[Tutorial] General Information on Scenario Creation.

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President Obama
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[Tutorial] General Information on Scenario Creation.

Post by President Obama »

Welcome to my tutorial on scenario creation which is to be part of many other tutorials I plan to make.

This tutorial is on general information on scenario editing, things like making templates, triggers, menus and other shit I can think of as I go along. I will update and edit this as things come to me.

####Templates####
To make any sort of multiplayer scenario you WILL need a template. You can’t just go to the scenario editor and start creating a map and expect it to work online. The reason for this is because when you make a map without a template it only generates 1 player slot (the rest are AI slots) which isn't very handy for multiplayer. Sorry to all those people who have made epic scenarios without a template but there’s no way of "copying and pasting" it onto a template, you WILL have to start again.

What is a template?
A template is a saved game with a certain amount of players and their names(That's why names like colours are used because they are easy to use), best if it’s never had a scenario built on it but you can use a pre-made scenario and clear the map. Using a pre-made map can cause big problems though, so I always recommend you start off with a fresh template. The reason for this is things from the previous scenario (like triggers and objects) can be embedded in the file and can’t be deleted. This happened to me in my "Hold the base" scenario. What happened was I made some areas called 1, 2 , 3 etc and for some completely insane reason pillboxes kept spawning in them. I didn't have a single trigger saying to spawn the pillbox it just did it. A lot of other errors were caused by not using a clean map. It taught me my lesson.

How to make a template. Well making a template is pretty easy, it’s just getting the 5 people to join is hard(or the amount you want for your scenario), as most people just want to play, not start a game save it and leave. I know, I've had this problem. Anyway what you do is get the amount of people you want in your scenario to join a game with the names you want your player names to be in your scenario. So people would join as names such BLUE, Player 1, O N E etc. Once you have the right amount of people you should (you don’t have to but it is best if you do) make sure they are in the right order, so if you’re using colours, BLUE would be in slot 1, RED would be in slot 2 etc. Now make sure the host knows the quick save hot key or you do if your host(the quick save key is F4), because as soon as the game he has to press it to get a template and so in the F11 time the scenario starts at 0:00. So start the game and press F4 real quick. Done! You now have your template. Now to change it so you can edit it.
Just a sidenote whenever you make a colour template, DONT FUCKING USE BLOO!

Converting a template (or any saved game) into an editable scenario. There are two ways to go around doing this. Both work with no problems except one usually adds to F11.

Method 1. Change the file format.
Go to your empire earth directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\Sierra\Empire Earth Art of Conquest on windows 7) Then go to the data folder and clicked on the saved games folder. Now all your saved games will be there, this includes any scenarios you have played. They should all have the file extension “.ees”. If you can’t see the file extension go to folder options (in the organize menu) Click on the view tab and the un-tick “Hide extensions for known file types”. Now go find your template or saved game you want in scenario editor. Right click copy and now hit back and click on the scenarios folder and hit paste. You’re not finished now you need to change the file extension to “.scn”. Just right click on it and hit rename. You’re done. Load up empire earth and scenario editor and hit load saved scenario, it SHOULD be there.

Method 2. Change it in game.
Go to scenario editor and hit test scenario, it doesn't matter if there’s nothing there. Now while in game open the menu and hit load saved game and select your saved game or template and load it. Now open the menu again and hit save. Save it as whatever you want. If you want to keep 0 f11 then you shouldn't do it this way, as this does add to f11. After you have saved it, hit exit and it will go back to your blank map. Now hit load scenario and BAM! There it is. This way is quicker though it does add to your F11 so I don’t recommend it.

Well that’s all I can think of about templates at the moment I might add some more later. I will upload some templates later and when I get them at the moment I only have a player template I think.

###General Usage of the Scenario Editor###
Using the scenario editor can be a bit tricky in some spots, and you can make some real stupid mistakes also. If you haven't, have read through the documentation in your eec folder on the scenario editor. There is a document there explaining quite a lot of things. Ill upload it later just in case people don’t have it for some weird reason.

Scenario Editor Documentation:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=S9KA2VO6

Hotkeys the only important one I know of is if you press del you can rotate the camera 360 degrees.

Placing natural resources (mines, forage patch, trees etc) Some people don’t know this, most do but to place natural resources, in the unit editor click on the circle next to world player then above that click on resources. All resources are displayed there.

Setting up alliances. Now this one is tricky and has always got me. If you click on the face icon and click on options in the top right hand corner, it will come up with the diplomacy options and the options to enable cheats and other things. Now I have never really worked how the thing works but the way I do it is, place 1 of a unit for every player in the game and then try combinations until they attack the correct people and not attack the correct people. If someone wants to explain how to properly do it, I will add it in here.

Things in the players options As I mentioned before to get to the players options click on the face icon. On the player 1 page you can set the initial resources players begin with and what age they start and end in. You can also edit the colour they have in game.
On the player 2 page you can edit what civilization the people have, this includes custom made civilizations just scroll down to the bottom of the scroll box to select custom ones. Now you can edit the names here but if you do I'm pretty sure it fucks the scenario and it won’t work if you do. So I suggest you don’t. BTW changing the name here doesn't change the names on the template.
You can also set if the players have shared los. Los stands for line of sight. If you tick this box that means you will share what you see with what your allies see. You can also tell on this screen if you are using a multiplayer template. If there’s no cpu only tick box near the name that means that player is actually human.
Now onto the AI settings tab, most the stuff here is self explanatory you can work out what to do here. The citizen percentage means how much of the AI population will be citizens.
Tech tree. Here you can change what buildings, units, technologies, and other things players have. When modifying this make sure to do it to all players if you need it to be. When you modify things on the first page you only change it for the first player. You have to click on the drop box that says human and select each player and go though and change it for each one.
Last one. Options. In options you can change the diplomacy between players, lock it so they can’t change it, and Replace the wood resource with the carbon resource from space age. The victory allowed option means that if it’s not tick and all the enemy is killed the game won’t end unless triggers are used. The other option unit improvements simply mean if players can click on the attack to upgrade it etc.

###Terrain###
Terrain is pretty simply stuff but having something other than grass in a game can make it much more interesting.

Coloured Terrain You may of seen in scenarios tiles that are red, even though that colour terrain isn't in the options. Select a terrain and on the right hand box scroll though that box till you see blue and select that now paint some and you have blue terrain. Pretty simply shiz.

Ambient’s
Now you might of used these before and seen nothing happened and wondered what they are for. Some of them place things like vegetation, rocks, shells etc they also place sounds. When you’re in game and your camera is over that area you should hear things like frogs croaking etc.

###Elevation###
This section is used for making the actual map, to make cliffs, rivers, islands etc.

Hills This tool makes hills as high as you like just click on the box next to it to select the height. Any unit can go over hills.

Mountains The height of mountains goes up by 4 so that it creates cliff faces which cannot be climbed by units unless they have pathfinding. Pretty basic shiz.

Paths are used to make paths in cliff face. This tool turns selections of cliff face created by the Mountains tool into walk able paths.

###Map###

This is what first creates your map. An elevation file can be used to make outlines of section of the actual world in your map. This is how world map was made. Using elevation files is really fucking difficult I spent days once fucking with them and in the end the only thing I could get was Australia. It was quite difficult and I'm not going to go into them.

You can create a blank map, or make a random map which makes trees, player placements etc. I don’t know what the seed option does.

Well that’s it; it’s taken me like a couple of hours to write this up, so thanks are really fucking appreciated. This has almost 2000 words and is over 4 pages long.

I’ll make more into the future, Ill update this with some pictures and downloads later and something I keep forgetting at the moment I think it was important too. This was just a general thing just so people know some sort of basics around the editor.

Please post anything you would like to add or have your say on or whatever or where I can add some screenshots.
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Re: [Tutorial] General Information on Scenario Creation.

Post by Trichome Indica »

Great work here Prez ! I will make sure to refer any inquiry's regarding scenarios to your page here as it seems to be quite detailed and informative. Thanks for your work here in trying to keep the
EE Scenario crowd strong........ :cheers:
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Re: [Tutorial] General Information on Scenario Creation.

Post by Sparky »

The diplomacy is a tricky one.. however I always seem to get it right every time..

Simple, it says


-- --2 3 4
1 -- x
2--------z
3
4

Or somthing simular.. it never shows the last player ?

However, if i were to select where the X is this means player one is allied with player 2 because the button you select meets the two in the middle.

representing them both.

If i were to click where the Z is..

This indicates that player 2 is allied with player 4.

It works just like a table.
Edit:

Okay the forum squishes it.....

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Re: [Tutorial] General Information on Scenario Creation.

Post by lightnessking. »

Setting up alliances. Now this one is tricky and has always got me. If you click on the face icon and click on options in the top right hand corner, it will come up with the diplomacy options and the options to enable cheats and other things. Now I have never really worked how the thing works but the way I do it is, place 1 of a unit for every player in the game and then try combinations until they attack the correct people and not attack the correct people. If someone wants to explain how to properly do it, I will add it in here.



You mean this part? Image
A green circle means they are allied with each other, a red one means they're in war with each other.

0 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6
1 - Y - X - Z
2 -
3 -
4 -
5 -
6 -

This would mean player 1 & player 1 are blanc, since they're the same.
Player 1 and player 2 are red = at war.
Player 1 and 3 are green = allied.


X=red
Z=green
Y=blanc (same player)
You cannot make another post so soon after your last.

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