TGMC:Guide to mapping

This page is a part of the TGMC wiki. TGMC is a project based on the CM-SS13 codebase.

Introduction

Welcome fellow poor soul! You have decided to visit the depraved part of TGMC contribution, mapping. We make the content that you walk on, and then proceed to cope about appreciate!

This guide will cover the following things:

• Installation of StrongDMM
• Basics of our map tool, StrongDMM (SDMM)
• How to make a small map edit
• Basics on making a completely new map

This guide will assume you have read/done the following:

• Have a working github fork and Virtual Studio Code (refer to the following guide to set it up: TGMC's guide to contributions.)
• Accepted your fate as a mapper

With that, lets begin!

Installing the Map Editor

The most simple part of the guide. I will assume you know how to install things on your computer.

Go to this link for the latest StrongDMM release, find your operating system in the "Assets" part, install it, then follow the instruction steps. Put it somewhere you want it to be on your computer, probably near where ever you installed your repo of TGMC. That's it.

Entering the Map Editor

Cool, you now have StrongDMM. Now how do you use the damn thing? Well, after opening it, you will have to open an environment file that TGMC has. To do so, go to the top right of StrongDMM where it says File, then Open.

Now, navigate to where you installed your repo of TGMC. Find the .dme file in the main folder, and open it.

Wonderful, you should now see a list of maps that you can now open, in addition the ability to create a new map in File.

The guide to the basics of making a new map will be at the bottom. The following section will how to use SDMM and make minor fixes/edits to existing maps.

Basics of the Map Editor

Well, now you have opened up a map. For the sake of this guide we will use the ship map Pillar of Spring. Let's say we want to change the name of a door in Preparations.

This is a ton of information to take at once. What you are seeing is the full Pillar of Spring map with all of it's layers. This includes area, turfs, objects and mobs. You barely have to worry about mobs during mapping, so lets go over the other ones. Turfs are the tiles you stand on or walls . If there is neither a floor or wall on a tile, it will be empty space which you never want inside the boundaries players play in. Objects are like vendors, guns on the floor or what have you; there can be multiple objects on a tile but not multiple turfs on a tile. Lastly, area. Areas give the tiles certain properties and divide the map into sections; for example, one of the main properties that areas give is ceiling type. The way caves are defined, for example, are with areas; their ceiling is underground so that CAS and OB can't hit it. Areas are also what determine what a certain APC powers , for future reference ONLY ONE APC PER AREA.

Any who, the main thing to de-clutter your screen is to hide the areas, you can either press CTRL + 1 or go to the top right and click View and uncheck mark Show Area. Zoom into where you want (for vendors, prep!). It should look like this.

Onto changing that door name. We will want to place a new door with the name we want replacing the old door. First we want the same door type, so to copy something you hold S and click the thing you want. So for this, I hold S and click the door I want to change. I now can place a new one of it's type anywhere I want; it will look like this:

On the left you see a bunch of objects you can select and search up, we'll ignore this for now. On the right we can see different prefabs (we will call these varedits from now on). Without getting too much into coding, a variable (var) is something that holds data. In this case, there is a var that holds the name of the door when you hover over it. On the bottom right you can press Filter and search up the var you want, in this case name;

Before we change the name we should create a new varedit of the door so we don't edit existing ones. To do this, go to the top right and right click the door, then hit "New."