Import height map

[Nilmadae]

I'm trying to make my first game map, but I'm having some difficulties. I've made this attached height map over Maquarie Island in Photoshop. I've saved it as a .tga file. When I upload it in RRT3 the red does not change into water automatically and the heights are barely visible. What am I doing wrong? Thanks for your help.

[brunom]

Welcome.

Ocean is never automatically placed. You need to use paint-fill for it.

As for the height of mountains - more often than not, you need to try a few times, changing those modifiers at start, when the game loads the height map. And, as my own rule, never smooth anything out - do it after you like the map, if need be,

I will load the map later and see if there is any problem with it anyway - but try changing those modifiers and see if you can achieve the desired effect.

Look forward to see your creations
B

[OilCan]

It is a nice map and you are almost there with it.

The red color on your map is not a pure red. That's the problem with the ocean. Your red color is 250 Red, 0 Green and 1 Blue. Change your red to 255 Red, 0 Green and 0 Blue and the ocean will appear. I tested it and it works.

Your map heights are mostly less than 150 Blue which means you are not using the highest half of the blue colors. You can go all the way to 255 blue. There are some strange peaks which appear in 2 or 3 spots on your map. I looked closely at the blue colors but could not figure out why RT3 editor made the peaks so pointy and jagged. These can easily be smoothed down with the Terrain Tool.

I tested your map at different Mountain Top Height Modifier numbers, even up to 10 which is the highest number, but it made little difference. I think your lower elevations are too low for the modifier to raise them. I even played with increasing the Overall Height Modifier with the Mountain Top modifier, but your map comes out too bumpy.

May I suggest that you redo your elevations using up to 255 Blue for your highest elevations.

One last thing: your map dimensions are 704 pixels by 1792 pixels. The RT3 map editor can't accept anything over 1024 pixels on a single side of a map. The editor will automatically 'shrink' your map when you try to load it. May I suggest that you do the shrinking in Photoshop and not leave it to the RT3 map editor. Resize your map from 1792 pixels on the longest side to 1024 pixels - with a proportional shrink on the smaller side. This might solve the strange peak problem.

Best of luck.

[Nilmadae]

Thanks for your help.

I thought I had the pure red but I guess I was wrong.

I also thought about changing the blue colours to the full 255. It's just a lot of work with small pixels, but I guess I'll have to try it. Hopefully the "Magic Wand" will select all pixels in the right colour...

The dimensions I'm aware of. I just wanted you to have my most detailed map.

I won't have any time until late tonight to fix this but I will keep you updated on my progress.

[OilCan]

Don't work in blue until you have all the hill elevations where you want them. It is hard to see the difference in the blue shades. Instead work with your lowest hill elevation as yellow, the next highest as green, the next as brown and so forth. Once you have all the hills shaped as you wish, then save as 'multicolor'.

Use your paint bucket to fill each elevation level with the proper blue shade and then save again as "blue". Now you are ready to test it as a heightmap. You have your multicolor map as a backup in case you want to make major changes to the map.

BTW, I looked up this island on the web. This could be a very interesting game.

[Nilmadae]

Thanks for your help. This is how my map came out after I changed to the full range of blue. I've also changed to pure red and changed the size to 384x1024. In addition I also blurred the map significantly to erase the plateau-shaped hills so it will be a slightly more balanced elevation.

When I imported it to RRT3 I used something like 2.0 - 6.0 - 2 to get a map which I might use. I'm not certain about that yet though.

With that I think I'm ready to start working on the scenario. I've got two thoughts:
The first would be something like the board game Settlers. Small cities which you would have to connect and evolve. I would have to decide their locations. In reality it is a deserted island apart from a science station. That's all I've come up with.

Should I paint the rivers and lakes before I start working on the scenario? I definitely think it would be easier to place the cities correctly and the cost for making bridges later would be included in testing.

The second thought I have would be a larger map with the cities from the first map a bit bigger and some smaller cities spread out all after the population grow larger.

Those are my thoughts but I have no idea how to fulfill them. I've always been more interested in making maps and geography rather than economics... So don't set your expectations too high OilCan!

[Hawk]

I believe it's safe to paint the lakes and rivers, but save all other terrain painting until after you have finished with all the events.
RT3 has a bad habit of degrading the painting on each new save of the map, unless you save it with a different name every time.

[Nilmadae]

I believe it's safe to paint the lakes and rivers, but save all other terrain painting until after you have finished with all the events.
RT3 has a bad habit of degrading the painting on each new save of the map, unless you save it with a different name every time.

I've read about that but I just wanted to be sure.

[OilCan]

It is a good idea to practice how to draw rivers and paint a map as well as how to set out cities, create regions and make territories, BUT I'd recommend comming up with a 'story board' or story plot first before doing anything you would want to keep on the map.

Think about your game as a play or a movie - you need a script before you start making the propts.
Think about these things: the start year for the game, the game goals (maybe something like connecting cities and hauling a specific good), the length of the game, the players (AI to join or not), and the industry which will be allowed (or easier to think about which is not allowed). The goals of the game are VERY important because they will determine if the stock market is important or not and other special conditions.

Make a timeline by writing each year of the game as a list. This will become very helpful when you start writing events. Note for each year what should happen: weather events, choices to the player for improvements, setbacks, political effects and such. These add the spice to a game. Many years will have nothing of note.

Your map will probably have ports since it is an island and it is far away from any real supplies. Think about using these ports as part of the story. Done right, they can add an enjoyable challenge to the game. Maybe you should make your track limited and costly - maybe make more available if a certain, scarce good is hauled to a port. Just some ideas....

Don't let this game become too complicated (that's one of my faults). The best games I've played are simple yet demanding.

Good job on the map!

[brunom]

To my knowledge, unfortunately, you cannot add houses or population to the cities via game events. You can only add industries.

As to create a map on a random island, I would advise thinking like this:
1. what resources would the island have to offer - these would be demands in the ports
2. what does the island need - these would be what the ports have to supply

3. then consider what kind of game you want - competition/one company only, modern/19th century, etc..

Say you will play it as cold, far away, island (as it is). Then it will obviously need produce, meat, grain, clothing and goods. It could have uranium mines inland and a lot of wood - these would be exports. Throw in some milk farms and you would have a complete economic system for an island of that sort.
Of course, you could make up a completely different economy - different imports/exports. But I usually go this way, so that's my advice.

B

[nedfumpkin]

My advice with rivers is to overlay them on your map using a very dark grey or even black before you create your map in map builder. This will sink them lower and will make them easier to paint evenly and you won't have them going over mountains. It will also make them easier to bridge.

After looking at it over and over, rivers don't actually flow in any particular direction. If they appear to, it is an illusion. Cargo flows to wherever it is demanded on a river, obstenively the Tycoonatrons use barges rather than letting cargo float on down the river. :)

You can add houses via event in 1.06, as well as the city buildings. Trainmaster allows you to add bungalows and apartment buildings via event.

[sbaros]

The depicted island looks suspiciously like Creta!
My question: Are these nice maps in the TrainMaster "Monkey" campaigns fractal-generated?

[Gumboots]

No idea, but the usual way to do them is to use an area of the real world taken from a GEOTIFF DEM.
The map mentioned above is of Macquarie Island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macquarie_Island

The process by which it was generated would have caused the artifacts ("strange peaks") and terracing ("plateau-shaped hills") mentioned in the previous posts. I know exactly what was going on there, having done quite a bit of testing on map generation. Read this post and the rest of the thread if you want to understand what's going on: viewtopic.php?p=46280#p46280

The artifacts are due to blurring the generated height map, which results in a colour value that is incorrect for that map vertex. To avoid such artifacts, the height map has to be generated at the correct size and not screwed around with after that. This is easy to do, but it does require a bit of thinking.

The terracing is due to the original RT3 height scale .dbf being screwed, so that it only ever gave a 40 metre resolution. After figuring out what was wrong with it, I made several alternative .dbf's that have resolutions of 4, 5 and 8 metres. Which resolution works best depends on map scale (larger real life areas on small game maps require less resolution).