Maps Made With Kickstarter Version

[Destro]

I stumbled upon Xenonauts recently, and tried the build that was released on the Kickstarter page. Needless to say, I am now very eager for it to be released; I absolutely love games of this sort. There is one thing I love more, however, and it's making maps for games of this sort, even if they're mediocre and never draw much attention.

Due to financial reasons, It's going to be a while before I can spare the money to pre-order. My question is: could I still make maps with the version of the game and map editor provided on the Kickstarter page? Will anything break drastically if and when I finally purchase the game and jump a dozen or more builds forward?

At the least, I could probably get some ideas worked out and have some fun doing so.

[Gauddlike]

You would probably be fine making maps for now but once the level designer gets hired and working they will probably make/rework many of the submaps and tiles so you may find the ones you have worked on are broken or less varied than you could have done.

The upside is that with the practice you have had you would be in a good position to jump in and make maps using the new assets much more quickly and easily than you would have been otherwise.
Chris has said that the tools may change as well though so this might not be as big an advantage.

[Gorlom]

Would the maps he has done be completely useless or just need some updating though? If he fixes the changed specters the maps should still work, no?

[LeftyRighty]

really depends on what is changed in the interim... if the game design requires a change to specters such as adding or removing a property you'd have to go through each one and add/remove it. If they change the way in which something works completely, it's going to be a mess really quickly.

[Destro]

Quick question, if you don't mind: I've got myself a couple Submaps and I've stitched them together into a Level. I can't figure out how to run the map, however.

According to the wiki:

You can force a game to use a specific level for each battle using the levelsetup.xml file (and also set the type and number of each alien there). If you load up the game using the -GroundCombat.bat files, this makes the maps relatively easy to test in-game.

I modified the .xml file as instructed, but I'm unable to find any batch file by the name of GroundCombat.bat; the only .bat file in the entire directory is cleanfolder.bat. I've read the FAQ for this forum as well and discerned that file names for the Kickstarter release were changed around. Did something similar happen for this batch file? Is there an alternate way to run my map in-game to see if it works?

[Gauddlike]

That bat file doesn't exist any more.
Easiest way to do it now is to make the alteration to levelsetup_quickbattle.xml then run the quick battle when you launch the game.

For example if you have made an industrial tileset and called it my_level change:
<LevelSetup>
<Map tileset="Town" />

Into:
<LevelSetup>
<Map tileset="Industrial" mapname="my_level" />


*edit* Updated the wiki, might have to change it back if the future versions remove the quick battle

[Gauddlike]

The maps should work if you had the right spectres, assuming the tiles used had not had their names changed and were still actually being used.
Also it would need to have all of the submaps used to still be available in the later versions.
If the submap or tile naming convention was changed it could throw the whole level out.

[Destro]

I'm unable to get the Quick Battle to function, as-per your instructions. I'm trying to first load the official map "industrial_scout1.xml" located in the maps/Industrial folder as a test, with my "levelsetup_quickbattle.xml" edited to:

<Map tileset="Industrial" mapname="industrial_scout1" />

It does not work with or without .xml appended to the file name.

What am I missing?

[Gauddlike]

What happens when you try it?
Does it load up the original map or a different one?
Working fine for me.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<LevelSetup>
<Map tileset="Industrial" mapname="industrial_scout1" />



<Aliens>

[Destro]

I click on "Quick Battle" from the Xenonauts splash screen that comes up every time you start the xenonauts.exe. What happens next, is that the game loads, but it loads the main menu, as if I had chosen the "Full Demo" option. Choosing "New Game" or "Load Game" only lets me load a new/old campaign, not a specific map.

Keep in mind, I am using the V10.2 build that was posted on the Kickstarter page.