INTRODUCTION

This is not meant to be any more than a quick-start guide, as there is a huge amount that I haven't discovered about Vengeance, however I will try to explain how to do the basics, and give a few tips along the way. It is also meant to be a guide for map makers who have progressed on the Myth 2 map making era.

MESHES AND COLORMAPS

Okay, first step: Fire up Loathing! Yes, that's right, we start our journey in Loathing, not Vengeance. You will need Loathing to do all your mesh work. Basically, make your colormap exactly as you would normally in photoshop.

Pretend you are making a Myth 2 map, and import a flattened 240 color colormap into loathing. Now, do all the heightmap work. I don't know if you prefer to create a B&W heightmap first, and then tweak in Loathing or paint it completely in Loathing, but it's up to you.

Now, for the reflection map. Import it into Loathing as you normally would. However, you should make sure that the black area on your reflection is just a bit wider than it should be. This makes sure that the water should intersect with the banks as I described above. About water levels. Hmm. If you just have one or two small areas which are different from the main level (eg Gimble) then I would recommend that you just leave it out of the reflection map, and do it later in Vengeance.

So, when you are satisfied with your mesh, the next step is to work on making your colormap photoshop document more vengeance/myth 3 friendly. Vengeance will import photoshop documents directly. On the background layer should be your complete, flattened colourmap. On the layers above should be your detail texture masks, which should include your base texture such as grass. These are just layers with whatever you want on them (I just keep my texture on them), with a black and white mask. You will most likely want to merge a few layers together from the way you were working with them before, because for many layers, you will not need more than one detail texture.

Now, one thing you will most likely have been doing is having your layers overlapping. In Myth 3, this will result in all of the detail textures being overlayed on top of each other, so you will need need to cut out the visible parts of the layers above from the layers below, if you get my jist :D. To do this, select your top layer's mask. Select all. Copy. Paste. Now go to select > color range. Select the white area. Now hide that temporary layer, and clicking on each of the layer masks below, press the delete key (making sure the background color is black!) Do the same with the next layer mask below, and the next. So, at the bottom, the grass for example should be masked, with places where you see only grass white on the mask, and places where you don't, black. I hope you understood all that :)

Next. If you made your colormap a multiple of 256 or 128, just resize the whole thing so that it is a multiple of 252 or 126. So for example, if your colormap was 1536x1536, it should now be 1512x1512.

VENGEANCE

In Myth 3, although there is a local folder, it doesn't work in quite the same way as in Myth 2. In Myth 3 you start off by creating a new tag. So go ahead - File > New. Also, go to File > Open Complete Tag List. This will open all the tags which Vengeance can find, whether they are in tags or plugins or whatever.

So, let's import the mesh. Simply drag the mesh you created in Loathing onto your new tag's window, and it will be put in the correct folder, however don't open the mesh yet! First we have to import the colormap for it. Go to mesh > import new colormap, and select your photoshop document. After a while of loading it in, it will appear in a folder called "Texture Stacks". Texture stacks are Myth 3's way of storing many of the tags which used to be collections in Myth 2. (However, collections still exist in Myth 3).

There are two ways of opening your mesh file. You can either double click on it normally which will open the Loathing-style editor (but don't do it yet, or it will crash!) or you can double click on it while holding control. This will open up the Fear-style mesh editor, which has all the properties such as the colormap, the lighting, the pregames and so on. Do that now.

See how there are wide buttons with text, and a smaller, blank button to the right? Well, the wide one will let you choose an alternative tag, while the smaller button will let you view or edit the tag which has been set. So, click the wide button for the colormap, and select your newly created colormap tag. Now click the smaller button. So you see, it just opened up the texture stack from within the mesh editor. Neat, huh? :)

Click the "apply" button in the top right of the window. This basically saves changes to the tag you just edited. "Reload" reverts the tag to how it was when you opened it. Close the tag.

Now, double click the mesh tag. Wooohooo! Hopefully, you should see your mesh with its colormap and heightmap. Potential problems:

- If your map looks like it is split into strips which are all jumbled into the wrong order, then it is probably because your colormap was imported at the wrong size - review what I said about needing to make the colormap size a multiple of 126/252 instead of 128/256.
- You don't know how do get rid of those nasty grids. First, go into the mesh menu and uncheck all of the "show blah grid" for all except for "show colormap". Now it should function normally - the render grid, physical grid, or media grid will only appear if you click on the appropriate "click blah" button the left.

Click Modes - these basically change which grids are shown so that you can edit them, or so that you can use them as reference. Useful for example to switch on the render grid when changing terrain.

In conjunction with these click modes, you can use these tools:

MEDIA

Now, firstly, you probably want to tidy up your media. Click the water tool, and show the media mesh. Clicking anywhere will add new media cells, while clicking on existing media cells will get rid of them. You will probably want to tidy up your reflection map, making sure that the media intersects with the bank properly. If it doesn't you will get horrible nasty edges. If you didn't quite raise the bank high enough in places, here is how you do basic vertex editing:

Select the Band Grid tool, and show the render grid instead of the media one. This mode is just like the multiple vertex selection tool in Loathing. It's slow, but precise.

You could also bend the media grid down at the edges, if you were feeling really evil :)

TERRAIN

Terrain editing is pretty much self explanitory... oh yeah, to fill an area you alt-click instead of shift-clicking.

PLACING OBJECTS

Now, to place objects, select the "band markers" tool, and whatever grid you want (probably none). The pop-up menu lets you select the scenery/units/etc you want to add.

Tip when choosing units/scenery:
If you click an item from your list (eg zerk, team 0), then when you click new, the settings will default to zerk, team 0, so that if you are adding a unit for another team, you can just change the team number, or the gametype without needing to reselect the unit.

To place, alt-click

To select, click on the *base* of the unit.

To move, drag it around (from the base). Zoom in as far as possible. See those little colored axis? If you click and drag on different ones, the object will move, constrained, along that axis.

To rotate, hold ctrl while click-dragging on each axis. The most important one will probably be the *RED* one - it affects yaw, so that you can change which direction the object or unit is facing.

DETAIL TEXTURES

You can import detail textures at any time - you could have done them first if you liked. Basically, you just need to create a new texture stack, and stick a few 256x256 detail textures in. The easiest way to do this is to just re-use the ones which came with Myth 3 because there are so many of them. However, these textures might begin to get old after a while, and you will probably want to create some of your own.

So, you just have a texture stack with a detail texture for each layer of the psd you imported (except for the background colormap). Put them in order, with the detail texture at the top of the texture stack being the one which is used first, ie the base texture, for example grass.

To re-use textures, just open a detail texture stack from another map, and drag them into place.

OVERHEADS AND PREGAMES:

Just create these in exactly the same way as you would for Myth 2, and drag the tag file onto your list. Pregames are the same size as in Myth 2.

Well, that's all folks. If you have any comments/corrections/critisisms, don't hesitate to email me at phish@aelius.com. I'm certain that I must've made loads of mistakes. Huge thanks to Vista, particularly iggy and El Bastard for help with Vengeance.