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Showing content with the highest reputation on 04/20/2020 in all areas

  1. Zero commuting has been great but as I work in the staffing industry we have seen a big down turn (not many companies hire during recessions and depressions). Also I'm not at home (I live in Boston and was visiting my SO in Prague when the lock downs hit). Certainly not the worst place to be as Czech's early restrictions have meant a relatively low infection and death rate. Recent articles have stated that many ICUs are half empty and it seems that the number of active infections is stabilizing around 5,200 mark as the number of recoveries increases and the number of new cases stays quite low. Obviously my home home (UK) and new home (US) seem to be in quite some dire straits at the moment. (to be honest though most of my news on the US comes from @rebelliousplatypus posts on Facebook 😃)
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  2. This happened to me when I had Windwos 7, doesn't happen now on windows 10 or XP back in the day. One recomendation; when you are about to do a map either left details to the end, or carefully think which tileset you are about to use, because you can only use 1 tileset, it's not possible to combine 2, so if start adding details and later you change your mind and change tileset, all those details are going to change into a mess. I guess you mean opening BLOXBGBS and adding for example the Ice mountains from BLOXICE, plus adding a frigate/carryall crashed from BLOXBAT and this/that from BLOXBASE and etc. The hardest part would come to set the attributes right: you need to tell the game (new version of the editor has the tool to do that implemented) if that square it's transitable, if the tile will slowdown light vehicles, heavy vehicles or both, if the sandworm can move or not, if you can place concrete/buildings on top of that or not... Like Fey said, all the tilesets share a good amount of tiles that are the same for all of them. If you open the editor, pick "Rock cliff" and then press the "space" on your keyboard, you will see some groups of tiles, those are common to all the tileset, but this is also true for "sand cliff" "Rock border" and "dunes border". So unless you want to remove one of the main tiles of the games, the only room to add/change are the ones that appear on the "X specials", which you can see that are not that much. So, yeah, you can combine details from different tilesets, but not much room to add those and you will need to work on 2 extra files that require works and testing. So like I said and you already realize, it's better to think ahead on what kind of tileset you are going to use before mapping; another option could be doing the barebones on a map (rock for the player, enemies and so on) just using any tileset and later change the tileset to the one you plan to do. Like for example if you really need bridges, then go straigh to BLOXXMAS, no other way to do them with the others; maybe you won't have a crashed frigate or the buildings buried into the sand, but you cannot have both. I have done more than 100 maps, but I am still new on adding new tilesets to use. Previous version of the tileset attributes only had 7 attributes, but with the current Klofkack version there are... I don't even know, 30-50 attributes you can use, although only 7 are "the core" and it can be done withouth touching the others, I didn't ever tried myself so I don't know how hard can be to learn about all. Oh, and something to complete a bit; the spice you see on the tileset it's just for the game to use, but don't place spice from the tileset yourself, it's not even transitable, so if you add that it wouldn't behave as regular spice. If you use the "paint mode - thin spice" the editor and the game will later use whatever it's on the graphics of the tileset, so they are needed there, you cannot remplace them (unless you want to change spice for C&C tiberiun or RA Ore/gemns); it's the same for the concretes you see on the tileset. You may want to add those concretes thinking "I'll add these concretes so the player can build on top of them" but no, like the spice, those graphics are there for the game to load later when playing, but if you use them manually you cannot build anything on top of them. I mentioned something early, but on the bottom-right you will see "Rock cliff", "sand specials" and so on; click on one and hit "space" There you will have the whole list of the tiles used for the current tileset, so if you are looking for a tileset that have 1 specific tile: So for example, if you want your briefing to talk about how your frigate crashed so you need the frigate into the land, to find more easily which tileset you have it just search on "sand specials", "space" to deploy all the sand details and you can later use the shortcut "control + t" to switch bewteen all the tiles available. In this case both BLOXBAT and BLOXWAST have tha frigate into the sand, so here you can looks what other tiles any of these two so you can decide which one has the kind of details you want your map to be. Also, with the middle button of your mouse it will show which keys on the keyboard are assigned; believe me, using them for the main parts of the game (rifts, borders) it's much more easy that trying to do it manually; it takes some time to learn, but they made sense, so "1" it's the top left corner and "Z" it's the bottom corner, that helps (for special details I manually use them, since are much less uncommon). Also, if you want to try to do a campaign style of map; although it's up to you, I recommend to start doing the barebones, just like adding in which area the player it's going to build, the Ai's bases and only main paths (like rifts to avoid the player/Ai to go in a straigh line against other), and going into the scripting (Events a condition windown - F11 shortcut) and try to set whatever you want to happen into the game. The reason I say this it's because the scripting it's a necesary part and can be a bit hard to understand; the more straigh events like adding a reinforcements to trigger after 5 minutes or making the game to show a "mission accomplished" when no Harkonnen are present it's easy, but others may be harder (or not) depending on how you understand how it works (I struggle for months to fully understand about the "flags" way of working, while Fey used them flawlessly since his first map). <-- the biggest recomendation here it's to open the vanilla maps and look at what they have done; except for a few maps, their events are very simple; most of us learned that way. You can also use other custom maps to learn, but unless you really understand easily how all works It is better to start with vanilla, you may look at one of mine, asking why and I will tell you "I don't ever remember why I did it, but I know if that's not there something doesn't happen right" xD. But it's true that sometimes I overcomplicate things. Sorry for the really big post text. Like Fey mentioned, the manual can give you a bit of help: "what leave means", "I add reinforcements but the AI doesn't attack" or similar questions are answered there as clearly as we could write, but I hope that helps to understand at least the main scripting part. Maps done back in time had very few events and they are still full playable, so don't get scare on this part, even if you only do a few basic scripts you still can make a map that it is playable. most of the maps done on the d2k+ site (that I didn't make) are simple in scripting, and some of them were innovative fun and special/unique. But knowning that you learn how to do script on the Tiberiun sun scripting this may be easy; It took me months to start doing really complicated things while Fey first's campaign were already much more complex that my first 5-6 campaigns so, once again, scripting it's going to be easy or hard more depending on the person itself.
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