Map making FAQ's

Q. What makes for a good map.
Answer-

Q. How big can my maps be?
Answer-

Q. Why is my map giving me internal errors?
Answer- Most common reason for this is having placed tiberium on a sloped area.

Q. Why does my game load so slow when I have downloaded maps in.
Answer-

Q. How can I make tunnels work?
Tunnel Fix. By Dad_A_Tude
Creating bendy tunnels tutorial. Tutorial By: pft1086

Q.How can I make my trains work?
Currently don't know of an available tutorial

Q. Sound effects?
Here's the listing.

Q. How do I make vehicles move?
Answer-

 

 

The large part of a good map is planning. Try for realistic terrain. Use different cliff parts to help give it a better look. Uneven terrain (raising it up in some spots, lowering it in others), different types of terrain blending together in tiny patches all clumped up (grass, sand, dirt, rock) and the the finishing touch, trees and rocks. Don't just place a tree randomly every 10 cells, place them in groups, near the protection of cliffs, with grass beneath them.
Cities, as well as some little bases like in Night of the Mutants with comp controlled guys that will defend it are a nice addition also.
Shoot for more than one entrance into a base. One small way in is too easy to defend. Multiple entrances make you think more defensively & give you more attack options.

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Map size:
Final Sun will allow a map 200 X 200. A lot of the WW maps are 150 X 150.
Here is a full list of sizes of WW stock maps.

Unfortunately, bigger user made maps don't work out well on-line and make your game load slow even at same size as WW maps. (see .pkt file fix) For on-line play it is best for all players to have the map. That way the map don't have to be transferred within time limit.
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A. To fix the slow loading of game with larger maps and/or having a lot of maps installed you can create a .pkt file for them. First, save your map as a .map file instead of .mpr. You can also do this manualy renaming the file to .map extension.
Open Notepad and copy/paste the following into it.

[MultiMaps]
1=

[]
Description=
CD=0,1
MinPlayer=2
MaxPlayer=

Now to fill in the info:
[MultiMaps]
1= Name of your map without .map extension.

[] Inside these brackets goes the same map name.
Description= Open your .map file with WordPad or other text editor and find the [Basic] section. Where Name=, copy that and paste behind Description=
CD=0,1 & MinPlayer=2 don't change.
MaxPlayer= the amount of maximum players the map will take.

Save this file as a .pkt. You can use Multi03.pkt (WW uses Multi01.pkt. SMIFFGIG uses Multi02.pkt in TSR) or any number up to 99. Also can name it the same as the map name.

Example using Excessive:

[MultiMaps]
1=excessive

[excessive]
Description=Excessive SE (2-8)
CD=0,1
MinPlayer=2
MaxPlayer=8

The .pkt file is named excessive.pkt

You can add other downloaded maps to your .pkt file. First rename them as .map files, then add 2=, 3= , etc to the [MultiMaps] section. (no spaces between the lines) Then add the Description info, etc, under the previous map leaving a space between each one.

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