DarkAngel

I think its trying to avoid objects at the side of the road.

Yes, as Nils says you may need to spend a bit of time lining your units up on the road before they start off. The other problem you will face is that going from a normal speed route to the slow speed route (from waypoint 1) the tail end of 1/A will still be transitioning when 2/A comes barreling into it. This will cause a nice cluster f**k which 3/A will then become embroiled in. You may want to think about using this as a starting example of conditioned routes. Personally I would have added another waypoint say 500m after waypoint 1 (lets call it waypoint 2 ). Put 1/A, 2/A and 3/A on a stay tactic (which will also enable you to get them lined up on the road). Then give 1/A a route with an "Embark if" condition of (Co/A has reached waypoint 2). Give 2/A an "Embark if" condition of (1/A has reached waypoint 2). etc for 3/A and 2/A respectively. One note with conditioned routes. You don't have to condition every route from a waypoint. Lets say for example that you have a waypoint with 2 routes coming from it and you want any unit which arrives at the waypoint to have a 50% chance of going down either route. You could do it like this:- Route 1 "Embark if" (0 <= random new < 50) Route 2 "Embark if" (50 <= random new < 100) However the embark if on route 2 is completely unnecessary, you can leave it unconditioned. If the logic on route 1 is true it WILL take that route otherwise it will take route 2.

Good one Toyguy. You probably faffed around too much in the middle there which shot your tempo on the vid. Only one note for you. In the vid you went through and selected each unit to set its spacing and formation. That's not necessary, you can actually drag a box over the units to select them all and set it in one pass. Which would have helped the video tempo too. :eek2:

Yes in that case you are saying L1 AND L4 the OR's get ignored as there are no other statements to evaluate them with.

Glad I can help!. I think this is a very worthwhile exercise. What I wanted to point out with the game logic window is something which I think people miss or misunderstand because of the layout. What I think is important here is the brackets. In Math or logic the brackets mean {these things are linked together and will be evaluated first}. So in the above window there are 7 possible logic entries. Lets call them L1 to L7. If you stretch it out into a single line (including brackets) it looks like this:- L1 AND/OR ( (L2 AND L3) OR (L4 AND L5) OR (L6 AND L7)) So if you wanted to build only OR statements you can have 4 statements. For example:- L1 OR ((L2) OR (L4) OR (L6)) If you want to build only AND statements you can have 3 Statements. For example:- L1 AND ( (L2 AND L3) ) Now of course you don't have to use all of the logic statements and you don't have to use them in linear succession. For example you could just do:- ((L2 AND L3)) or ((L3) OR (L5) OR (L7)) or ((L2 AND L3) OR (L7)) It may not be essential to understand this for your tutorial I just wanted to point out the way in which it can fit together. If I've muddied the water too much for you feel free to catch me on TS and I will try and clear it up

Part 4 is nice and clear. Only one thing to note, the UTC time which you talk about is initially set by the UTM zone of the map. This can be found in the map info screen from the menu. One thing that could have also been mentioned is setting the contour line interval. Although it isn't saved with the mission file it could be useful for the mission designer to get a better idea of the map. Are you going to be touching on logic in this set of tutorials?. If so I have a useful snippet for you.

Can't tell you about your first question, I only use the supplied sky textures. In regards to maps though the terrain map is automatically included in a mission file. You have no choice in this matter. The heightmap embedding is optional though. If someone doesn't have the correct heightmap and the mission designer doesn't embed it the mission will fail to load.

Good work again Toyguy. Nothing to add on this one

Nice job again on part 2. Some notes on it:- In the beginning to say that unless there is a deployment zone red can deploy anywhere. You correct this later when talking about blue. The colour of the region in a deployment does matter if you have multiple deployment zones on one side. If more than one deployment zone is the same colour units can be dragged between them. If they are different colours units cannot be dragged between them. It may be worth mentioning that by default units will be in line formation (or is it wedge formation) and facing east. That is unless you specify a formation and a heading using a tactic. Also you can use the copy to other side function to duplicate a region on one side. Say for example once you have set up the blue deployment zone. Use the copy to other side, then swap to red, move the copied deployment to a different location and use the copy to other side again then delete it. When you go back to blue you now have 2 deployment zones. You can also use this to make sure both sides deployment zones are the same size. For example once you have created the red deployment zone use the copy to other side. When you then swap to blue you can change its colour and position without changing its size (note the deployment attribute is copied with it). I hope you don't mind me making these notes. You are doing a fine job and I don't want to seem like I am trying to rain on your parade.

yes

Nice idea and well carried out!. A few notes:- The first set of numbers in the bottom right are truncated UTM coordinates. If you check the map info window from the menu you can also glean what UTM region the coordinates correspond to. It may also be worth mentioning that the grid squares are 1km. (BTW UTM = Universal Transverse Mercator). The maps are derived from GIS data not GPS data. When quoting the map coordinates they are Degrees, Minutes and seconds (° degrees, ' Minutes , " seconds). It may be worth mentioning that a Pro PE mission is restricted to 22km per side. Overall though a nice job.

Replacing the map won't change anything. One of the first things written is a version number. If you try and load it in an earlier version it just bails at that point.

Scenarios never have been backward compatible.

Netherlands = Dutch.....

You're a cannuck, you're not equipped to think of clever things!. :eek2:

Hey Stu, Drop me a PM with your email addy. Or Email me details of what went wrong if you still have my email address. I have ways of fixing things like what heightmap is associated with a terrain map etc.

Bit outside of the scope of SB maps. I can't read the scale but instinct says you'd need about 20 or so heightmaps to cover that sort of area. Good luck with making the terrain maps for all of those. SB's Heightmaps are a maximum of 120x120km, though personally I've had problems working with maps of that size. I've found 80x80km to be about the maximum handle-able map size. There are already several heightmaps around in that area. An Najaf, Jalibah airbase, I think there is an Nasarijah and Bagdad maps floating around too.

http://www.steelbeasts.com/sbforums/showthread.php?t=15206 There is already a request thread here. (Maybe that one could become a sticky Sean). I don't think people really understand the work involved in making a heightmap even. The terrain map is the real workload. But to make a heightmap its not as simple as just load the data and go, there is a lot of prep work involved too. To do the prep work you would need to buy some extra (and more expensive ) software. I believe there are some free ones that can do some of the work but not all of it. Research. Even given a SW coordinate a bit of research is needed to refine that point and the data sets available. You need a GIS program to do this!. Google earth doesn't have the ability to work in different projections which is required. Download the data. Load the data into the GIS program, fix the projection and datum to the type SB pro is expecting. Select the subset of the data that will be used to make the map. Export this out to DTED format. I don't think any of the free GIS programs will allow you to do this. Especially to DTED3 which would be required for 10m data. This exporting can take a while and will produce up to 300mb files. Create the Heightmap in SB Pro and then import the DTED data. So not only do you need to understand the data formats and be able to handle them. You will need to spend about $400 for Global mapper which is about the best bang for buck GIS program which can perform the tasks.

Join the queue.

Yes Thank you Tacbat... was good. A big round of applause to Toyguy and the red team.

Most of them got converted to the hgt format and are still present. I think the .raw files are still usable but lack the geographic information for calculating UTC.

Had also forgotten about it!. I can do more than just the heightmap. Depends on the world region. For the US there is a lot of free data available, this includes shape data (roads, rail etc) and land coverage. From these 2 data types I can make a rough terrain map and the road network too. For non US it gets trickier, I can make a basic terrain map from the ETM+ (Landsat) data but the only free shape data available is 1:1000000 which is frankly CRAP!. For Australia there is 1:50k data readily and freely available. If someone wanted to digitize roads in Google earth I can also import that. The only thing I'm not willing to do is lots of digitizing myself. Its an A**hole of a job and usually involves moments of insanity. From my perspective here is what I would need to make a basic map. South west corner either as Lat/Long or as a Google earth marker. Dimensions of the map required (SB allows sizes in 2km increments from 12km to 120km per side, maps over 80km though are not easy to deal with). Patience, It will take me a while to get all the data together. Possibly an occasional reminder as I usually have a few irons in the fire at any one time.

Yes!!!

I have a whole repertoire of effects i can do to the heightmap (and the terrain map). Catch me on TS at some point and I'll tell you the sort of things. If I'm in the R&D channel just text me or poke me.

The terrain file hasn't changed and the new heightmap is a perfect alignment with the original.