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Maps Made With Kickstarter Version


Destro

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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

Edited by Gauddlike
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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.

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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?

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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.

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Okay, I'm extremely confused now, but not about the map editor.

I accidently deleted my tiles/industrial/Office folder. No big problem right? Apparently, wrong. I went to go re-extract the folder from the Xenonauts_Kickstarter_Demo.zip and almost everything is there. Except... I no longer have the OfficeWallInnerSE and OfficeWallInnerSW image files. They're magically gone, poof. I know they were there because I've been using them in my current map project.

Does Xenonauts automatically generate the images for some assets? I'm asking because apparently they were never there in the .zip to begin with, yet they were created somehow. If that's to no avail, could someone zip up those two files for me if it's not too much of a burden?

Here's a screenshot of the map in progress if you're interested why I need these two files.

http://i.imgur.com/VtxJu.jpg

I enjoy making complex map geometry if you can't tell.

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None of them are bigger than 15x15. I designed them to be interlocking and allow for limited randomization.

Map idea is: Huge office complex of XYZ megacorp. Player lands the chinook in the front parking lot and has to fight/blow up their way through the complex to the landed/crashed alien ship in the back courtyard.

I'd say that screenshot shows about... 8 submaps or so?

Since you saw the thread, could you look in your folder and see if you have the two named files?

Edited by Destro
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Look again at that screenshot.

The image is OfficeWallInnerNE but the spectre says OfficeWallInnerSW.

There is no image file for the one you said was missing, it is just a spectre that uses an existing image (WallNE) but moves it to align with the SW edge instead of the NE edge..

The spectre file should be there so look for that, not the image file.

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That's a piece of info I must have overlooked. I think I understand what's going on now. Before, I was blanket-loading entire folders and scrolling through them until I found something relevant. Now that I know most of the tiles, I've been cherry-picking specific images that I remember using.

It's odd how I accidentally deleted my Office folder right before I actually started looking specifically for that tile.

The map editor's confusing enough as it is. Thanks anyway for everyone's time.

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Yeah there aren't many tiles that reuse assets, most of them have their own.

As you said, when you load the whole folder up then you get them but if you are looking for a specific image they can be hard to see.

It makes things a bit trickier sometimes when you are trying to find something specific, I feel your pain ;)

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