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How To Make A Crappy Map For ZK In One Hour

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There were complaints that there was no video tutorial about how2map for ZK, so here i've made a crappy and silent video that shows my mapping workflow, or at least, one version thereof:

The whole process here takes one hour, but this assumes you have this set of prerequisites before you can start working:

1) An install of Blender (mostly used here for crappy automatic texturing)
2) An install of SpringBoard.
3) A working copy of SpringMapConvNG (any other map compiler will do if you know how to make it work. Latest SpringBoard seems to sport a built-in compiler, so you may even skip this step!)
4) The blend file with the cycles materials to use the crappy automated texturing process (available here
5) The "blueprint" directory with the compile script (not needed if you can use your own compiler) and pre-packaged features (which may need their metal values and collision volumes adjusted for your taste).

This also features and highlights some bugs:

1) The heightmap export from SpringBoard seems to cause an annoying edge-of-map wall issue that i've never seen before today. Oh well.
2) If you use heightmap export on Windows, you'll have a 8-bit grayscale file. You can solve this by reexporting from blender (rendering using the heightmap material). This will however further rescale your heighmap altitudes.
3) Yeah, heightmap altitudes seem to also not be that consistent. Exporting from springboard and recompiling seems to change water level!
4) You need to remember to edit feature collision volumes because the features (which i took from SpringFeatures) have extremely crappy default values. And 0 metal and energy.
5) For me, SpringBoard texture export fails to export the diffuse texture. This is not a problem in this case because i'm using it to only edit heightmap and features anyway, and newer versions of SpringBoard should have this fixed since the video showcased them :)

That said, 1h shitty rush job is 1h shitty rush job. Now you can see how crap maps like Glacies are done.
+27 / -0
Thanks!

I've got Spring downloaded, SpringBoardCore, and the demo map.

When I load all those through Spring, though, I see the controls as in the video, but there's no text. Everything is 2 colors. I tried updating my graphics card.

Not sure what to try next.


ETA: Looks like it's not loading up Spring after I hit test game. I see the progress bar, but there's no info under it. I used pr-downloader to get sbc:test and then ran Spring, selected the three things, click test game, and it doesn't load right...
+0 / -0


5 years ago
Can you screenshot the problem?
+0 / -0

5 years ago
It sounds like Spring is failing at start, but there still might be an infolog.txt file. Please upload it if you can find it.
+0 / -0
5 years ago
Yeah, I found it. Do you need the whole thing? Here's a few of the errors I found.

[Spoiler]

User Config...

[Spoiler]

Permissions problem, maybe?

+0 / -0
Here's the whole file...

+1 / -0

5 years ago
I'm not seeing anything that would indicate what the issue is. Can you make a screenshot as EErankAdminAnarchid suggested?
+0 / -0






+1 / -0

5 years ago
Seems like you are using newest engine (develop), which isn't usable yet. Download latest maintenance instead.
+1 / -0
5 years ago
This is the Spring version.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/springrts/files/springrts/spring-104.0/spring_104.0_win32.exe/download

Do you mean another SpringBoardCore version?

Is there something to use other than pr-downloader: sbc:test?

Thanks for the help.
+0 / -0

5 years ago
Are you sure?
The log (which you removed) shows:
Spring Engine Version: 104.0.1-1364-g6acbbcc develop
And the graphical display definitely suggests develop version.

Get one of the latest maintenance versions from here: https://springrts.com/dl/buildbot/default/maintenance/?C=M;O=D . This one should work: https://springrts.com/dl/buildbot/default/maintenance/104.0.1-909-g82a205f/
+3 / -0
5 years ago
Woot. That worked.

I couldn't find the older builds at first. Thanks for the pointer.

On to the next hurdle!
+3 / -0
5 years ago
Just playing around.




This has been useful too...

+0 / -0

5 years ago
EErankAdminAnarchid
Thanks for the video. I encourage other people, especially first-time users, to also make videos, as it can give me a lot of feedback on how to improve this further.
For example, watching this I thought Anarchid wasn't using hotkeys as much I normally do: shift and ctrl are very useful in SB (shift + mouse wheel can change brush size, ctrl can be used to rotate selected objects, etc.).

Most of things reported were bugs, except for this:
quote:

3) Yeah, heightmap altitudes seem to also not be that consistent. Exporting from springboard and recompiling seems to change water level!

SB doesn't respect loaded min/max heightmap values because it allows you to modify the heightmap as you wish, and more importantly, it's not how I envision work to be done with SB. With SB you can export mapinfo.lua, which includes correct map extremes, environment settings (e.g. sun lighting, fog), map settings (e.g. void map), author information (see Misc->Info), and so on.
My goal is to make one command that exports map textures, map info and s11n features, then compiles it, all within the SB GUI.
+3 / -0
It would be nice if you could manually set the min/max heightmap values for export. My usecase is that early in the map creation process my current heightmap does not always reach the extremes which I will want it to reach later, and if I need to use a tool outside Springboard for some reason, having my current and non-final min/max heights be represented as (0,0,0) and (FF,FF,FF) is a bit inconvenient.

(Also it helps me track stuff like the depth of shallow water, which ideally needs to be pretty precise, if ingame height and value in the heightmap image are proportional with a simple ratio like 2:1.)
+2 / -0

5 years ago
cOOL Map Anarchid, makes me want to play it even tho its simple. :P Just because it looks like it works for most factories and Fleas won't work. That's a dream.
+2 / -0
I might need some help with Spingboard...
since the automated downloader is currently broken,

i followed the manual download steps(Windows):

1. i installed Spring Engine
2. used the Pr-downloader to download: sbc:test and zk:stable
it seems like they got downloaded in Documents\My Games\Spring\packages (idk why there) as
0f5af0ae3b1bb1121f4e47b6f547f3a3.sdp and
017c5687a34f0213e5e304beeb8eeab2.sdp
3. i put some Zero-k maps into the Spring/maps folder and started the Engine with:
SpringBoard Core test-1011-85b998b
Obsidian_1.5
Player Only: Testing Sandbox
4. This works but i noticed that there are only like 7-8 textures and i wanted to have more textures
I downloaded https://github.com/Spring-SpringBoard/SpringBoard-Core.git
but Springengine doesnt recognice it when placed in its folder
C:\Program Files (x86)\Spring here C:\Program Files (x86)\Spring\SpringBoard-Core-master
any idea what to do to make it work?
or how can i add more textures from the core assets file because i dont have a directory to copy sth inside
+0 / -0
It needs to be in the games subfolder of your install and to have the folder have the .sdd suffix, something like this:
 C:\Documents\My Games\Spring\games\SpringBoard.sdd\ 

I don't think the git version of SpringBoard has more brushes on its own though.

The manual says that to install the assets package you need to:
quote:
A set of core assets are available. To use, extract them to springboard/assets/core/.

So if your Spring lives in "C:\Documents\My Games\Spring", then you should put the assets here:
C:\Documents\My Games\Spring\springboard\assets\core
+1 / -0
Documents\My Games\Spring has only the folders (which all were created by Pr-downloader):
cache, demos, LuaUI, packages, pool, rapid

I tryed adding a games folder there and put the renamed SpringBoard-Core-master.ssd
in but it didnt work. (tryed SpringBoard.sdd too)
Inside rapid and packages it doesent work too.

I tryed putting the renamed SpringBoard-Core-master.ssd in
C:\Program Files (x86)\Spring\games (which was empthy) and it doesnt recognize it too

I know about the part with the extra core assets,
but to add them i need a working springbordfolder, which i can access first
because the pr-downloader doesnt give you a downloaded folder but sth else you cant edit

Edit: Got it you somehow have to rename the Folder to SpringBoard-ZK.sdd
And put it in C:\Program Files (x86)\Spring\games
+2 / -0

5 years ago
All you have to do is create an empty springboard folder in your Spring datadir folder, where the maps and games folders are located
+0 / -0
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