Dispensing the Myth of 16+ tiles

Well here it is, proof that you can actually go above 16 tile texture spaces. I know that TucksMa's already had 22, but some people believed that 16 was the max with Zepirs. I'm not sure what the upper limit is, but it's safe to say that it's much more then you'll need :). The bonus is, that if you go beyond 12 ground textures, WE is nice enough to add a scrollbar for you. Unfortunately cliffs have a limit of about 10, otherwise all your icons start overlapping each other, but that's the only problem I've encountered so far. Here's an (incredibly messy) screenshot, just for demonstration purposes. Please don't take it as an assessment of my terraining skills :P --



~kharma

That's pretty cool! Does that need only Zepir's editor? And it loads ok in UMSWE? No slk editing needed?

And btw where the hell is Zépir? Did he give up the editor?

Cool 4 diffrent cliffs.. hmm.. where can i dl the zepir editor? :)

Really wanted to change the cliffs...

@Kami: Zepir's Editor can be found here: http://www.wc3campaigns.com/download...498dbbdf198a6b

@kharma: Even though the pic doesn't load at the moment I would like to try it with so many tiles; could you describe how you did that?

There's only one slk file you need to fix, and that's the cliffdata.slk. Each cliff file is represented by a 4 letter code, just like abilities and upgrades etc. And each cliff blp is called #_cliff0.blp or #_cliff1.blp, where # is the second letter from each of the cliff codes. Ie: The badlands cliff codes are CBde and CBgr and the blps are called B_Cliff0 and B_cliff1 respectively.

However, Warcraft 3 is set to 'intelligently' read the data from the slk partly through the code and partly through the filename. As you can see below, the #_ part of the blp is removed:



This means, however, that if you try and include more then 2 cliffs the textures will not read their own types, but instead read the cliffs that you based the tileset on. Ie: If you were configuring a cityscape tileset (CYdi, CYsq) but tried to add in say, the Lordaeron Winter Snow cliff (CWsn) the texfile would unknowingly read the cityscape cliff1.blp for the cliff instead of the snow texture.

So how do you fix this? Easy as pie. Just insert the full filenames for each of the cliffs and it will work perfectly (note that Lordaeron Summer is the default cliff and therefore does not have any prefix at all). I've attached a copy of the slk that's already done to save y'all some trouble :). The best thing about cliffdata.slk is that it works both in local directory (Warcraft3\terrainart\cliffdata.slk) *and* is bnet compatible. Not only that, but the whole thing is only 7kb uncompressed, so it's not going to expand your map size by anything significant.

@KDEWolf: I haven't seen Zepir in a LONG time. Although Stoned said he may try and coerce him to come back to update the editor for FT :).

~kharma

seksi

yeah, thx ok i got it to work thank you! :0

oh one more thing is there a editor that is great for spells? cause i can seem to find a great one ( i kno this isnt a great place to put it but yeah )!

I tried messing around with this myself but I found that you are limited to actually having the cliff tile "installed" into your map, if you don't have the cliff tile and you put the cliff into your map, it won't show up. This is a problem and I'm gonna play around with stuff and see what I come up with.

EDIT: No luck, I need to find out where the information for cliff tiles are located, they aren't in the SLK files, it must be in a txt or something. If we can find out where the cliff information is stored we can manipulate all the tiles to be registered as cliffs, that way all the cliff tiles will show up. Well this is what I'm hoping anyways.

Someone else give it a shot.

Maybe if we could find the data in the cliffs that would ask for that tile to be present in order for the cliff to actually show up. There has to be some way...

FyreDaug I don't understand what you're talking about. As you can see, it works right there. You only need to add the modified slk file, nothing else. It works perfectly fine ingame. I can show you a screenshot of it working ingame as well.

~kharma

kharma, you can't have a cliff show up unless you have the cliff tile, what I'm saying, is that we should find a way to modify it so every tile can have it's own cliff.

EDIT: Bah nevermind, to do this you would have to modify the cliff.blp files, too much work, it you have a cliff tile then good, otherwise you will only get so many cliffs.

FyreDaug the "cliff tiles" are read from the blp files. It has nothing to do with text files or anything else. You'd have to create a unique blp for every single texture.

--EDIT-- I'm glad to see you caught on, I was getting worried for a moment :P. Also remember that unless you make a custom cliff texture, you don't need to import it into your map for it to work. The reference in the slk is enough. --/EDIT--

~kharma

hm.. doesn't work for me. What exactly do you have to do to get it set up to work with in the WE ?

You have to use Zepirs editor to add the references for the extra cliffs. Once that is done you can successfully manipulate your map in normal WE. I'll be writing up a complete tutorial within the next few days that explains the whole process for people that are still confused.

~kharma