Author Topic: Easy way to place dungeonwalls (complete dungeon in under 2 minutes)  (Read 6603 times)

King Knuffel

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Hi,

I have created my own maps and it took me way too long to make the dungeon layout with all the walls and copy paste the rooms and as soon as I was finished I found a easy way to do it that would have saved me a lot of work.

1)First draw the Dungeon in MS Paint (or an other image programm) in black and white. Each black pixel stands for a piece of a wall.

2)When you are done and think you have made an awesome dungeon start the Hammerwatch editor.

3) In Paint mark the drawing and copy the map that you have drawn (crl+c). Do not open the drawing with the Editor or copy the file into the editor it wont work. Just copy paste the map directly from paint into the editor.

4) Go back to the Hammerwatch editor and paste the painting (crl+v). Then there appears your drawing as a dungeon A themed wall.

5) If you dont want to always play in the dungeon A theme then save the file now as a Hammerwatch editor file (something.xml) open it with the Texteditor.
The file looks something like

Quote
<dictionary>
   <dictionary name="tilemap">
      <array name="tiledata"></array>
   </dictionary>
   <dictionary name="doodads">
      <array name="doodads">
         <dictionary>
            <int name="id">0</int>
            <string name="type">doodads/theme_a/a_h_16.xml</string>
            <vec2 name="pos">0 -5</vec2>
            <bool name="need-sync">False</bool>
         </dictionary>
      </array>
   </dictionary>
   <dictionary name="actors">
   </dictionary>
   <dictionary name="items">
   </dictionary>
   <dictionary name="scripting">
      <array name="nodes"></array>
   </dictionary>
   <dictionary name="lighting">
      <array name="lights"></array>
      <int-arr name="shadow-color">135 128 128 255</int-arr>
      <int-arr name="ambient-color">50 50 50 255</int-arr>
      <int-arr name="add-color">0 0 0 255</int-arr>
      <float name="shadow-length">1</float>
   </dictionary>
   <dictionary name="prefabs">
   </dictionary>
</dictionary>

Where each
Quote
   <int name="id">0</int>
            <string name="type">doodads/theme_a/a_h_16.xml</string>
            <vec2 name="pos">0 -5</vec2>
            <bool name="need-sync">False</bool>
stands for a piece of wall.

Now youse the find and replace function from the texteditor and replace a/a with the tileset you want. For example replace a/a with c/c and then save and close the file. If you open it again in the hammerwatch editor then you will see that all the theme a walls are now theme c walls. If you are doing that make sure it is one of the first things you do because if you replace it later things like a bridge will dissappeare because the bridge is only in theme a and there is no easy way to replace only the walls and no other things (you only could do it for each wall tile seperatley starting with the right wall and then on of the edges and so on.. by replacing the whole line like "doodads/theme_a/a_ledge_up_v2.xml" with "doodads/theme_c/c_ledge_up_v2.xml"


If you make dungeons that way it is much faster and more fun to generate them because the basic layout is done in a minute and you can put more energy in making evil traps and placing fearesome enemies.

MadMan

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Re: Easy way to place dungeonwalls (complete dungeon in under 2 minutes)
« Reply #1 on: March 05, 2014, 04:54:26 PM »
It's a great method, if you want to save time. I always use this method on making my map(s).

Hipshot

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Re: Easy way to place dungeonwalls (complete dungeon in under 2 minutes)
« Reply #2 on: March 06, 2014, 09:31:15 AM »
Yea, this is how I create the levels, this is level 7:



As you can see, I have a grey shadow which indicate how high the wall is, makes it much easier to paint the layout without getting too many errors afterwards.

Then I just save the level as I normal would, like level_7.xml and open it with UltraEdit and replace "/theme_a/a_" with some other letter, like "c" for act 3. Make sure you don't replace the wrong things or else the file might go corrupt and the editor won't recognize the file any more.

This is the PSD for act3 for anyone that has photoshop
http://zfight.com/misc/files/hw/act3.psd
« Last Edit: March 06, 2014, 09:39:22 AM by Hipshot »

Flemse

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This is a great tip, thanks a lot. Any other colors I can use, or just the black, grey and green?