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