I wanted to share with you some discoveries I've made with the editor that you may find interesting. In my humble opinion this should be a great discovery for those who like to make maps with a rich and personal atmosphere, specially in story/rpg maps.

The key of all this is that the editor works just like a minimod maker, and a map is in itself a mod. In fact when you open a map with the editor, it creates a folder named with the map name, where the content of the map is uncompressed. Those folders are subfolders of one called "H5 Mods". Any modification to the data files that you include in your maps will be used by the game when you play that map, which is a great way to mod the game easily and "cleanly", without any side effect for the rest of the maps, (note that you won't have problems even in mp maps, because both players will have the "mod", that is, the map).

But the best thing is that this modding, is very easy. Which things can you change easily?:

- Ambient lights. But NOT ONLY the main ambient light, you can change the ambient light for COMBAT and TOWNS TOO!! So if you want to make a night map you can do it. Do you feel like your story should include a demon invasion?, just change the ambient light and make it look like the grass battlefield is being corrupted into a hellish red ambient, with a hellish sky dome.

- Map adventure objects, ALL of them. Do you want a cartographer with the look of a Sphinx?, granted. Do you want to make it look like a creature? Granted. With the help of scripts this should turn into something more powerful. Just imagine that in your map there's an old wise dragon. If you approach him a script triggers and some text shows explaining to you that the old dragon will reward you with the map of the kingdom just if you add some gold to his treasury. Then if you "visit" the dragon it behaves actually like a cartographer. The good thing is that it may have any effect of any object in the game. You could use a dragon like a dimensional door if you wish (though it would look a bit silly :P ).
You can change the appeareance of any object, and theoretically you could even use new 3D models (just if you could make them compatible with the format that H5 uses). You can even add visual effects to the objects (the light of the lighthouse for example).

- You can change the birds that fly over your map, but I'll explain this later.

- In theory you can change almost everything that is described in a file in the game data, easily through the editor. The only problem is that you have to know what makes each file, and what is each field of the file used for.

Now I'll describe what I've being playing around with, concerning these points.

- Ambientlights. You change it by selecting in the map properties tree field GroundAmbientLightS or UndergroundAmbientLightS for the underground. There are GoundAmbientLight and UndergroundAmbientLight fields too, but I don't know what's their use.
If you click to browse an ambientlight you'll find the data resource browser and all the ambient light files of the data.pak file. You can use one of them for your map, or, you can make one yourself (right mouse button, new object).

The most important fields to create or modify an ambient light are the color of lights and the position of the focus. That is controlled by: LightColor (the color of the focus of light), AmbientColor (the general color of objects), ShadeColor (the color of the part of objects that don't get the light of the focus), IncidentShadowColor (the color of the shadow projected by the objects over the terrain or other objects), ParticlesColor (I'm not very sure about this, but for example, the smoke of the pipe in the wizard heroes animation will have this color).

The position of the light focus is controlled by the fields pitch (relative position in the z-x axis), and yaw (relative position in the x-y axis). Both use degrees, not radians. The distance of the focus to the centre is fixed. This is extremely important in the final look of the map. If the focus is very horizontal (pitch near 90 or 270) there will be more shadow. If the focus is on the top (near 0), there will be almost no shadow but you'll have a lot of light. ShadowPitch and ShadowYaw is the same but for the incident shadow. Yes, you can modify this even though it would be unnatural considering the position of the main light focus.

The DistanceFog has a very noticeable effect on the map, which is make it look foggy of course. You can select the already existent fogs, or create a new one. You can select the color of the fog and alter some parameters about it.

Then we have the skydome, which is the sky graphics that you will see in the map. There are some to be picked, the most important being the skydomes from towns.

There are more fields that you can modify here, most of them of less importance, lesser effect (sometimes not perceptible at all by me), or just of unkown effect by me.

Tuning these parameters you can do things like this:

This is a night with a blue tone
http://www.torredemarfil.org/ftp_colaboradores/Vitirr/Ambiente1.JPG
http://www.torredemarfil.org/ftp_colaboradores/Vitirr/Ambiente2.JPG
http://www.torredemarfil.org/ftp_colaboradores/Vitirr/Ambiente3.JPG

If you want something more surrealist
http://www.torredemarfil.org/ftp_colaboradores/Vitirr/Ambiente4.JPG
http://www.torredemarfil.org/ftp_colaboradores/Vitirr/Ambiente5.JPG
http://www.torredemarfil.org/ftp_colaboradores/Vitirr/Ambiente6.JPG

And with fog
http://www.torredemarfil.org/ftp_colaboradores/Vitirr/Ambiente7.JPG
http://www.torredemarfil.org/ftp_colaboradores/Vitirr/Ambiente8.JPG

But you can even change the battle and town ambient. You just have to identify the file that uses the game for that particular terrain or town, which is usually easy to find (but not always, I spent a lot of time to find the one used in the sand battlefield), and modify it. The game will use it when playing your map.

The only problem is that if you create an ambientlight object, it won't be displayed in the resource browser unless you keep using it in the map. For example, if you choose to change the ground ambient light (to see better) when you want to return to your custom made new ambient light it won't appear. You'll have to manually change it in the map.xdb file of your map (you can access it by opening the map with winrar or winzip. Note that any modification or addition should be saved with the same compression method used, which is no compression at all).

- Objects. Select the map properties tree. Now select an object. A properties tree will appear, with much more detailed properties than the normal object properties window. One of the fields there is "shared", which defines which type of object is, which model uses, visual effect... You can choose between the types of objects in the game, or create a new one. However, it looks like no matter what you do, you can't completely change the type of the object, as it is some other way determined in the moment you choose it in the editor. There are for example static objects (decoration, etc..), which will never be visitable no matter what you do. So my advice is, select the object which effect you wish to have, and then modify at your will: change the 3D model, the visual effect, the message... Note that if you modify the file that an object uses you will be making a mod in fact, and all objects of that kind will be modified in your map. To affect only an object (or a few of them) create a new file for them, with the same info that the other except for the particular things you want to change.

There is a field called point lights too. It allows you to define a light focus (or some) for that particular object. It is heavily used in underground to light the map, but you can use it in the ground too, for example to simulate light in buildings in a night ambient light (it will look like there are people living there). Just have a lot at this:

http://www.torredemarfil.org/ftp_colaboradores/Vitirr/Ambiente10.JPG

By the way the cloud you see I got it changing the weather in the map properties tree. The light effect is the lighthouse effect, which I have used for one of the objects.

- Now about birds. There's a Birds field in the map properties tree. You can browse the pigeon birds and you will see the normal birds that appear in some of the maps. OR, you can create your own birds, (new object). You just have to select the model, and the animation. You can set the speed and height of the "birds" too. So you can in fact use any object, monster, hero or whatever you want as bird. I've used it to have black dragons and the result is quite good.
http://www.torredemarfil.org/ftp_colaboradores/Vitirr/Ambiente11.JPG
http://www.torredemarfil.org/ftp_colaboradores/Vitirr/Ambiente12.JPG

The only problem is that the dragons use the idle animation. There is another animation for the dragons, composed of all the animations of the unit, but of course it looks silly (you see the dragon dying or attacking while flying). I tried to delete the rest of animations and keep only the moving animation. I was great BUT, there's an annoying side effect. The dragon flies for a while, then the animation stops and starts again some space behind. I couldn't solve this, but I'm sure that with some further investigation we could get a beautiful flying animation.
By the way in the editor you see too many dragons, (though the number of birds is set to minimum), but in the game it's not so evident.

You can download the experimental map I've made to triy all this from here, if you want to play it and check it in the editor. If you play it be sure to visit the buildings (some or them are not what they look), fight the town, enter the town, and finally fight the archdevils.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Alderbranchh,

One can also try "Double futa" by EvilP ond CH maptesting section. It is certainly not a finished map yet, but uses some interesting customization, like heroes with creature skins and custom battlefields...

I asked Vitirr if it was possible to get a night and day-transition over the course of a week or something similar and he said he would look into it.

Now as the great guy he is; he managed to do it and to quote him on his exact words.

[quote="Vitirr"]Well, I present you the first test map of H5 (that I know) with night and day transition.

One day passes through a whole week of gameplay. The transition is gradual and sometimes you won't even notice the change from turn to turn. The fog doesn't change gradually (the scripts used doesn't allow that) so in some turns it appears suddenly and the change is too abrupt. I'm thinking about removing it to avoid that.

The combat is also affected by the change of lights, that's why those neutrals are there, to check the light in combat.

THE MAP IS FREE OF MODIFICATIONS, so it shouldn't affect other maps at all.

Download it here.[/quote]

Have fun everyone!