More Land and more countries
Well looks like your back for some more TE fun.
In this edition we'll get into a little more detail as well as review a few of the operations of the TE.
First and foremost you must understand that this tutorial is just to give you some very basic knowledge on building
an Aces High terrain that you can fly offline.
It will not teach you how to make a terrain that will be accepted by Hitech Creations for use in their arenas.
That may come after a little more practice and further instruction.
This tutorial assumes you have a working knowledge of how to install a program,
and how to navigate thru the folder structure of your hard drive.
If not that is outside the scope of this tutorial.
One thing you will notice in these tutorials, is that I have not inserted any reference images.
I don't because I think if you read and comprehend the instructions without images
you can get a better handle on successfully creating your terrain.
Before we begin with the next section, this is probably a good time to either start a notebook,
or text file with field number information, country affiliation and so on.
You may need to refer to this at times.
Contents
Resizing and Moving around in your CBM and the Main Editor Window
Continuing where we left off, let's start up the TE and open our "test.oba" terrain file.
Make sure you have your grid turned on, cell overlay on, and snap set. (You should remember how to set these from the first tutorial)
OK if you click on your clip board map window hold the mouse button down and move the mouse you'll notice you can
navigate around the CBM. This also moves where you are in the TE main window.
Also you can zoom in and out of the CBM by using your mouse wheel.
You also may say "Hey my CBM is so small can I make it bigger?" well yes you can.
The CBM window is sizable, you can make it larger by grabbing the edge of it and dragging it out, ( the same way you can
re-size a window in Microsoft Windows™.)
OK let's learn how to move around in the main TE window.
In the main TE window hold down the shift button,
and then right click your mouse button and hold it down and move your mouse.
You will notice that you are now zooming in and out of your terrain.
This is helpful for doing some fine tuning in your terrain.
OK now that you've learned to zoom in and out,
lets hold down the "Ctrl" and then right click and move around.
This will move you around your main TE window.
Also helpful for fine tuning the terrain.
Some times you may forget to hold the shift key or the ctrl key
and find that you have changed the perspective and are kind of looking at an angle.
If this is the case just click on the "Top View" button at the bottom of the main TE window,
to bring you back at the overhead view.
Now you might be wondering why we had to learn all that,
well because we are going to be using it as we add more and do more in our test terrain.
Here's one of those Don't I mentioned in a post. Never rotate an airfield,
vehicle field or strat object, (factories, HQ's, CV Task Groups, Towns and such)
it creates havoc with the terrain and besides that HTC says don't.
You can however and most times will need to rotate a port object.
Creating a second Island and Populating it
Alright now using the movement procedures we just learned let's move our terrain down
to a section of ocean to the lower right of our existing Island we made in the first tutorial.
Follow the same steps as you did in the first tutorial and create another Island,
(erase water, paint grass ) you could choose a different terrain texture other than grass if you wanted.
Yep you guessed it.....SAVE your work.
OK now that you have a second Island let's get it populated like the first one except this Island is going to be for country 2 in zone 2.
Place your "lafld0" object, the type will be "Group Master" and be sure to set the field number to "2" and the zone number to "2"
You might have to review the first part of the tutorial if you forgot how to get the object in place.
Basicly we are duplicating what we did except the field and zone setting will be different.
OK now place your "town0" object, the type will be "Group Master" and set it to "Field Owned" 2 and Zone 2.
Now the "HQ" object type will be "HQ" and instead of field owned set it to "country Owned" set to 2, and zone 2.
SAVE your work.
Creating the Third Island and Populating it
Create a third Island and repeat these steps again but set the field number to 3 and use zone 3,
as well as with the "town0" object.
The HQ will be "Country Owned" 3 and zone 3.
SAVE your work.
Field Ownership Setup
Alright after you have saved what you've done we need to do 2 more things
and then we can build our terrain again for offline testing or playing.
Under the file tab open your "test.oba" file again.
I know it's already open but some times we need to do this
to ensure all our previous changes are loaded in the working window.
Now under "Settings" at the top left of the screen, click on "Fields Setup".
This will bring up another window listing our fields and their ownership.
You should see "BA1, KA2, and RA3". Translated this means that the Bishop country "Country 1" owns air field 1.
Knight country owns air field 2 and the Rook country owns air field 3.
If that's what we have then we are good to go.
If that's not what we have then I'll explain how to fix it.
Lets say you missed a step when placing field 3 and instead of the Rooks owning it the Knights own it.
Well click on it in the list so it is highlighted and to the right of it there are 3 buttons, Bishop, Knight, and Rook.
Click on the Rook button. It should have changed it to "RA3" if so click on OK and then save your work.
Create a New CBM
Alright the other thing we need to do is make a new CBM since we added more land to our terrain.
Follow the same steps as you did to make your CBM in the first tutorial and overwrite the one you have now.
Once you have your new CBM made and placed in the texsrc folder start up the TE again and load your "test.oba" file and
build your terrain again, place it in the games terrain folder and fly it off line and look at your changes.
We will be doing test builds periodically to check that every thing is going well with our terrain.
In the next Tutorial we will be adding some Vehicle Fields, Port's and CV Task Groups.
Plus a whole lot more.... see you then.
