How To Make A Crappy Map For ZK In One Hour

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.

Can you screenshot the problem?

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?

I'm not seeing anything that would indicate what the issue is. Can you make a screenshot as Anarchid suggested?

Seems like you are using newest engine (develop), which isn't usable yet. Download latest maintenance instead.

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/

Just playing around.




This has been useful too...

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.)

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

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