, or considerable longer on old systems.
WARNING: the engine will also recompile the navaldist2.tbl when you change seaprovinces assigned to landprovinces and harbors in the province.csv.
DH specifics provincenumber
There are three values that need to be IDENTICAL.
Maptools folder:
/settings.txt
Code:
#The max province number
MaxProvinceNumber=****
/mods/x/db/misc.txt
Code:
# Total provinces. There is a hard-coded limit to 10000. adjacent.tbl must be updated after any change
****
/map/map_x/distances.csv
Code:
****;Total Provinces;ID;ENG;Region
The distances.csv file will only work when its not longer then ****+3 lines.
So when you have a map with 2608 provinces, the distance.csv has to be 2611 lines long.
DH specifics mapdebuglogs
In the settings.cfg you can activate debuglogs, specifically added for mapediting.
2 # Extra debug logs (savedebug.txt): 0 = disabled, 1 = enabled, 2 = enabled + extra map statistics
Will give you pretty much all the information you will need while setting up your db files properly.
Warnings when mapicon like aa and forts are placed in the wrong provinces.
Warnings when coastalprovinces have no or the wrong seaprovince defined.
Warnings when when something is wrong with the distance between two provinces.
Warnings when the amount of connections for a province seems wrong.
Warnings when a province id is not used on the map.
And a lot more.
Everything I needed a log function for while creating the new map, was included. So pretty much everything you run into should get logged.
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