I Made A Thing (EaW map maker)

Wyrmrest Accord
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So in the lull of WoW I’ve rediscovered my first love… Star Wars.

Specifically the EU and the original movies. So basically everything before 2014. Before the dark times.

Anyway. I’ve been playing with the map maker for a game called Star Wars: Empire At War: Forces of Corruption. It uses a map maker very similar to WoW’s.

Late Night Rambling EaW (eventually) became the best-selling Star Wars game on Steam and is currently on sale. A highly flexible game practically designed to be modded, a big part of the game's longevity is because of how many still-active mod teams there are working on it even today, fifteen years later. Exciting times.

As I said, it uses a map maker similar to what WoW does even today (though there are differences, especially in regards to object collision and water levels, but it’s fundamentally the same).

I could nerd out over how impressive Mac’aree is in terms of design, and talk about why the reason Dalaran lags is because it’s all objects, no terrain, but that’s not what I’m here for… I mean, unless you really want to know why Outland has those weird soft ridges going down into nothing but Mac’aree doesn’t. But anyway.

Here’s a video I quickly threw together showcasing what I’ve been doing in my spare time for the last couple months:

https://youtu.be/Q-RIVUrYB0o
As I said, it’s basically the same principle as WoW. Terrain heights on a grid, objects placed on coordinates with shifting angles. Might give you a better understanding of how WoW’s world works. I find it interesting, anyway.

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Ah yes, EaW, good game and the mods greatly enhance it. I’ve never messed with the map maker myself (say that 5 times fast), but you’re work is really good. Now if only Star Trek Armada would get released again.

So, why does Outland have those weird soft ridges going down into nothing while Mac’aree doesn’t?

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It’s easier to explain visually, but I’ll try with text.

First I have to establish the elements that make up the map maker.

There’s two main things in the map maker (WoW probably uses a modified advanced version of WC3’s, tbh):

Objects

Terrain

The terrain is a plane you can alter at each point on a grid. You can see it very clearly when I change the view in the video to show the grid pattern.

There can never be multiple terrain levels at the same point.

WoW, as a result, can only create caves through objects.

Objects are modeled items placed in the world.

This means trees, rocks, fences, caves, buildings, chairs, crates, you name it. Most objects have collision with the player, some (like 3D grass) don’t.

I can really only show this more effectively than tell it, but caves are created by making a smooth hill, then placing the cave object so that the mouth faces out of the hill, and the cave’s collision allows the player to go under the terrain level (which would normally mean falling through the world. When you fall through the world, you have somehow gone through the terrain.

This is also way so many WoW caves are redundant - they’re objects using preset models. Which is one of the big advantages of terrain, in addition to causing virtually no lag comparatively, you can paint them freely and mold their heights freely.

Some caves are VERY, VERY large, like all most of Siege of Orgrimmar.

Dalaran is the opposite (in both cases), the terrain is far, far below the city, so the entire city is a collection of objects suspended in the air.

That one basket that floats in the air of Vol’dun was an object someone likely accidentally hit “+300 vertical” to or something and not noticed what they had done.

But back to your question.

As I said, there can only be one terrain.

Outland is a bunch of floating rocks (and some of those floating rocks are objects).

The edges of Outland, therefore, can’t “tuck” in on themselves because the terrain cannot fold inwards. The only way to conceal it would be by putting curved objects on the edges of Outland.

But making enough objects to cover every edge of Outland would be a ton of work, so they opted for smoothed edges that lead into nothing. At the bottom, there is likely a flat plane that is painted to be see-through.

But Mac’aree DOES appear to genuinely float.

They accomplish this very cleverly.

The edges of Mac’aree are actually ALL objects. But these objects are very specially designed to blend in seamlessly with the terrain that makes up most of Mac’aree. The real terrain edges of Mac’aree actually probably look exactly like Outland’s, but they’ve been painted invisible and likely don’t have collision.

I can try to show this better visually in another video. It’s hard to explain without images.

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I totally understand you, I used to play with the WC3 map maker. Thanks for the explanation.

Are there any hard to create places you’re trying to do in the EaW maker?

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The dream is to someday make Nkklon - the volcanic mining planet where everything burned in the heat of the way-too-close sun. Lando had a mining operation there set on the back of a dreadnought resting on 40 AT-ATs perpetually moving across the super hot planet to stay on its dark side.
I made a proof of concept map to show it can be done (making it look like the map is actually moving AND on the back of the dreadnought), but it doesn’t look great, and unfortunately the ship is very skinny, which doesn’t make for a good layout.

But at the moment I’m working on Prakith, which is a mountainous planet with a fortified base.

After that, I’m likely to work on New Cov, which is basically bubble cities surrounded by hostile jungles. That will be fun, since I’ll get to use the deadly Felucia props that damage units.
:smiling_imp:

I also got to make an edit to Mytus VII so it can double as Ord Padron, but that won’t take too long, pretty much just a skybox change, remove a couple objects, maybe shift layout a bit too.