Heave-HO! Off it goes to the Map Editor Forum!

My little brother who is 8 was having fun making maps on heroes 3 yesterday. He doesnt stand a chance with the heroes 5 map editor, but why not? why is complex betteR?

Alright, let’s turn this around then. Tel me how you can make it simpler.
I’ll give you two. An undo button, and being able to click on an object and edit it.

But for the rest... how can you make it more simper?

Now, before someone jumps in and begins about the scripting. Absolutely. The scripting is so complex (at least to me) that I won’t touch it with a ten foot pole.

But let me ask you were you able to use scripting in H3? I honestly don’t know. If it was I never used it. I do know that you could set up events like ‘on the third day this message appears and you can give or take away that.’ But that was only in the tows as far as I know. So, was scripting like we have it now possible? Could you mark a part on the map and if the hero gets there, this happens?

If that was not possible, and this is a new feature of H5, I think that we can complain about it being hard, yes, but still should be thankful that it’s possible now at all.
I won’t know how to use the scripting, but then I never used it in H3 either (if it existed), so I don’t consider the fact that I can’t use it a change for me.

I started this topic of by asking what was wrong with the editor, and I still stand by that question. The most replies I saw were about people not understanding something of the editor, like the fact that you need the 3x3 tool to lower the ground in underground. Others say it’s too hard/difficult.

So let me now ask; alright, if it’s so hard, how can it be done easier?
Come on people, point it out how the editor could be easier, maybe it will give the Nival people some ideas.

H.W.

But let me ask you were you able to use scripting in H3? I honestly don’t know. If it was I never used it. I do know that you could set up events like ‘on the third day this message appears and you can give or take away that.’ But that was only in the tows as far as I know. So, was scripting like we have it now possible? Could you mark a part on the map and if the hero gets there, this happens?


In homm3 editor you can place events for where the player walks over an area. You can also put events in the towns and daily events in the daily events section of the map editor. No typing, just select from a list.

In homm3 the code is already written for the events so the map maker has a list they can select for the desired event. For example; you want to have the player fight creatures then give the player extra moral, luck, artifack, extra movement points, etc. This is done through a list you can scroll down to select the event you want. There is no code typing by the map maker.

The map editor for homm5, I feel is not an finished product and that is one of the things I don't like about it. That's why I put a deposit on the expansion for when it comes out. To get the finished map editor and the extra town.

The only other things about the editor I don't like are the fact you have to know and use code to make a map. I'd prefer a list to choose from for the simple things like homm 3 can do. But keep the code for the cutsceens and hard things a simple map editor would have problems with.

The other thing I don't like is not being able to select a certain skill in the witch huts for the maps where you want every player to have logistics for example.

Other wise I like the map editor but there'll never be any code written in my maps.

I dont think that being able to script is a bad thing, but a logically ordered menu with things people might choose, sided with the ability to click and edit an object or whatever would be so powerful.

The possibilities arent that endless or many that they cant think thru everything a person might want to do with a map, and have a front end for it, rather than making someone script it.

Think, IF function in excel, sure, u can type in the formula and everything to make it give u the right answer, but isnt it just 10 times easier to use the popup box where u put in ur true/false values and the test?

That in a nutshell is all they have to do to make the editor easier to use and functional, i'm sure a list of all things fans want to be able to do with objects/maps can be constructed on forums if necessary, and a big list compiled, edit all of those into the editor and bam. Great, easy to use editor.

AliasHW,
It's just too buggy. The 3x3-tool-size trick for "lower" is a handy work-around, that we had to learn about; but that isn't merely an obscurity, it's a bug. The game crashing when it loads a map is a bug. I should not be able to make a map that crashes the game; it should just stop if the map is impossible somehow, ideally give a helpful error message, but at the least clean up it's open file pointers etc. It's just buggy.
The editor is so buggy that I fear it was just badly designed from the beginning. That's what it looks like to me; an overly large list of features implemented, with no sound design underlying it.
I guess I shouldn't complain about a freebie, but the wealth of user contributed maps was something that made Heroes III special.

Of course, some folks are contributing fun maps already; so I'm not giving up, but I am stalled and it's pretty frustrating.

I wrote my first game, in BASIC, in the mid 70's; a prototype game I wrote was exhibited at an Amusement Manufaturers of America tradeshow in the mid 90's. I'm not a noob at this. Maybe the opposite, senile, but not a noob :-)

But I'm sure glad y'all are still plugging away at it.

yoof

P.S. and btw, a memory leak in my game at AMOA crashed not my game, but, worse, the subsequent games played on the box, as the controlling program gradually ran out of free memory. (I had been obliged to add features after the show began, and there was no time for QA.) Mainly I know about these mistakes from having made most of them myself.

So, if I understand you correctly, (and please, do correct me if I’m wrong) you don’t have a problem as such with how the editor is set up and how to make maps, but with the bugs in it that prevent you from using the editor like it theoretically can be used.

That, I fully agree with. I’m not making maps at the moment (other hobbies taking up time) but from the experimenting I did I noticed that if you want to create a working map and don’t want to risk losing a lot of work you just did, you pretty much have to safe the game after every thing you did. This because there is no undo button (which I guess is coming with the improved version, considering that it is in the editor, just hidden because it’s not working right.) And even more annoying, sometimes something you place on the map is just not editable and you have to delete the object and then place the same object again just to get an object you can edit. At the moment it’s; placed a hero, safe. Placed a town, safe. Placed a treasure chest, safe. Placed a creature, safe. That is not how you should have to work with an map editor.

The thing for me personally is that I don’t get too worked up about the bugs. Not that I don’t mind the bugs; I do. But simply because that’s proven Nival way of working. Just look at Heroes itself. Like it or not, Nival is using the Heroes community as a whole as ‘beta testers’ of their product, which I why we should report all the bugs we find in the editor bugs topic created by KingImp... scratch that, they still didn’t more that topic over from the now hidden bugs and suggestion forum. Guess a new topic has to be started here then.

Anyway, as far as the bugs are concerned, I’m willing to wait until the next patch at least. Then I will look at which, if at all, bugs are removed from the editor. And then I’ll start screaming all about how I can’t believe that they didn’t even fix this or that simple problem.
But the bottom line is that I’ll still be glad that the map editor is reality simple to use.

Take a look at the map editor for Titan Quest if you want to see a difficult editor.
With the heroes editor, even if you don’t have any experience from the H3 editor, if you spent some time you will manage to make a map. A simple map that exists out of nothing more than 2 towns and 2 heroes, yes, but still a workable map.

But the map editor for Titan Quest... I tried it, and gave up. You need 3!!! programs to make a map there. It’s like; open program 1 and do this, now close program 1 and open program 2 and do that, but make sure that you don’t forget to do this. Now open program 3 and do this and that. If now your map doesn’t work you did ‘something’ wrong in one of the 3 programs.

Eh, I much rather have the H5 editor.
So, let me see, for now I think the score for the Editor is (and again, anyone please correct me is I’m wrong.)

In itself the editor is alright or even good, but the things that need addressing are:
1. Get rid of the bugs.

2. Simplify the scripting. Leave the option to put in detailed scripts like you have now, but add a ‘click and edit’ menu like there was in H3 for the more basic stuff like, this event happening on that day and this is the result.

3. Add the damn undo button.

4. Ad an option to switch off the moving graphics in the editor, or just simply have it switched off all the time; you don’t need moving graphics in the editor anyway. The moving graphics really do nothing more than slow down your computer to the point where you can’t work on big maps unless you have a NASA certified computer.

H.W.

IMHO the editor only has one very BIG problem. It's completely user unfriendly. After playing with the editor for some time my respect for the HoMM5 level developers has highly increased. If that's the tool they had to use, they certainly had to endure lots of frustration.

The editor is very, very powerful and probably you can do everything with it. The problem is figuring how to do it (the manuals are very good, but they cover just a little part of what can be done) and being patient enough. If you are adding more than a couple scripts to your map, then you have to be extra patient. The good thing is that you can easily figure how it was to program some decades ago without the helpful programming tools we have nowadays.

If they make the editor a bit more user friendly, they will have a great complement for the expansion.

Euphistopheles
The problem seems to be the passability .
Turn on Passability(CTRL+B) you will see a red line on the edge of the map .
Remove any unit that is on the edge (first square)of the map, and any units/objects that overlap(you have some units in the walls)

OrsonZombie,
Thanks very much! I'm able to playtest that map now, which gives me courage to resume my "too big" map.

It's interesting that passability can cause crashing; we've all seen inaccessible resources under the trees in user contrib maps. But now I know that can crash, too.

Fitting, it was, that the AI hero who showed up with Avagadro's Number of skeleton archers and beat me, was Orson :-)

Thanks very much,
Yoof

quote:

In itself the editor is alright or even good, but the things that need addressing are:
1. Get rid of the bugs.

2. Simplify the scripting. Leave the option to put in detailed scripts like you have now, but add a ‘click and edit’ menu like there was in H3 for the more basic stuff like, this event happening on that day and this is the result.

3. Add the damn undo button.

4. Ad an option to switch off the moving graphics in the editor, or just simply have it switched off all the time; you don’t need moving graphics in the editor anyway. The moving graphics really do nothing more than slow down your computer to the point where you can’t work on big maps unless you have a NASA certified computer.

5. make it possible to have an editor and game running in parallel. Right now, to test whatever change you made on a map you need to restart the game. To be really sure, close the editor first. (start editor, edit, save, close, start game to see the effect, close game, open editor to make another change etc.) "restart cenario" in game should be enough to load the updated map.

heh, that sounds extremely wishful

I wonder if they could open-source the Editor? We could fix it up, and as it is, I don't think their competitors would want it :-)
Yoof

how about we group the mines together... nothing stupider than having to scroll thru the all terain objects to find ur damn ore pit

i like moving graphics, it lets u see how stuff is gunna look in the game, but yea a toggle would b nice there

First, my map (much anticipated by...me) is playtestable.
Second, I have a question and some comments about scripting, particularly MessageBox.

I) Thanks to OrsonZombie's generousity looking at someone else's buggy map, I was able to resume my main map. It's a self-indulgent blood-feast for people who like to amass the maximum imaginable teetering stack of Skeleton Archers, in the privacy of their homes.
I have the topography basics laid out, and 9 cities (which gets the warning "there are more than 8 cities!" but seems harmless so far), 4 regular cities and 5 hobbled special purpose things, like the necromancers' Slave Pen, which only has peasant huts.
The raised areas look like layer cakes. That's pretty OK in one artificial mound area, but needs a ton of landscaping work in the mountain pass area to look at all natural.
I just playtested with Angel Wings in case I found yet another inaccessiblity problem, but never had to use them (I'm sure I will after future iterations of landscaping) but it took two long sessions to conquer everyone (it's a big darn map and has long stretches of hoofing along interminable corridors; alot of the dungeon-crawl phase is yet to be fleshed out).
Anyway, it's early enough to make big changes easily, so if anyone would like a crack at making suggestions for it, drop me a line.

II) I don't have any scripting yet, a bit embarassing since I"m a programmer. Is this really what I have to do to call MessageBox?
1. write the text of the message into a .TXT file.
2. rename the H5M map to ZIP.
3. unpack the zip into a directory structure.
4. move the TXT into a subdirectory.
5. repack the zip, and rename to H5M.
6. Open the Editor and link an object in the object tree to the text file.
7. call MessageBox in a script with that object as the arguement.

Is that basically it? There is no ordinary "MessageBox" function, that takes text as an arguement, as in all modern programming languages??

I really don't like the editor, because of the contrast to H3, which made map-making as much fun as playing. But again, several users have contributed just beautiful maps, so I can't blame the editor.

"Fury of the Elements" is just gorgeous. Maybe not alot of replayability, but it's a poem of orchestrated terrain topology, event chronology and timing, and fully detailed story-- everything is fully detailed, and every inaccessible tile has an artful reason.

Yoof

Euphistopheles with pleasure.
Try this for the Message box:
1)Open the ?Map Properties Tree ? (Ctrl+M)
2)Expand the ?Resources? property
3)Right click on the SavesFilenames and select ?Add? from the dropdown menu
4)In the value field of SaveFilenameFileRef click ?New?
5)Insert a name of the file and click ?OK?
6)Insert the desired text and click ?OK?
7)To use the file within the function instead of messageName insert the path from the value field of SaveFilenameFileRef .
Example:
MessageBox( "Maps/SingleMissions/New Map/test.txt","Function")?

Because Nival and UBI don't want to enable scripts for the multiplayers , i would propose that someone with the knowledge to crack the .exe and disable that protection.
What do you say?!

I liked the H3 Editor better, i cant script and im too lazy to learn how...I liked H3 with the preset triggers and stuff. Now its all complicated and everything.

Hi Guys, please help me I can't save my map in map editor at all!

Whenever I save it, the file is created, but it's only 22 bytes, so doesn't work for a map.

I've already tried the least: opened an existing map, changed nothing, saved as a new one. But it's still 22 bytes.