What's new?

[Caradoc]

While moving to a new computer, I came across my old Heroes 3/4 maps and thought it might be fun to update them. But before I jump in, I thought I'd ask if there are any new developments in the world of mapmaking that I should know about. All of them are fairly intricate, especially Lost Crusade, so I'm especially interested in whether I need to cut them back to continue to run.

Are there any upgrades to the editors? I thought the Heroes 4 editor was the best, but kept running into problems getting events to fire properly. I'd love to hear that someone has done some work on it. Did they every get that thing going where you could chain maps together?

Also are there any trends as to what kinds of maps the community enjoys these days? I make 'story' maps and would like to know that there is still some audience for these.

Cheers!
Caradoc
(astonished that my login still works after all these years)

[iLiVeInAbOx05]

Hi Caradoc. You sent me a pm a longgggg time ago and then disappeared

Anyway, to answer some of your questions, to help with the map editor, I would suggest you try out my Heroes 4 Map Generator (H4MG). You can find the thread here.

It has some handy features like the ability to copy and paste scripts and events. You can also move scripts around other scripts. For example, if you create a conditional, but then later decide that it should be inside of an ask question script, you can drag the conditional (or other script) and drop it into the yes or no branch of the ask question script.

You can also save your scripts so that you can load them and then copy them to any map.

There is also a drawing tool so that you can do high level terrain drawing. You will have to smooth that out though, since I never got around to figuring out the codes for terrain borders.

One of the nicest features this tool has is the ability to copy and paste a selected portion of one map to another.

As far as story maps, there are still some people around that like them, including myself.

When you ask about stringing maps together, what do you mean? You can do campaign maps in H4, which does this. You can also do as Karmakeld has done and each map is a "campaign" which carries over to the next map, which is also a "campaign." Using this second method makes it easier to release individual maps while you continue working on the next, rather than have to finish the entire thing before releasing it.

If you do give the H4MG a try, let me know how it goes and if you have any questions.

[Caradoc]

H4MG sounds like just the thing I need. For Lost Crusade, I need to break the map down into smaller segments to reduce the complexity. It has hundreds of triggers and massive amounts of narrative text. Being able to copy and paste scripts will make that a lot easier. Then I can string the segments into a "campaign".

After Heroes5 came out with such a crappy editor, I kinda lost interest in the game. But I'm glad to see the community has held together and that the game lives on. Cheers!

[iLiVeInAbOx05]

It will definitely save you lots of time. Copying and pasting scripts and events between maps is probably the best feature for map makers, especially if you want to do carry over heroes.

One of the issues I've run into some is compatibility issues with pre-WoW maps. If you run into an issue where it won't load a vanilla or TGS map, use the game editor to convert it to a WoW map (drop a WoW object on the map) and then the H4MG should be fine to load it up.