Mapping

Creating custom maps & mods is explicitly welcomed - Soldat 2 ships with a built in map editor.

General Tips for Mapping

• Make your map readable: Follow functional conventions of map design. Steel beams and big bridges are almost always collisionmodel: players collide, while small stairs and platforms are - guess what - collisionmodel: platform. Sandbags and barrels are always collisionmodel: bullets collide.

• Especially on CTF maps, make sure to place grenade kits, health packs, and sandbags / barrels, and choose their locations wisely.

• Check your map for bad spawn locations in DM - even if it's not a DM map. See section #Unwanted Spawn Locations for details.

• Put work in selecting good colors from the start (see below for a guide to what each color does). This will help a lot getting a good feel for the map.

• Always test your maps with the graphics setting detailed backgrounds set to off. Many people play with this setting (for various reasons), so the map must look okay with this. With this configuration...
  • the SkyColor1 and SkyColor2 colors are not used for the map background. Instead BackDimColor is applied to the background. Make sure it looks OK.
  • anything in the background layer is not drawn. Look for map-props that appear floating because they are placed on a background shape. To fix this, put these objects also in the background layer, or move them to a better position.

• Add depth to the map by placing objects deep into the foreground and background. dm_db_cuba is a good example of this.

• Most props are 3D - rotating them often gives them quite different appearance and use on the map. Make use of this property to reduce repetition, or to reinterpret what those props represent.

• Don't overdo decoration, it will distract too much during game play and in some cases eat FPS of your players. When in doubt, place decorative props on the background layer, so players can hide them via the disable detailed backgrounds setting.

• There are already a shitload of maps (check out TMS). If you want to create a map that gets played, make sure you do at least one thing differently. Or fill a niche that is not yet. If you just want to create a piece of art that's of course great too ;)

Built-in Map Editor

The built-in editor is as of v0.8.46a still very much beta - its UI is quite rough around the edges. Here are some tips for working with it.

General Concepts

Maps primarily consist of polygons (protoshapes), 3D-props, and spawn locations for various items, and a color scheme. Props and protoshapes have attributes that affect their rendering. Protoshapes also have a collision model (props don't. To make something collide with a prop, draw a protoshape with disabled rendering on top of it. Maps are persisted to a JSON structure.

MapProp & Protoshape Properties

Rendering Layer

Each object on the map is placed a rendering layer, which affects (a) how it is colored, and (b) sets a default value for the depth / z parameter. Available values are:

• foreground: slightly desaturated, applies SunColor taint. default for solid protoshapes.
• none: don't draw this object.
• background: desaturates and darkens the object, and applies Fog* and BackDimColor taints to it. default for non-colliding protoshapes, which get a different texture applied.
• color: directly applies the color defined on the object 1:1. protoshapes with this also get a different texture.
• original: similar to color, but not the same?
  • TODO: whats the difference?

Collision Model

Applies to Protoshapes only, it's pretty self-explanatory. Note that platform shapes will always draw a dashed outline, which is good, as it helps with map readability.

Material

Defines the sound effect when bullets hit this shape. Also applies different bullet ricochet visuals (but those are not actual bullet ricochets able to hit players).

Map Settings

There are plenty of settings. I highly recommend exploring the entire settings panel, but you can use this section as a guide.

Note that this section does not primarily consist of authoritative information, but is to a large degree reverse 'engineered'.

Dimensions & Scaling

• Width, Height: Defines the map size

• Scale: This vector does not scale the whole map (see GlobalScale for that) - it's a multiplier on the Width and Height attributes.

• Mirror: Enable this if you want a symmetrical map. You only draw the left half of the map, and the game generates the other half on the fly. To get a preview, use the mirror button at the bottom of the settings UI. Individual map objects can be excluded from mirroring via the Mirror flag.

• GlobalScale, GlobalPosition: These values transform all objects on the map. Do not set these numbers in the settings panel, but use the transform button in the map settings panel (the transformation handle UI can appear outside of the map bounds)

Lighting

• SunLightColor: Sunlight color taints all objects in the foreground rendering layer.
• SunIntensityShift: The amount of sunlight
• SunHorizontalAngle, SunVerticalAngle: the angle from which light is applied, useful for shadows on protoshape normals.

• Fog, FogColor, FogDistance: fog applies a taint to background objects, which is applied with increasing opacity with increasing depth (z axis coordinate).

• HueShift SaturationShift BrightnessShift: These transform all colors specified in the settings panel, but does not apply to colors specified on individual map objects.

Sky / Background Colors

• SkyColor, SkyColor2: two colors with a gradient in between can be defined.
• SkyGradientScale, SkyGradientOffset, SkyGradientRotation: Parameters for the gradient between SkyColor and SkyColor2.
• BackDimColor: fallback color for the sky, when the setting detailed backgrounds is disabled. Note that this also applies a taint on background objects (why tho?).

Other Colors

• FadeColor: Color applied to the area outside of the map boundary.
• EffectsColor: Color used to taint stuff like explosions. White == untainted.

Protoshapes

• PlatformsColor: default color for all foreground platforms, unless they have an individual color specified.

• BackColor: default color for all background platforms, unless they have an individual color specified.

• PlatformsTexture, NormalTexture: defines the texture of the protoshapes and their normals (i.e the depth information that makes them have shadows.
  • TODO: is it possible to provide custom textures by placing them next to a map in the Levels/Custom/ dir?

• DetaulTexture, DetailNormalTexture, DetailTextureScale, DetailNormalTextureScale, DetailImpact, DetailGradientTexture, DetailColor: Additionally to their primary texture, protoshapes have a detail overlay with a separate set of textures. DetailImpact scales the visibility of this overlay.
  • Note: iiuc, this is mostly a relic from the pre-0.8 versions with a different renderer. To me, these settings are of little use for design.

Miscellaneous

• Author: self-explanatory. Make sure to fill this in, people want to be able to find the creator of a map.
• AmbientSound: selects one of a couple soundscapes. there is nothing worse than a sunny map with rumble ambience, be sure to choose a proper ambience.
• Generate: ??? iirc when enabled enabled, some sandbags etc are placed around each basecamp / flag placement.
• Seed: RNG initialization value for the generate feature.
• TopBarrierheight: ???

Workarounds

While the editor is in beta, there are plenty of bugs. For many, a workaround is available:

Unwanted Spawn Locations

In DM, players spawn at random locations on top of any colliding protoshape within map bounds, and not at the spawn locations you can place with the Gostek symbol. If your map is enclosed by a protoshape that does not extend well outside of the map bounds, players will spawn there.

This can be avoided, by placing another protoshape along the outer edge of your enclosing shape, extending it well outside of the map bounds. To not affect your map design you can set apply collision-model: players collide and rendering mode: none.

Selecting / moving all map objects

It can quickly happen that you run out of space in the left or bottom area. Instead of moving each object, use the transform button in the map settings panel to select all objects and move, rotate or scale them all.

Protoshape with render mode: color does not apply color

Restart the editor. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯.

Protoshape is invisible

This can happen when a shape is very thin or has a very pointy corner. Moving some vertices around can often fix the issue. If not, creating an extension of the shape

Protoshape is always drawn in front of Gosteks

The exact root cause is still unclear, some protoshapes just always appear in front of the player, independent of their rendering layer setting and depth value. It could have to do with the vertex order being wrong (clockwise instead of anticlockwise or vice versa). To fix this move some vertexes around, or just replace the shape another with another protoshape that does not have this problem.

Third Party Tools

The community also has written tools for creating maps that integrate with the map game / map editor:

• svg2map by @noerw converts between map JSON files and SVG and can be used to create or edit protoshapes in programs like Inkscape.