So for the benefit of the people who are interested, I have worked out how to make rivers and bridges. I know a bunch of folk on this board know this already, but I thought it might be useful to pass on what I've had to learn the hard way. Here is how rivers & bridges get made: 0. Make your planet, and once you're happy with the terrain (and water height, number of landing zones, etc.) open the advanced editor. Then, go to the 'CSG' tab. 1. Bridges On one level bridges are super easy. To make a simple, flat bridge over a bit of water you can just place 'metal structure 12' brushes CSG, lining them up so that you have ramps up onto the bridge at either end, and so that the platforms join up (hiding the ramps) in the middle of the bridge. But we can do waaaay better than that. To make real, cool bridges, you need to learn about two other things. The first is that CSG placed in the editor falls into two categories: pathable and non-pathable. Pathable CSG can be moved over by units, whilst non-pathable CSG can't be moved over, however flat/traversable it looks. The cool thing is that although only CSG with things like obvious ramps is pathable by default, you can make non-pathable CSG pathable by editing an exported .pas file. Be aware that making a CSG pathable doesn't make the whole of it pathable, though - the game will still think of vertical/steeply-sloping edges (even very, very small ones) as not pathable. But you can make the top of a flat rock into a space that units can build on and move about on by making it pathable: just save your map, export it, and open it in a text editor (e.g.Notepad). Find the entry in the list of brushes for the CSG you want to make pathable, then, where it says: "pathable": false change the 'false' to 'true', and hey presto, you have a pathable rock outcrop (or whatever)! To make it easier to find these entries, I often place all the CSG I want to make pathable first, save and export the system, change the CSG in notepad to make them pathable, then finish the map after. The second thing is that land units can go under bridges as well (naval pathfinding, on the other hand, does not go under bridges under any circumstances, AFAIK). The way you can get land units to go under a bridge is to place pathable CSG under the bridge, so that when units on the ground check to see whether the space under the bridge is pathable, the game immediately tells them 'there's pathable CSG down there! of course you can!'. If you don't place pathable CSG under your bridges and leave the ground empty, instead (I think) the units detect the non-pathable edge of the bridge above and they stop. When you combine these two bits of information, you can now do fun things like use the ordinary pathable CSG to make ramps that take you up on top of rock formations, and then make bridges of 'metal structure 12' between the rock formations that other units can go under; you can make 'high-gr0und versus low-ground' setups, battles between mountain peaks, etc. etc. This stuff is at the heart of the bridge-tastic maps I've made so far like Dorne and The Eyrie, and a lot of other mapmakers use this technique regularly to make more interesting maps than you could get out of the basic system editor tools. 2. Rivers I know some people have asked for river maps, and I've been doing some tests. So, can you make rivers? The simple answer to this is, yes, and all you need it 'desert pit 1'. Really. Desert pit 1 is a subtractive brush (so it takes away from the ground under it), and when you put it next to a body of water in the editor it will automatically flood and fill with water. If you place long chains of the brush 'desert pit 1' that snake across the landscape and link two bodies of water - you'll have yourself a river. To make things look neater/less repetitive you can put other rocks and things around the edges of your river, but so long as it's wide enough, boats will sail down it no problem. The only downside is that you can't make bridges over your rivers. Or, you can, but boats can't go under it because naval pathing only looks to see if there's land at any height in front of it - even if that land is a bridge a hundred feet above the water. Well, I hope that helps somebody. Making maps is fun, you should totally try it! And if you have a question about the editor or any of the stuff above, ask me in this thread? I will try to be helpful and make sense, hopefully at the same time.
Excellent guide. One thing I might add with regard to bridges: try using metal_stripe_01. It's just a flat box, and it looks much cleaner for long bridge spans than having a bunch of metal_structure_12s in succession. I put a few of these in Gandalf's IceAge map, if you want an example. Obviously you need to edit the .pas to get an instance of this brush, but it seems like you're familiar with the process already.
Very handy! I will give that a go - metal_structure_12 is fairly well-behaved (though having a brush clip through another brush when building bridges isn't always particularly good), but I think metal_stripe_01 might be a very useful addition to my bridge-building toolkit. If you have time, it would be awesome if you could add some more of your own map-making tips in here! You've got a much broader knowledge of how to get things out of the editor than I have.
Thanks! I don't want to hijack your thread, but since you've asked I might as well share the way I make tunnels. If you change any brush's operation type to BO_Subtract, it will subtract its volume from the terrain and other CSG. This is normally used with craters, cracks, pits and such, but you can do this with any other brush as well. For instance, if you were to make a metal_stripe_01 subtractive, you could carve a boxy trench in the land. Problem is, most brushes that are additive by default don't have a texture on the bottom, so your new trench will have a pitch-black floor. To fix this, you can put the brush on the opposite side of the planet and set its height property to a negative number; this will put it in the correct location, upside down. The texture on top of the brush will then appear as the floor of the trench. Here's a map I made that uses this trick: One thing you'll notice about the tunnels in that album is that they don't bend along with the planet's curvature, since their projection type is set to BP_None. This causes each tunnel to pass under the heightmap and terminate in a pathable ramp without having to use more than one brush apiece.
So I didn't reply to this yesterday. But I meant to say - thanks for this @guest1 . A really cool tip; to be quite honest, I'd happily make this 'your' thread if it meant you'd keep dispensing wisdoms like that. Also, I've tried using metal_stripe_01 and it's a pretty excellent as a bridge-building tool. One question though - is there any way to increase the curvature with which a CSG bends to follow the planet curvature? Going through the planet is very cool, but I was wondering if metal_stripe_01 could be bent to form a curved bridge between outcrops or the sides of a body of water (this would also have the added bonus of making the brush into, effectively, its own pathable ramp. I'm sure there must be, but I don't know exactly how the values in the "transform" array affect things like curve, stretch, skew, etc.
