Vbases, Ports and Ships Oh my!!! Part 1
Section 3 Part 1
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.
Well in the first two segments of this tutorial series you created three different Islands.
Three separate countries, consisting of a large airfield, a town and a head quarters.
If you have completed the first two tutorials and successfully built an offline terrain, you are doing a great job.
In this tutorial we are going to add much more to your terrain and expand the land area of each Island where needed.
Thus this will be the longest tutorial so far and will be in two parts.
Some of the things we will be adding are vehicle fields, a few spawn points, ports, and cv task groups with way points.
From this point forward your country, zone, and object data settings will be very important.
Hence the reason I suggested starting a note book or text file for your terrain.
Contents
Clutter and what it means
OK I know enough about all that you want to get going...
So lets start up the TE and load our "test.oba" file.
Make sure you have your Grid on, Cell overlay on, and Snap on.
Since we will be adding vehicle spawns later in this installment of the tutorial you will see why we need the cell overlay on.
Basicly what it is, is the trees, shrubs, fences, and the rest of the ground clutter you see in your terrain.
Since we don't want to place a vehicle spawn on top of a tree, we need to be able to see these things when setting our spawn point.
We will get to that then.
Adding Vehicle Bases
Now make sure you have right clicked on your CBM window and turned on "Show Field Numbers" and navigate the CBM to where our
country 1 Island is.
Depending on how large you made this Island in the beginning we will add a vehicle field, and a port to it.
If there is not enough land mass on this Island use what you have learned thus far to make your Island bigger, (erase water and paint terrain).
Now that you have enough land mass to add more fields without them being all bunched together, lets add a vehicle field.
Select the objects tab and then in your main editor window click on a red grid square where you want to place your vehicle field.
Now in the "Available shapes" box select the "vfld0" shape and click "Add Shape/Group".
The object type will be "Group Master", Ownership will be "Field Owned" and since this will be our fourth field added to the terrain set it at 4.
Our zone will be 1 since this is our first Island and it's objects are zone 1, bellow the "Zone" box you will see one that says "Object Data".
Set this to 1 this tells the TE that this field is a vehicle field.
The setting for these are "Air field is Object Data 0, a Vehicle Field is Object Data 1, and a Port is Object Data 2"
Now navigate to our country 2 Island and repeat the steps there. Be sure you follow your field numbering sequence, this one will be field 5.
Group Master, Zone 2, and object data 1.
Now navigate to our country 3 Island and do it all over again. Field 6, Group Master, Zone 3, and Object Data 1.
Yep you guessed it SAVE your work. Click on the CBM and selecting "Show field numbers" off and then on again should
make these appear. Now it might show these 3 new fields as A4, A5, and A6. Click on file and open your "test.oba" file again
so that all your changes are loaded in the working terrain. That should change them to V4, V5, and V6.
If it does not click on the field in the main editor window and to the right in "selection list" and you should see something like
"F04GMS000" or the field number in question, double click that and it will bring up the "Object Properties" window.
Make sure in there you have your "Object Data" set to 1.
Now you may have noticed that with the Vehicle fields we did not place any "Town" objects with them like we did with
the Air Fields. Thats because on a vehicle field the map room is located on the field and it is not on an Air Field.
Lets make sure all our fields are set to the right country like we did in our previous tutorial.
Under settings select "Fields Setup" you will probably see that the 3 vehicle fields are not set to the proper countries.
1=Bishops, 2=Knights, and 3=Rooks. lets make those changes now so they are correct.
Yep lets save our work again and then reopen our "test.oba" file before we continue.
If you had to create more land mass on any of your Islands you will need to make a new CBM
to reflect these changes. Hopefully you remember how to do this, if not refer back to the first tutorial and complete this process.
Now with your new CBM created (if you had to make a new one), lets build our terrain again, and place it in our
games terrains folder and load it offline and check out our Vbase additions.
Adding Vehicle Spawn Points
OK since I promised you earlier that we would learn to place spawn points let's put in a couple of those.
Start up your TE again and load your "test.oba" file and lets continue.
Since we don't want to place or vehicle spawns in the center of a grid square but instead we want to more
refine our placement. Uncheck the "Snap" box that we normally have set.
Navigate to our country 1 Island and lets place a vehicle spawn near our HQ object.
Select the objects tab and in the main editor window click close to the grid line in a square adjacent to our HQ object.
Do not place the object directly on a grid line.
Now in our "Available Shapes" list select "entpnt" this is an entry point.
When the "Object properties" window appears under "object Type" set this to "Veh Ent" (Vehicle Entry Point).
Ownership should be set to "Field Owned" (put a check in the box) and the field number should be 4.
Zone will be 1, next to field owned you should see to check boxes "Can Collide, and Set to Terrain Alt" Uncheck "Can Collide" and leave "Set to Terrain Alt" checked.
Select OK. You should now see a white circle with an arrow pointing North in it where we placed the Vehicle Spawn.
Rotating the Vehicle Spawn
Depending on where you placed the V spawn by your HQ you may want to rotate it so it points to your HQ object.
In the "Selection List" below our "Add Shape/Group" button, you should see something like "F04VHE000". Click once on this so that it is highlighted.
Now closer to the top below all our tabs (Terrain,Objects,Roads) and such you should see "Select, Copy, Rotate, Move, and Group Rotate".
Click on the little circle next to "Rotate" and it should put a black dot in the circle.
Now in the main editor window your cursor should turn into a little hand. Left click and hold the mouse button down and move your mouse.
You can now change the direction that the white arrow was pointing and make it face towards your "HQ" object.
You can now move onto the other 2 countries and repeat these steps to add vehicle spawns for the other v bases on your terrain.
Don't forget to set the field numbers to the appropriate vehicle fields on each of your other Islands, as well as the zone settings.
Now lets SAVE our work again and then reload our "test.oba" file.
We can now build out test terrain again and place the .res file in our games terrain directory and
load it off line to check that our vehicle spawns are there and work properly.
OK welcome back.... once you have verified that your vehicle spawns work properly you can either
add a couple more to each of your vehicle fields if you like or move on to adding the ports.
If you decide to add more spawns just remember that you can only have a max of 8 spawns per v base,
and you can make a spawn to any of the other countries Islands if you like. Just remember not to place it to close to
a field or HQ for the opposing country as the ack will kill you as soon as you spawn. I would suggest a couple miles away.
Each red grid square in your terrain is 1 mile square, or 5280ft x 5280ft.
OK ports will be next.
