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How to Make an EA Quality Map

Avatar of m@tt

m@tt

Category: Worldbuilder
Level: Intermediate
Created: Thursday April 10, 2008 - 6:06
Updated: Sunday February 6, 2011 - 17:28
Views: 35206
Summary: A huge Worldbuilder tutorial which takes you through the basics to making EA quality maps

Rating

Staff says

4.9

Members say

4.8

Average

4.9/5.0

39 votes

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This is a tutorial I started doing last summer. It was meant to show the step-by-step progression of my Mountains of Mirkwood map, but as I felt it wasn't my best work, the tutorial stopped. However, holiday boredom has led to me carrying on with it. At the beginning, it shows my MoM map, but most of it shows my Old Fords of Anduin 2 map, with a little bit of the BadMadMax's Carrock map that I edited.

Contents
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Preparation & Concept
Page 3: Opening Worldbuilder
Page 4: Setting up the map to work in Worldbuilder
Page 5: Terrain
Page 6: Textures
Page 7: Lakes, Rivers, Fords
Page 8: Trees and Props etc


Introduction:
I hate downloading a map that is rated highly on a site like MEVault, and then when I play it, it is crap: poor terrain, badly textured, imbalanced, lakes for rivers etc. It is also a pity when people make a nice scripted map but neglect these things.

Therefore I decided to write this tutorial, which will follow me building a map, step by step, so others can see what it really takes.

Whilst scripted maps are popular, I will be focusing just on the visual and gameplay aspects, i.e. how to make a skirmish map that is EA quality.

What you need:
1. Battle for Middle-earth Worldbuilder – I use BFME WB I, but the vast majority will also apply to BFME WB II.

2. At least 512 MB RAM - I used to have 512 MB of RAM and 3.2 GHz processor which ran WB fine. Don’t have any needless things going on in the background, including things like MSN Messenger, so quit them before opening WB, unless your PC can handle it (1GB plus).

3. Patience – if you don’t have this then leave now, you’ll never become a good mapper.

What should you already know?
1. Whilst I will try to go over the basic as much as possible, I don’t plan on saying “you can find this option two thirds of the way down in the View menu” etc. But who know.

2. Try to familiarise yourself with Worldbuilder before trying the advanced stuff. I learned by just playing around with the tools and I just happened to get good at it. However a lot of people don’t have the time/patience/ intelligence to do this.

Comments

Display order: Newest first | Page: 1, 2

Harrylotr - Sunday December 19, 2010 - 2:12

You're awesome!! Thanks...

Yiio - Friday August 20, 2010 - 15:53

rom were can idonload this worldbuilder?

Lord Eniam - Monday February 22, 2010 - 20:06

Very well explained. Thank you.

m@tt (Team Chamber Member) - Sunday October 11, 2009 - 15:06

It's a castle for BFME 1. The smaller one is a camp, the even smaller one is an outpost/expansion.

The direction refers to where the gate is.

Windrider - Saturday October 10, 2009 - 14:07

the large black circles with the directions - what do they do? How about the smaller black circles with the red font and the 3 meshed black circles?

{AE}Manveru - Thursday September 3, 2009 - 6:32

@militaryman: That's part of WB. It only shows some tiles in an effort to cut down on the resource usage. If you want to enable the full map even when showing many tiles, go to View -> Show All of 3D Map (Or press Ctrl+A).

militaryman - Sunday August 23, 2009 - 14:47

Ok. i have a problem with world builder. when i go to zoom out i cannot see the terrain in some parts. an example of this is on page 4 of this article(where it tells you this "When everything's added (screenshot doesn't include creeps for some reason):" the picture bellow this is my problem

{AE}Manveru - Wednesday April 1, 2009 - 17:46

Thanks SO much! I can finally make maps that actually work!

tank_builder - Thursday March 19, 2009 - 18:36

Arg!!! i dont have the player list and team!!! please help.

--------
wait. found it. it doesn't have the shortcut, though.

Ridder Blauw - Saturday December 27, 2008 - 9:17

This article is really helping me out, thanks ;)
Hope my new map I am making will be really nice!

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