ETW Map making tutorial

**Aradiel** · May 26, 2009, 11:10 AM

Its really not that hard, i never made a map before, and i only had 2 issues i couldnt figure out, which where answered by hokomoko and badger, and another 2 i couldnt know of because noone did, which are solved now as well. So theres no reason why anybody should not be able to make a map, ff you want to see whats possible check this thread page 8.

**FearofNC** · May 26, 2009, 05:21 PM

i would just try and ask your questions to someone in a steam chat...i was able to get some help from tsailen last night... posting your problems here doesnt seem to work.

**♔Dignan♔** · August 26, 2009, 07:42 PM

Is it possible to edit the preset battle maps that generate from campaigns? For example, can I use these tools to edit all siege battles so that instead of forts you get a series of earth bunkers and wooden cavalry spikes?

**FearofNC** · August 26, 2009, 10:58 PM

Originally Posted by Dignan

Is it possible to edit the preset battle maps that generate from campaigns? For example, can I use these tools to edit all siege battles so that instead of forts you get a series of earth bunkers and wooden cavalry spikes?

no

**Emperor of The Great Unknown** · November 07, 2009, 05:46 PM

none of download mirrors work can someone plz post it an attachment? Ill +rep you!

**Flavious** · June 02, 2010, 09:38 PM

Thanks for the great tutorial and tools!

They convinced me to tackle a single-battle custom map for ETW: The Battle of White Plains, NY,
on Oct. 28, 1776. The unit limits in ETW make it impossible to mod the whole battle, so my map concentrates on the critical part: Chatterton's Hill. I grew up near there, so I know the general terrain (and I watched a lot of reenactments in nearby parks as a child).

Here are the steps I've taken so far, with notes about the successes and roadblocks along the way. Perhaps someone can offer tips to help me -- because I'm stuck at the moment on exporting/converting/importing my heightmap. I want to use accurate terrain and not draw it from scratch.

1. Found the 2x2 km area on Google Earth, marked the 4 corners with placemarks, then recorded the longitude-latitude coordinates of each corner. Drew a polygon on the map area, saved it, then cropped in in Paint.net to give me a satellite image of the play area. Scaled the image to 2048 x 2048 pixels, so it would match the scale of my project.

2. Logged onto USGS site ( http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/viewer.htm ), used my grid coordinates to select an area for elevation data download. Selected the Elevation Dataset (NED) 1 Arc Second data, and downloaded it as a GeoTiff file.

3. Used the freeware program 3DEM (works only in XP, get it from http://www.visualizationsoftware.com )
to open the GeoTiff. The image shows as a beautiful color shaded terrain map. Using 3DEM, I saved the file as a "Binary (Signed Integer)" file (extension *.bin).

4. Once I had a .bin format, I could import it into the L3DT terrain design program and create a project, resize it, etc. according to the Lordz tutorial. The heightmap looks fine in L3DT, and the elevations are all accurate.

5. Now, the critical step is getting my heightmap imported into PnP Terrain Creator so I can edit the heightmap and put in textures, etc. But here's where I've had problems: PnP says one can import heightmaps in *.raw format, as an L3DT project file (*proj), or as a bitmap (many formats supposedly supported).

The first way I tried was to import the L3DT entire project file into PnP. First, I resized the heightmap in L3Dt to 1024 x 1024 and exported it. Then I tried to import the *proj file it into PnP. Nothing happens -- just no reaction from the program at all. Maybe this import filter doesn't really work with the free version?

Then I tried saving the heightmap in L3DT as a *raw file, but after the import the entire PnP heighmap is pure white, with an even 300 meter elevation all across it.

I get various results (none of them satisfactory) with all the other bitmap formats. For example, when I import the heightmap as a *.tga file, I get a very faint greyed out heightmap with insufficient variation. *.jpg heightmaps result in the opposite problem: excessive contrast, so the black-to-gray lower elevations are good but everything in the top several dozen meters is whited out into flat plateaus.

Now I'm looking for a way to maybe convert my heightmap from, say binary (*bin) to *dds. If I can get it into .dds format, then I can use the Lordz heightmap tool to convert that into .raw and maybe have it import properly into PnP.

Here's my heightmap in various formats, in case anyone wants to try converting/importing it into PnP and seeing why it does or doesn't work:

Any ideas?

**Kaunitz** · November 02, 2010, 10:10 AM

Sorry, Flavious, I cannot answer your "advanced" problem.

I'm trying to create my first map right now and I am stuck when I try to run the map scripts for the height maps in gimp (script-fu-maps-script 1 5). I always get the gimp-error message "layer scale full" (Error: eval: unbound variable: gimp-layer-scale-full). I'm a greenhorn in such things - what am I doing wrong? Can anybody help me?

On this page (http://homepage2.nifty.com/sampodo/g...pscheme01.html) it says that I have to "Scale the layer using a specific interpolation method." which doesn't really help me on.

The Lordz-tutorial says that the picture should be 1025x1025! Do I need to make the layer huge (speaking of thousands x thousands pixels?)?

**Aaronbaron** · February 26, 2011, 07:00 PM

Originally Posted by Kaunitz

Sorry, Flavious, I cannot answer your "advanced" problem.

I'm trying to create my first map right now and I am stuck when I try to run the map scripts for the height maps in gimp (script-fu-maps-script 1 5). I always get the gimp-error message "layer scale full" (Error: eval: unbound variable: gimp-layer-scale-full). I'm a greenhorn in such things - what am I doing wrong? Can anybody help me?

On this page (http://homepage2.nifty.com/sampodo/g...pscheme01.html) it says that I have to "Scale the layer using a specific interpolation method." which doesn't really help me on.

The Lordz-tutorial says that the picture should be 1025x1025! Do I need to make the layer huge (speaking of thousands x thousands pixels?)?

Right umm I could be wrong as I have never ever modified anything to do with empire, but I know a quite a bit about gimp, when you press scale layer in gimp, it come up with a dialog box correct? with different options like how big you want it. Under all that there something called interpolation, then a dropdown box so it must mean one of those.

EDIT: after looking at the date you posted, you prob already found an answer oops lol