Editing and mission designing
On the editor: you get a mission editor, as said above, and a map
editor that allows you to define type of terrain, object placing,
vegetation, and how fast various kinds of vehicles can move in a given
terrain. To be more precise, the map editor as the primary design-tool
also includes the so-called terrain theme editor in form of a program that
opens from within the map editor in a separate window, the latter allowing
to change movement parameters for different mobility properties, and to
change the visual appearance of the ground textures. You can essentially
determine not only what kind of terrain should appear at a location (and
what vegetation, objects, buildings), you can also determine what effects
the selected terrain type should inflict on unit movement in the designed
scenario. These changes are not global but are saved as integral part of
the scenario file. However, there is no height map editor (only the
military is getting that, not the PE version), so you cannot change the
3D-modelling of the earth’s surface, its valleys and hills. But the
simulation comes with 60 huge height maps, which can be multiple times a
big as the actual mission maps, so only a fragment of a single height map
is used at a time to form up the approximately 13x13 km battleground for
the actual mission (there are height maps included of up to 60x50 km).
And you can nevertheless turn the same area on the same height map into
a very different terrain by using the map editor to go over it, turning
desert into woodland with rivers and forest, for example. Additionally, a
member of the beta-testers who are in contact with the developer told me
this: "In the map editor, you can modify terrain up to 80x80km˛ in size.
In the mission editor, you can pick maps of up to 20x20km˛, of which the
recommended battle space usually is 12x12km˛. At the edges of the mapped
area, Steel Beasts performs a wrapping of the terrain. This requires a
transition zone where height differences are leveled out. This transition
zone should be at the very edge of the player's visibility limit to avoid
an immersion-breaking "discovery of the ugly truth". Many of the included
height maps, according to their titles, seem to mimic realistic terrain
from around the globe, from the Gulf over Asia to Germany, from the
Balkans to the Arabian deserts, from Korea to US terrain (Fort Hood or the
complete NTC, for example). If you are a mission designer and think the
lacking ability to manipulate the height maps is a showstopper for mission
designer, then you should build your own experience on it by trying it –
the disadvantage is much smaller than one may conclude from my words. In
their forum it was also said by some guys some time ago, that maybe there
are ways to bypass the missing height map editor, and that it is possible
to manipulate terrain height, nevertheless. But take this with caution -
it was also said that this is an extremely complicated and difficult
process that is not recommended to be tried by the faint of heart. The
option to manipulate height maps was intentionally left out, so that the
military still will buy the more expensive version that allows doing that,
by importing DTED and ESRI formatted data.
Importing the missions from SB1/Gold can be very easy for not too
complex terrain, just drop the missions into the according SBP-folder, and
the sim will recognize them. Other missions eventually will need to add
some substantial manual corrections. But it is possible to increase the
number of SP mission from the default 26 to over 140 missions, in a very
short time. If it is recommended to do so with every old mission is
something different. Sometimes it may be easier to design a mission from
scratch.
