Transcript
TEd Tutorial: Getting Started + Playing your map!
Download and install the Total War: Attila Assembly Kit BETA.
Instructions on how to download and install are here: http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/155477-How-To-Download It is very important that you actually read this, it’s short and could save you a lot of time in future.
Open the Assembly Kit BETA and run TEd
When opening the assembly kit you will be brought to a folder with all the tools and some other files in it. For map creation, you’ll want to use TEd.
Double click TEd and you’re ready to start editing.
Where is everything?
So when you open TEd this is what you should see:
Some of you may see this:
This screen is harder to work with. It will offset the in-editor cursor a little bit in relation to the windows mouse cursor. In order to get the fullscreen view as displayed in image one, just drag the windows out to your second monitor. If you do not have a second monitor, you can just place these windows behind TEd and adjust them when needed, but it is recommended to use two monitors. Very briefly, the controls are similar to Attila. Move the camera with W,A,S,D and use middle mouse to dictate the orientation. Shift + middle mouse will raise and lower the camera.
Setup your map Properties
It is important to setup some quick properties first. This will allow you to load your battle in the game if done correctly. First, just click “File” up on the top toolbar and click “Edit Battlefield Info…”
Keeping it simple, Display Name will be the name of the map displayed in game. Description doesn’t show up anywhere for now unless you check it in the Database. Author will display above the coordinates of the map in Total War: Attila when selecting it. Battle Type can be land, sea or siege. For this map, we’ll stick to land. Map Type should be left at Multiplayer (don’t worry this can be used as custom battle or in the campaign) Click OK and we’re done for now. In more advanced tutorials we may cover more ground and options, but to prevent this being a bit too long, let’s progress.
Terrain Manipulation
First off, let’s change to a nice grassy plain. To change the base texture of the map, click “File” and then click “Tile Properties” from the drop down menu. Inside Tile Properties, you’ll find and array of buttons and drop down menus. But all we’re interested in right now is the first drop down menu at the top left next to “Texture Groups”. Click this and select “grass” or any one you want, then press “OK” down the bottom right and the texture will change. For now, I’m going with lovely green grass. (You can paint the ground in certain textures, and the texture groups control how many you can use, 4 groups, with 4 textures each, means you’ll get to apply 16 in total)
Ahh much better
Now let’s raise and lower the terrain. From the editor top menu you’ll see the “Select”, “Create” and “Paint” tabs. Click Paint and from the drop down menu select “Height Map”
Now, select “load_brush” and choose one of the brushes. These are .png images and you can create and add your own so long as you follow the format of the others. For now, use “brush3.png”. Once selected, change “brush scale” to 400 and left click on the map and drag the mouse around to increase the height of the terrain.
Now you’ve made some bumpy terrain. It doesn’t look very natural, so you can smoothen it off. Change your brush to “brush1” and change “operation” to “smooth”.
Now it looks smooth and much more natural. In “operation” you can add to terrain height, subtract from it, smoothen it off or set it to an absolute value. The value of terrain by default in TEd is 10, so
setting the absolute value to 10, will reset that section so you can always undo mistakes. (Ctrl+Z works too!) Scale will adjust the harshness of the brush, ie how quickly to raise or lower it etc. As this is a BETA, it’d be a good idea to save now. Click Save Tile As… When Saving change the name from 8x8 (or whatever it says) to your own custom name, to prevent overwriting. To change the terrain colour for specific sections, switch the “target” (the initial drop down menu) to “Blend Map” and change the “channel” to “agri 0” (agri will need to be selected as one of the 4 texture groups from earlier). As before change the brush scale to 50, and start painting the terrain. It’s best to turn down the opacity (value between 0 and 1). Important! – You’ll need to define the climate. This can be done by clicking the little mountain icon down at the bottom of TEd. The default climate won’t show up in game, which means your tree’s and grass won’t have textures. If you paint the tips first and then broadstroke the whole area you’ll get a nice diffuse between the peaks. The higher up, the less visible grass for instance.
Battlefield Essentials
Select the “Create” tab up on the top left and in “Object Type” select Deployment Zone Editor. Best to orientate your camera to look down on your map as if it were 2D at this point. (see next photo) Holding Alt+Middle mouse button will orientate the camera. Change draw mode to Square and alliance id to 0 (it should be 0 by default first time). Then draw out a deployment zone. You can use a circle or free hand deployment around a city for example to get creative.
Do the same for the opposite side of the map, but this time change the alliance id to 1. Not changing this will still work for 1v1 matches, but when more players are added in they may get mixed up so best to just set it before hand. Save again.
Just like the Deployment Zone Editor, the Civilian Deployment Zone works in the same way. Civilians will spawn here at the start of a battle. You can toggle between farmers and civilian. Farmers tend to be more aggressive. A civilian shelter is an area civilians will flee to when scared. Lastly, A Go/NO –go region is pretty obvious. A no go region is an area in which you cannot order troops to move to. Generally these are placed in tight alley ways, around cliff edges and on buildings so that units can’t move there. You can manually place a go region, but by default it’s all over the map. A no go region is best to make sure units don’t move somewhere.
Placing props and buildings.
Select buildings from the Object Type menu and select show_building_selector. These are all the buildings in Attila and some that aren’t even in the game. Select Roman > roman_aqueduct > roman_aqueduct_terminus. Place in the world by pressing left click. Then select roman_aqueduct_straight. Place alongside the terminus to make it look part of the world naturally.
To manipulate your object, hold Left ALT + click and drag to rotate. If you want your object to sink into the world or rise above it, change the surface_mode from Landscape: Above to Freeform. This means the object will no longer need to connect to the ground. You can also manipulate the orientation here among many other things, such as destruction, even opacity! (Ghost buildings anyone?) As a test, place around some aqueducts, paint the terrain and find more objects you could use. See what you come up with.
You can see, by placing some rubble around, darkening the terrain a bit, damaging some buildings you can come up with some pretty interesting results. Try this with some of the VFX items also from the object type menu.
Placing Trees
Lastly, we’ll cover placing trees. It’s fairly simple but has one important rule to remember. Select Vegetation as the object type and the select “select_trees”. In this screen, you can add different trees to a sort of pot, and adjust the probability of how often they have a chance of spawning. Select chestnut, and then click the “->” symbol underneath “Add” for chestnut a, b and c. Adjust their probabilities and click “OK” down the bottom left. Change your “mode” to Brush and anything else you like and get painting your land scape with trees.
The important rule to remember I mentioned is exclusion zones. Much like the setting of other zones, you need to put a bounding area around your trees. This can be large and broad or just right around the trunk of one. This is just for TEd to get a handle on all the trees when processing. When selecting vegetation, change the “creation mode” to exclusion zones and draw your zone as a polygon, by clicking point to point and linking them in the end.
Save your tile.
Exporting Your Map to Attila.
Now you have the basics, let’s play it in Total War: Attila. Select File “Save as Battlefield” Give your battlefield a name (this will not appear in game). BOB will now open and begin processing your map for errors and building it into one pack file. Once finished, it will place your pack file here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Total War Attila\assembly_kit\retail\data Or in your custom Attila directory. Grab your map_name.pack file and place it here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Total War Attila\data Then, when you run Total War: Attila, it will appear in the launcher. If you want your map to have a photo, just give it the same name as your pack file and save as a .png image in the same folder. In Total War: Attila, go to custom battle, select land battle and in the preset menu you’ll see your map name with a steam icon next to it.
Ta-dah! Your map is now in the game!
Have some feedback? Check out our forums here: http://forums.totalwar.com/forumdisplay.php/246Total-War-ATTILA-Assembly-Kit Stay tuned to the forums and wiki for more announcements and tutorials for the Assembly Kit.
