Empires Terrain

AEP Map and Terrain

The AEP map is a specialized instance of a MapDisplayUIControl.

Creating a Scenario

To create a new scenario, click Editor from that main menu and then the + (Create a brand new campaign) button from the scenario selection screen. Enter the scenario folder name and display name for the scenario.

To use an existing map, click Use map: <New Map> and choose a BAM file.

To create a new map, specify the following:

• Map Image
• Height Map Image
• Height Scale - a multiplier applied to the height map values
• Logical Map Width - this is how large the map will appear to be in game, it is independent of the actual resolution of the map
• Logical Map Height - may be set smaller than the width to create a non-square map, the upper portion of the map textures will be used
• Import Borders from SVG (Advanced) - optionally specify an SVG file that contains border polygons to create initial borders. Note: SVG importing ONLY supports a list of polygons indicating a sequence of bordered regions. There are many other ways a map could be drawn in a valid SVG that will not be imported, if you are planning to use SVG importing, be sure that your software and approach results in this particular format.

If you have not imported borders, or wish to edit borders, choose Border mode from the upper left palette in the editor and follow the directions below the palette.

Before a map can be played, you will also need to associate the bordered regions with entries in an existing Regions.CSV file located in the Data folder in either the current scenario folder or the game folder. Switch to the Region mode from the palette. When you select a region, the Region Properties panel will be displayed. To associate the region to a row in the table, select the row by name from the Template list. You may also need to add or remove connections between regions to allow movement on the map (importing an SVG automatically creates connections between regions which share two or more consecutive border points). This is also edited in the Region mode under Connections in the Region Properties panel. The anchor points within a region can also be edited, the meanings of the anchors are specified by script and can be used to indicate city location, army locations, etc.

The Unit Placement and Scenario Properties modes of the editor are read-only modes displaying properties set by other CSV or script files.

Files

Unless otherwise specified, all map related files are located in either the Data/Maps folder within the current scenario folder (highest priority) or in the Data/Maps folder of the game folder (in which case they may be shared by multiple scenarios).

SCENARIO.TXT

Each scenario requires a SCENARIO.TXT file in its root folder. This file contains an entry which specifies which BAM file to use as the map for the scenario. It is created automatically when a scenario is created in the editor, and may be edited manually if required.

BAM

The BAM file contains the map data. It is created automatically by the editor. Some fields in the [MAP] chunk of the file corresponding to the new map settings in Scenario Creation may be safely edited by hand. Otherwise, the editor will normally be used to edit this file.