Section I: Enjoy The Fruits of The Oak

Introduction "Easier to grow, prettier on the eyes." Many people fell in love with Bungie's map making tools almost immediately, with the huge amount of options, with the depth and power to back it up. As MythDev, then Project Magma took over, we started seeing new possibilities open up, with new features for Myth map making. Oak, the all purpose Myth application, is Project Magma's newest project it is aimed at being a replacement to Amber, as well as being the only way to apply the new feature of Myth II 1.7, Detail Textures. Oak should be pretty easy to use, but everyone can use help on their first steps, thus, I am writing this guide, to help new Oakers in using this fine application.

What Oak Does Oak is an all purpose Myth editor, aming to replace some of the unsupported Myth editors which do not run on modern computers, as well as combining other myth editing applications to create an easier to work on tool, which could be used cross platform. So, what does Oak do? The first big thing Oak does, is replace the functionality of the Collection editing Tool, Amber. This was the tool everyone used to bring collections into Myth. Without this ability, there would be no Total Coversions, or indeed do new units, effects, scenery, or even interfaces. However, Amber is now very old, and requires a Mac OS9 computer, or a suitable emulator., Oak aims to gives cross platform functionality of Amber's collection editing to everyone. The other large thing that Oak does, is provide a way to apply Myth II 1.7's new feature, Detail Textures. Detail Textures are a way of painting textures ontop of already constructed Myth II color maps. Oak also includes the ability to turn plugins into local folders, replacing the functionality of such apps as Tag Extractor, UnTag, Topaz, and others. Finally, Oak can read tag files from any of the games, Myth: The Fallen Lords, Myth II: Soulblighter, Myth III: The Wolf Age.

Table of Contents And more to come... Section II: Using Oak to apply Detail Textures 1. Overview 1A. Installation 2. Making Detail Textures 2A. Making Tiling Textures 2B. Making Textures that look good in Myth - Editing Textures from Within Oak 3. Using Oak - Mesh Controls - Detailed Texture Options - Menu Options - Archive Browser Options - Texture Options - Archive Browser Texture Options - Detail Map Options - Setting up Oak Itself 3A. Applying Detail Textures 3B. Starting to Dtex 4. Getting things Compiled right 5. Q & A Section III: Using Oak to Edit collections -to be filled- Section IV: Credits Credits Fin.

Section II: Using Oak to apply Detail Textures

1. Overview Oak, Project Magma's newest project is aimed at being a replacement to Amber, but also contains the only way to apply the new feature of Myth II 1.7, Detail Textures. These detail textures are small texture files which can be painted over Already existing Myth color maps. When painting over a map with detail textures, you create a detail map. From now on, I will refer to Detail Textures as 'dtex' and Detail Maps as 'dmaps'.

2. Making Detail textures Image: Finding free Textures To start off, you will either need someone else's dtex, such as Magma's Detail Textures, or you will need to make your own. In my experience, it's much easier to obtain the look you want if you make your own dtex, Where do I find textures? Well, that's simple, there are tons of ways of doing this. The easiest would be finding textures on google, and refitting them for Myth. Another thing I often do, is take photos of things with my camera, and then make textures out of those.

2A. Making tiling textures This section explains how to make tiling textures, if you already know how to do this, skip this section. This section also assumes you have a copy of Adobe Photoshop. The key to making good tiling textures is to choose a photo that has a lot of variety, but doesn't have anything that stands out among everything else. A good way to test this is to look at the picture and blur your eyes. If the picture does have something like this, it's possible to deal with it, but the more there are, the more difficult it is. So, open up the photo in Photoshop. First thing to do, is make sure it is a square, (Example: 512x512). Next you will want to offset the picture. This moves the image itself to one side, or up and down, and scrolls it over the side of the frame. Depending on the size of the image the amount you want to offset the image will change. For a document with a size of 512x512, try about 300px. It doesn't matter if you start with vertical or horizontal, but choose one. This should make a very apparent line though your texture. Your job is to clean this line up. Make it not visible, or barely visible. I suggest using the Patch and Clone Stamp tools to clean it up. This should take a little while, but depending on the texture, it can be short or take a long time. Once you've done this, do the same thing, but for the other direction (If you did vertical first, do horizontal now). Once you are done with that, make sure you save a copy of the document.

2B. Making textures that look good in Myth You will need to first desaturize the texture so it doesn't stand out from the other textures, or change the color of the cmap so much. From the "image" menu in Photoshop, go to the Adjustments menu, then to Hue/Saturation. For most textures it's good to use -85 saturation, so put that in the saturation box (The lower the number, the less the color of the textures comes through. In most cases, the cmap itself it what colors your dtex, so you shouldn't need any extreme colors here). Your image should now be in nearly black and white. If you do not like the way the textures looks via De-saturation, Melekor has old me a different way of doing this, which can give different results. Instead of de-saturating it, go to the filters menu of photoshop, then down to 'other', select 'High Pass' and simply mess around with the radius slider until you get something that looks right. Suggestion would be 16 pixels for a 512x512 texture, and 32 for a 1024x1024 texture. Now go up to the window menu in Photoshop and make sure the 'Histogram' window is open, and the histogram tab is selected. After you have done this, go up to the 'image' menu and select Adjustments->Brightness/Contrast. Play with the brightness and contrast so that the Mean number in the histogram window equals 127. (This is the general number used for dtex, but feel free to experement. the lower the number the more intense the dtex is, the higher, the more faded it will be.) You are now pretty close to done. Oak has some requirements so, again, make sure the size of the image is a power of 2, and that it is square (Example: 512x512, 256x256). The larger the image, the larger the texture. For most textures you will want to use either 512, or 256 as the size, otherwise it will be too large or small. Lastly, Oak will want it in .bmp, .png or .tiff format, so make sure you save it in one of these. If you are stuck without a program capable of saving this format, or just don't feel like saving it as such, you can copy the image and paste the image as a detail texture in Oak. Don't worry if the dtex doesn't come out right on the first time, I usually end up with lots of dtex I don't use, or dtex I have to edit 5+ times to get looking right.

-Editing textures from within Oak- Image: Get Info Dialog Within oak, you have the ability to mean center the RGB and gray channels of a texture, just open the texture tag, and right click it, to bring up a menu, select either "Mean Center rgb" or "Mean Center gray".

3. Using Oak When first opening Oak, there are a few things you have to master, we'll start with the controls.

-Detailed Texture Options- Image: Artifact Editor When you double click a detail texture from the sidebar, you can double click the 'Highlight Color' box to change the dtex's highlight color.

-Menu Options- Image: Collection Reference Editor File menu: • New Collection: Creates a new collection for a unit, a effect, scenery, a projectile, interfaces, ect. • New Detail Texture From Image File: Creates a detail texture from a saved image • New Detail Texture From Clipboard: Creates a detail texture from whatever you have copied. • Exit: Quits Oak. Tools Menu: • Reload Local Folder: If you change local folders while Oak is still open/or add more tags to it, use this to reload the local folder. • Choose Myth Folder: If you have multiple copies of Myth, use this to switch between Myth folders. NOTE: Oak can also read Myth: The Fallen Lords, and Myth III: The Wolf Age tags. • Archive Browser: Bring main Oak window to the front. • Log Viewer: If you have conflicting tag ids consult this, and it will explain what is conflicting. • Dump Dtex List: This will dump a list of all dtex used by dmaps in the currently selected local. (I will touch on this later.) • Build Dtex Add-On: If you are making dmaps for an already existing plugin, use this to build an add-on plugin. (I will touch more on this later.) • Recursive Image Conversion: Converts all images in a selected folder to a target type. Useful for renders. Help Menu: About Oak...: Information on who to thank for Oak. :)

-Archive Browser Options- There are a few things to note here, such as the color of the tags: • White tags are ones that can be accessed, but are not in the local. • Orange tags are ones that are in the local and can be accessed. • Dark Grey flags are ones that cannot be accessed. When you right click a tag you are presented with a menu with the following options: • Open (enter): Opens selected tag. • Get Info (cmd-I): (Control+I on PC) Gets info of selected flag. • Copy To Local (cmd-K): (Control+K on PC) Copies the selected flag to your local. • Duplicate (cmd-D): (Control+D on PC) Duplicates the tag, giving a new tag ID, copies to the local, if not already there. • Delete (del): Deletes the selected flag. • Toggle Hidden Groups (cmd-T): (Control+T on PC) Toggles on other tags, which currently are not editable from Oak. Useful for duplicating tags, or extracting tags from other plugins. Sidebar menu (Right click an object in either of the left sidebars): • Default Working Set: Resets Oak's default active plugins. (This will activate all the patch files, and add-ons in your plugins folder along with the foundation tags, while deactivating everything else.) • Activate/Deactivate Selection: This will bring a plugin from the active, or deactivate sidebars to the oppisite sidebar. (active->deactivate, Deactivate->Active) • Disassemble Archive: Turns the selected plugin into a local folder.

-Texture Options- Image: Connector Editor When the detail texture list is open on a mesh, here are the actions you can perform on them: Control+Click: Enable highlighting on this texture Shift+Click: Lock clicked texture. Double Click/Return: Opens texure options for selected texture.

-Archive Browser Texture Options- When you open a detail texture in Oak, you can right click it for a menu with these options: • Export (Cmd-E): (Control+E on PC) Exports the texture to a file, good for editing the texture. • Import (Cmd-I): (Control+I on PC) Imports a texture from a file, and replaces current texture. • Copy (Cmd-C): (Control+C on PC) Copies the texture, to be pasted in other programs. • Paste (Cmd-V): (Control+V on PC) Pastes a texture from the clipboard, and replaces current texture. • Save Tag (Cmd-S): (Control+S on PC) Saves a texture tag to the local. • Mean Center rbg: Mean centers the RGB channel to 128 • Mean Center gray: Mean centers the Gray channel to 128

-Detail Map Options- When first starting to dtex a map, you have 2 options: A). Auto dtex (and clean up from there). or: B). Start from scratch. If you chose to auto dtex, it will use the mesh's terrain map to generate a dmap. While this is useful in some situations, and is easier to start with, it will nearly always look worse in the end run. If you start from scratch, the dmap will end up not as spotty, and it will be a lot easier to make sure everything is how you want it to be. Personally, I started with auto, but moved onto starting from scratch. Some people will probably do the same as I have, but I would suggest to start from scratch.

-Setting up Oak itself- Oak pulls tags from all 'active' plugins, to a combined collection of tags. When editing maps, you can access all of these tags. The issue with this, is it doesn't add those tags (in this case, detail textures) into your local, unless you manually add them. So, when you are setting up Oak to texture a map, you want to make sure that it only pulls detail textures from add-ons that you have permission to use. Upon opening for the first time, Oak will auto 'activate' all add-ons in your plugins folder, along with all patches. The base Oak window has 3 panels, the main window, and a left side bar split in two. The main window shows tags available on the selected plugin or local, while the top left side bar shows what plugins or locals are active. The lower left side bar shows the rest of your plugins, that are currently not 'active'. To activate, or deactivate a plugin, right click it. The right click menu here will have 3 options, "Default Working Set", "Activate/Deactivate Selection" And "Disassemble Archive" The first will reset Oak to it's initial settings, while the second will activate or deactivate a plugin. The last option can turn plugins into local folders, (Which is totally effing sweet). Once you have the add-ons and patches active that you want, tim to open a mesh for dtexing. There are 2 options here, dtexing a mesh in a local, or dtexing a mesh that is in an already released plugin. To dtex a map that is in your local, simply select local in the top left sidebar, then in the main window, click meshes, then select the mesh you want to dtex. To dtex a map that is in a plugin, find the plugin you want to dtex the mesh from, and activate it, then select the plugin in the top left sidebar, and select meshes, then select the mesh you want to dtex. NOTE: This will make a dmap appear in your local, not the plugin itself, in case you wondered. :P

3A. Applying Detail Textures To apply any detail textures, you will need Project Magma's Oak (At the time of writing, still in private beta). Before we get into the nitty gritty, there are a few things you need to know about textures. First, I mentally group textures into these groups: 1. Dominant Textures 2. Background Textures 3. Bridging (Or Blending) Textures The first group, Dominant Textures, refers to textures that take over an area, and (Usually) only work in specific places. Generally, these textures are more intense, and detailed, and don't blend well. Examples would be grass, rock and sometimes water. The second group, Background textures, refers to textures that can be used over many different types of terrain, and are more subtle. These textures are generally not as intense, and don't look like much by themselves. Good examples would be mud, moss and dirt. The third and last group, Bridging, or Blending Textures, refers to textures that are used to go in between Dominant Textures and Background textures. These textures generally are very, very subtle, and don't really look like all that much. good examples would be more subtle moss and noise. The reason for these groups of textures is as such. Rock and Grass both can have Dominant Textures, and while they look great by themselves, when they meet, at the edge of a hill, for example, they overlap, and simply look wrong. Either you have green rock, or grey grass, both of which look wrong. The solution in that situation would be to line which separates them, the line would be composed of a Bridging Texture, which smoothes out the transition. The size of this line depends, so it's not always one block wide. The same situation applies at water edges and many other instances.

3B. Starting to dtex Image: Font Editor How should I choose detail textures? Well, depending on your style, there are a few ways you can do. I am going to outline the 3 I've seen. 1. (Magma 1.0 style) - Adding 'noise' to the color map, be adding shading to textures, while this doesn't really make any of the textures stand out, it does smooth the color map out some. (This is most like adding shading to an already existing picture.) 2. (Jon God's style) - Using real textures, but using contrast and brightness to not completely take over the color map. The aim here is to use some detail, but not too much. It takes a while to get the balance down. (This is kinda like inking a already drawn picture.) 3. (Overkill Style) - Using detail textures to take over the map. While this probably looks the best in screenshots, it is the hardest to have proper blending, and it really only uses the cmap as a blueprint. (This is more like painting a new picture.) Now that you are set up to dtex, what part of a map should you dtex first? I usually start with water, as is usually is pretty easy to texture, and get out of the way, it also will, depending on the map, act as a spine to hold the rest of the dtex together. While not all maps have water, I move onto hills, and rock, as these are usually the second largest group that can be found on a mesh. When painting textures, the easiest way to keep track of what you are doing, and what you have painted, is by using texture highlighting. Select the texture in the right sidebar, and control click it. I should be highlighted in the side bar with a color. If the color that the texture is highlighted with is black, double click it, then click the highlight color and change it to something brighter. If the highlighting is not showing up in the map, make sure it is toggled on, using F3. TRy turning on and off highlighting while you dtex to make sure you are actually filling the areas you need, but not painting over things you don't want. Usually I have highlighting on about 50% of the time. Once you have these, and any other misc. elements that take up a large amount of a map at least roughly covered, then it is time to start cleaning things up. Use a blender texture, and surround the parts of the map you have textured already. Usually, you only need to cover 1-2 Mesh cells around the areas you dtexed, but the key here is to make sure, for example, that rock is not bleeding over into grass, or water into mud, or sand. So, use a blender texture to cover these bleed overs, and sound the textures you used, so nothing bleeds over into them. Once you are finished this, move ahead, and cover the part that has the next highest % of the map. Repeat this process a few times until the map is covered in detail textures. A disclaimer here, don't expect this to be a quick process, even simple maps usually take at least half an hour. Depending on the complexity of the map, it can take upwards of a few hours. Some maps I've spent a few days on. Once you've gotten all this done, it is time to to look over your dmap. I would say to first take a quick look over in Oak, scan over it quickly, and then zoom as far out as you can (If you start to lag here, try turning off the detail textures, and turning on highlighting, then turn off media animation). Now to move on, load up the level in Myth. If you are dtexing a single player level, I suggest un-clicking 'Has Limited Terrain Visibility', or if you are working from a plugin, playing through the level, and exploring it, then saving your game. You can reload it, and look over the level. At this point, if you haven't already, feel free to add any 'finishing touches' such as rock pathways, and such. Before you are ready to deploy, I would suggest taking FPS tests, by Using F11 or Page Up to turn dtex on and off in game of Myth. Use Shift+Delete to toggle the FPS counter. What you want to make sure is that your dmap doesn't make any drastic drops in FPS, as it will make the dmaps just not useable on older computers, and even perhaps some newish computers. Some tips to reduce lag: • Use smaller images for textures. (Larger images, 512x, 1024x will lag much worse than smaller ones. Experiment here.) • If possible, try to use less textures in a smaller area, for example, if there is moss, mud, grass, and water in a small area, consider sharing textures for mud and moss. • Make sure none of your textures are scaled within Oak, via - and +. That should be the last thing you need to look out for. So, if you've made it, congratulations! You've done it, perhaps your first dmap wont be spectacular, but don't give up, I started out, not even able to make textures, and couldn't do anything more then an auto dmap. So don't lose hope!

4. Getting things compiled right Image: Formation Editor So, you got your dmaps. If you build the plugin/add-on now though, odds are, it wont load your dtex. The reason for this: Myth will only load dtex in a plugin or add-on if they are in the plugin or add-on itself. Unlike Oak, it will not pull tags from every plugin and add-on. Before you complain, this is a good thing, because not everyone has the same plugins and add-ons. Therefore, having all the tags incased in the plugin or add-on is the best solution in the end. ;) The first thing you will need to do, is to go up to the Tools menu, then select "Dump Dtex List". This will make a list of all the detail textures used be dmaps in the local. What you will then ned to do, is make sure every one of those textures are in the local. All the listed textures should appear in add-ons and patch files, so just sift through them and when you come across a texture that you need, then right click it. A menu will open, select "Copy to Local." Continue to do this until all the Detail Textures are in the local. If you are building these detail textures along with a local, just build them as you normally would a plugin. If you are making an add-on, you have 2 options (1 if you are on PC). Option 1: Open the Tools menu in Oak, then Select "Build Dtex Add-On." Put the name down for your addon, and hit 'OK". Option 2 (Mac Only): After doing the previous steps open Fear, and go to the File menu, then select "Build" to pull up the sub menu and select "Add-On File (For 1.7+)". A dialog box will pop up. For the name, put the name of your add-on but don't make it too long. For the version, put 2.0, or something higher. The URL doesn't matter. And you're finally done!

5. Q & A Q: Why are my dtex not showing up in Myth? A: There could be a few reasons for this: • Detail Textures are not currently enabled for Myth II. (To fix this, open Myth II, go to the preferences screen, under graphics select "Open GL", then click the box titled "Landscape Textures.") • You forgot to include a detail texture in the local to build the plugin/add-on. (Make sure you followed all the steps I mentioned. Go back, and dump the dtex list, and make sure all the listed textures are in your local folder. If you are having a lot of trouble with this, deactivate all the plugins from the archive browser, and load the mesh in Oak, it should then show all missing textures with a name like "JGD9 <Not Found>", then just remember what slot that dtex was in the sidebar, and reactivate the addons/patches/plugins. (Alternatively, you can right click an object in the archive browser side bar, and select Q: Which style of Dtexing do you suggest? A: I don't suggest one in particular, try each one, and see what works for you. :) Q: I Simply cannot make textures, even after following your guide! A: My suggestion would be to keep trying, you'll get it eventually, or, you can also download pr-emade textures, and mess with the saturation and brightness as I described earlier. (You can also use Textures from Magma's Bungie Map Textures) Q: Will texture my Map? I mean, you're so good, I'll never get that good! A: First off, never say never. You might even surpass me if you just try a little bit, it's really not hard. However, depending on what map you are working on, it might just interest me enough, feel free to ask, just don't expect a 'yes.' Q: Why haven't you textured _____? A: There are only so many hours in a day, and since you are reading this, I figure it's about time someone else start detail texturing some. :) Who knows though, it might be in my long term agenda. Q: How many textures do you work with? A: Well, my texture library is always growing, but out of my current 262, I usually only use maybe 10-15 for a complex level, and maybe 30-50 for a whole plugin, depending on the variety. Don't feel shy about making a new texture if none of your current ones work. Q: Magma's Map Texures suck, why do you suggest people to use them?! A: Because they don't suck. :( While they aren't as 'in your face' as some people's detail textures, they don't suck, I certainly learned a thing or two by looking how they textured some maps. Also, I still use a handful of their textures, albeit, a little edited for some of them, to this day, here's a list of my favorites: • Cobble10 • Dirt2 • Forest1 • Grass7 • Rock17 • Sand2 • SnowA • Water5 Try em out, if you don't believe me. Q: I keep trying, but I can't come out with a dmap that looks good enough! A: While this is kinda vague, I would say to look at other people's dmaps, look how they did things, look for things you had trouble with, see how they made it look good. Q: When are you going to release that texture pack you promised!? A: Someday™. In all seriousness, I need to probably make some more textures, and take out all the textures I will probably never find a use for. So, it could be soon, it could be a while, just give me time. :) Q: This guide is awesome, can I donate to you money? A: Uh, are you serious? If you really feel you ought to, donate to Projectmagma.net instead, they are the reason this is even possible, or needed. ;)

Section IV: Some Other Miscellany Stuff

Credits • Jon God - Writing this guide, uh, yeah... • Melekor - For cutting some research time in two by pointing out some things for me. Also for uh, MAKING OAK. • Myrd - For building the mac versions of Oak. • Project Magma - For keeping Myth alive, and for the contribution of "Magma - Bungie Map Textures" • Mariusnet - For giving players a place to play online. • Bungie - For Oni, Myth and Halo, 3 of my favorite games.

Fear, Loathing, Myth II, and content copyright 2010 Take 2 Jon God

Loathing Documentation

Fear Documentation

Oak Documentation