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Creating new levels, music and graphics for Rapid Aerial Deployment.

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-Editing original maps
Well, creating your own levels for R.A.D. is realy easy. First thing you need to do is download the mapeditor mappy you can download it from http://www.tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php .

When you have opened mappy you can go to the MAP folder that is placed in the folder where Rapid Aerial deployment is in. Just open one of the maps that are in the game. As you can see on the leftside is the map of one of the levels in the game on the right side you can select the tiles which the map is made of. Just select one of the tiles and click on the map to place it, incredible simple isn't it? Now you can create your own map. Just make sure there are always two HQ's and at least one Factory on the map.I advise to read through the help, there are some handy features in mappy, like brushes, fill,random fill and resize map.
Just save your map in the same \MAP folder under a different name and you can select your map as an extra map in the level selection screen in R.A.D.

-Adding your own music
Adding music is even easier, just select your favorite .mp3 or .ogg track and rename it to the same name your newly created map is and place the track in the MUSIC folder of RAD. Now the music is automatically added to your map.
I suggest you use some kind of audio editting tool (I use goldwave) to trim your tracks so that it is loopable.

-Creating new map graphics.
So you want to create a totally new map, cool! You can draw your own tiles and import the tiles into Mappy. You can import 24-bit BMP.files (I believe the newest version of mappy can import TGA files).
If you create a new map in mappy make sure you set the Block(tile) width and height both to 64 pixels.
For the map width and heigth you can choose any value you like, although I would recommend a value between 30 to 50. Also make sure the color depth is 24-bit.
You can make all the graphics yourself with you favorite paintprogram, just make sure the size of the HQ is 3x3 tiles and the factories are 2x2 tiles. You can Import new tile graphics tile for tile by importing a 64x64 picture, or you can import a large block of tiles as one picture (just make sure the size of this picture is a multiple of 64 pixels). Download this bitmap of factory and HQ tiles to get you started (ofcourse, there is no reason why you shouldn't create your own HQ and factory tiles.)


Once you have imported the graphics in mappy, mappy needs to know which tiles are factory-, HQ-, water- or blocked tiles. That is why we have to access the properties tab in mappy. just double-click on a tile (1.)on the tile selection window on the right to access its properties. There are a lot of properties that can be set, we are only interested in four of them.
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A) Set this parameter to 11 if the tile is the upperleft tile of a factory, otherwise leave the value at 0.
B) Set this paramater to 1 or 2 if this tile is the upperleft tile of an HQ. set it to 1 for player one (red) HQ set it to 2 for player two (blue)HQ. Otherwise set it to 0
C) Set this parameter to 1 if this tile is a water tile.
D) You can set these checkboxes to indicate if a part of the tile is blocked/water or a normal land tile. Check the parts of the tiles that is water or blocked or leave it unchecked if it is a normal unblocked tile.

-Adding new unit graphics to the game.
I'll keep this part brief, it's already very late and I want to go to bed. Adding new sprites to the game is also very simple. If you look in the SPRITES directory you can see all the graphics in the game. All sprites are contained in 24bit color bitmaps. All unit sprites are 64x64 pixels Most sprites have 9 frames of animation, from up (frame 1) to right (frame 5) till down (frame 9) The game gets the other directions by flipping the frames from frame 2 till frame 8. The soldiersprite has 18 frames of animation 9 directions with leftfoot infront and 9 directions with right foot in front. The player sprite has even more animations 24, 9 directions for the plane, 9 direction for the robot and 5 animations for the transformsequence. The frames of the playersprite are placed below each other instead of next to each other, that is because directx sometimes has problems with bitmaps that are wider than 1024 pixels.
Now Just make sure your sprites are the same size and have the same framecount as the original and you can replace the original graphics with your own. To make parts of your sprite transparent, make that part pure - black (R=0,G=0,B=0)

Well, that is about all you need to know to create your own levels and graphics for Rapid Aerial deployment. I don't reccomand you change any Interface graphics, because these are bound to change in a future version.

If you think you got a great map or great graphics. you can mail the map to me rad@leondroog.com, so I can put it on my website. Or you can send me a link where people can download your map.



 
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