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WorldMaster™ Help

General Controls

Moving the camera

Moving/Panning
Mouse Shift + Right click + Drag mouse
Keyboard The Arrow Keys (Shift + Arrow Keys will pan slowly)

Note: Scroll Speed may be adjusted in the Edit menu under Program Options.

Zooming In and Out

Mouse Ctrl + Right click + Drag mouse up or down
Keyboard Ctrl + Up/Down Arrow Keys

Tilt Camera

Mouse Alt + Right click + Drag mouse up or down
Keyboard Alt + Up/Down Arrow Keys

Rotate Camera

Mouse Alt + Right click + Drag mouse left or right
Keyboard Alt + Right/Left Arrow Keys

Keyboard Shortcuts

Ctrl + Z Undo last action

H Bring up the History dialog

Getting Started

The Tools

General Tools

History

The Battle Realms™ WorldMaster features a Photoshop-like History feature, brought up with the H key or the Edit menu. This feature tracks every map change as a separate entry, allowing the user to undo and redo every action done during that program session. Note that non-volatile tools, such as Select Vertices, do not store undo/redo information in the History. The History list has a maximum number of entries coupled with a maximum size of memory that it may take up. Once either of these limits is reached, the oldest history is lost.

Brush Settings

Many of the WorldMaster tools involve using a brush to “paint” a specific attribute onto the terrain. The brushes used for these tools can be customized to suit your needs.

To change the attributes of a brush
Right click on the brush you wish to edit and select “Options” from the menu.

Different tools use different attributes of a brush while ignoring others. For example, the Paint Texture Tool does not use the Softness, Strength, Falloff or Smoothing Rate values stored in each brush. Experiment with these values to suit your specific needs.

Brush Options

Constrain Proportions
When toggled, the brush’s width and height will always share the same value.

Brush Width/Height
These numbers and sliders determine the height and width of the brush. Note that all brushes are round, thus a brush with greater height than width will be a tall oval, not a tall rectangle.

Opacity, Speed, Strength
This value determines how “hardly” the effect is used on terrain and how quickly it will repeat when the mouse button is held down. For example, a brush with a low Strength will apply the Paint Height tool slowly, raising or lowering the terrain only a small amount with each click.

Softness
Every brush is gradated so that painted effects are smoother and more natural looking. This value determines the end value of the brush’s gradation. If you wanted a very hard-edged brush, the Softness value would be 0.

Softness Falloff
This graph determines when the brush starts gradating towards the softness setting set above. A straight line denotes a straight gradient. A convexly curved line would denote a harder brush with little gradation on its edges, while a concave line would denote a soft brush that is almost entirely gradated.

When using this graph, note the changes in the Brush Preview in the lower right corner of the dialog.

Smoothing Rate
This value determines how much smoothing the Smooth Terrain tool does per click/cycle. A high value will smooth jagged areas to smoothness quickly, while a low value is better suited for detail work.

To save your current brush configuration for loading at another time, right click on a brush and select “Save Brushes”. To load a saved brush file, select “Load Brushes” and then specify the brush file to load.

Select Vertices Tool

Many of the WorldMaster tools involve using a brush to paint a specific attribute on the terrain. An alternative to this is to first select the vertices that are to be affected, and then apply the specific tool.

Add to Current Selection
Left Click / Left Click + Drag Mouse

Remove from Current Selection
Ctrl + Left Click / Ctrl + Left Click + Drag Mouse

Clear Selection
Space bar

Push/Pull Height Tool

Use this tool to uniformly raise or lower the height of all terrain selected with the Select Vertices Tool uniformly. If you position your cursor over the selected terrain while using this tool, you can track the current height by looking at the coordinates in the lower right corner of the window.

Raise Selected Terrain
Left click + Drag mouse up

Lower Selected Terrain
Left click + Drag mouse down

Paint Height Tool

Height is one of the most significant strategic components in Battle Realms. In the game, units standing on hills or other raised areas gain substantial bonuses as a result of their height advantage. Likewise, units below other units are at a substantial disadvantage.

In addition to its strategic uses, height also affects passability; units will not be able to walk on areas at a 30 degree or greater incline and players may not build on areas with an incline of 10 degrees or greater.

For more information on passability, see the Define Path Data Tool section below.

Raise the Height of the Area Under the Brush
Left click

Lower the Height of the Area Under the Brush
Ctrl + Left click

Smooth Terrain Tool

The Smooth Terrain Tool is useful for adjusting the passability of a map and just making a map look more natural and eroded.

Smooth Terrain Under Brush
Left click

The rate of smoothing is set via the Smooth Speed slider in the Brush Options dialog. For more information on Brush Options, see the General Tools section above.

Flatten Terrain Tool

Flat areas are the most ideal for building and walking, but are visually and strategically uninteresting. The flatten tool is a useful last resort when smoothing and other terrain height modifications aren’t giving you the results you want.

Flatten Terrain Under Brush
Left click

Note: The height value flattened to is that directly beneath your cursor.

Select the checkbox if you want to constrain the tool to flatten to a specific height. Move the slider to your desired height, and anything painted will conform to this height only.

Roughen Terrain Tool

The roughen tool exists for aesthetics alone. While smooth terrain is natural, maps look stale if they’re too smooth. The roughen tool random raises and lowers vertices under the brush within a threshold set with the tool’s slider. While extreme values don’t look natural, low to medium values can give a smooth face some pleasing unevenness.

Roughen Terrain
Left click

Paint Textures Tool

Use this tool to change the appearance of the terrain to suit your map design. While this may seem mostly aesthetic, the terrain textures on a well-designed map communicate the map’s underlying passability. Additionally, some types of terrain have gameplay effects. For example, units are slowed when walking or running through forest terrain.

Rice and Forest terrain do not naturally generate rice plants or trees, so they may be used aesthetically. To populate these terrain types with their intended objects, see the Paint Forest Tool and Paint Rice Tool descriptions below.

Paint Terrain Textures
Left click

Adjust Tile Variant Percentages
Right click on the desired terrain type and specify the variant percentages by adjusting the sliders.

Select Specific Terrain Variant
Right click on any tile of the desired terrain type and left click on the variant desired.

Note: In certain cases, painting textures will result in an invalid configuration of textures on the map (i.e. rice cannot be directly adjacent to stone). When this occurs, the WorldMaster will attempt to resolve the conflict by painting nearby whatever is necessary to resolve it - if the conflict cannot be resolved, your paint command will not be executed. While occasionally frustrating, the other option is losing all textures on your map due to a cascading texture replacement pass, a far greater frustration.

Paint Lakes Tool

This tool adds water to the terrain. Water is an essential resource in Battle Realms - a map without water will be unplayable in the game and will display a warning when saved by the WorldMaster.

Add Water
Left click

In order for peasants to be able to gather water from a lake, there must be Water Gather Points present. After painting your lakes, click the Generate Water Points button to evenly place Water Gather Points towards the edges of the lakes. The edge of a lake must be passable in order for a Water Gather Point to be placed there. Should a desired area not get water points, display the path data with the Define Path Data Tool and smooth the edges of the lake with the Smooth Terrain Tool.

Water Aesthetics Tools

As water is such an important part of Battle Realms, a number of aesthetic options are available. Note that all of these settings are global and not available on a lake-by-lake basis.

Paint Water Translucency
Water is naturally transparent, and this toggle lets the player alter the level of translucency. While largely aesthetic, this feature is handy for denoting crossable points on bodies of water. For best results, use a very weak and soft brush when altering water translucency - it’s easy to go too far and end up with completely invisible or opaque water. For more on Brush Settings, see the General Tools section above.

Start Color and End Color
While the water color has a texture that is naturally blue, you can alter the colors of the lighting applied underneath the water with these two values. The Start color is the color of the lighting near the edge of lakes, while the End Color is the color of the lighting on the bottom of the lake.

As this is lighting, note that a vertex color of white is tantamount to no lighting at all and will not produce a frosty white effect.

Start Slider and End Slider
These dual sliders adjust the size of the borders of the Start Color and End Color mentioned above.

Paint Color Tool

Use this tool to apply coloring to the terrain. The uses of this tool are almost purely aesthetic, but the tool can be used to accentuate shadows to better communicate height. As water is already affected by Vertex Coloring, coloring cannot be applied to the bottom of bodies of water.

Paint Color

Left click

Erase Color

Ctrl + Left Click or Paint white coloring

This tool uses the Brush Opacity setting, thus soft brushes will apply less of the coloring at a time than a hard brush. For more information about Brush Settings, see the General Tools section above.

Paint Forest Tool

To add trees to your map, you can paint them manually or click the Fill Forest Terrain button to add trees to the map wherever you have painted forest terrain. WorldMaster will automatically generate the appropriate trees for the tileset you have chosen.

For more information on painting textures, see the Paint Textures Tool description above.

Add Trees

Left click

Remove Trees

Ctrl + Left click

If you want to re-randomize the placement of a certain group of trees, remove the trees and repaint them. This will place them in a new random configuration.

After placing trees, click the Update Tree Shadows button to apply shadows beneath new trees and remove shadows from removed trees.

Paint Rice Tool

To add rice to your map, you can paint them manually or click the Fill Rice Terrain button to add rice to the map wherever you have painted rice terrain.

Add Rice

Left click

Remove Rice

Ctrl + Left click

Keep in mind that each rice plant is an object in the world, and there is a limit of one thousand objects on any given map. If too many rice plants are placed on a map, the WorldMaster will prompt you to remove some rice before saving.

For more information on painting textures, see the Paint Textures Tool description above.

Place Objects Tool

Objects can be placed on the map to enhance the map’s mood and general atmosphere. In addition to objects, particle effects and other props can be placed via this tool, as well.

Add Object

Left click

Move Object

Left click + Drag mouse

Rotate Object

Alt + Left click
Note: When rotating an object, the “front” of the object will turn to face the cursor.

Raise/Lower Object

Ctrl + Left Click + Mouse Up/Down
Note: Before an object may be raised or lowered it must be unlocked. Right click on the desired object, toggle Always on Ground off, and click OK.

Select Multiple Objects

Left click + Drag mouse

Add Object to Selection

Shift + Left click

Remove Object from Selection

Ctrl + Left click

Delete All Selected Objects

Delete key

Some objects, such as the waterfall, must be scaled to be used properly. To scale an object, Right click on the object to open its Options dialog. Enter new scale values in the Scale slots and hit OK.

Place Tag Points Tool

There are five types of Tag Points: Player Start Points, Creature Spawn Points, Defensive Objective Points, and Water Gather Points.

Player Start Points

These important tag points are used to designate the starting locations of the teams that will play on the map. Thus, the number of start points determines the maximum number of players that can play on the map, which is no more than eight.

A map will not be playable without Player Start Points.

Notes on start points and AI players: For an AI player, the start point is perhaps the most valuable piece of data that can be used. In order for a map to be used wisely by an AI player a few things should be considered. • Keep start points reasonably close to unique supplies of rice and water • Don’t put start points too close to each other • Try not to let multiple start points be closest to the same rice patch or water source (this will generally cause the AI to fight over this patch initially, and be weaker in the starting phases of the game) • Keep start points on passable ground • Try to put start points in large areas of building passability (this will make it easier for the AI to find good building placement)

Creature Spawn Points

These tag points will spawn creatures to roam the map and generally enliven the world. While most are aesthetic, two have gameplay uses.

Horses

Horses are an essential resource in Battle Realms, used to mount units and give them important damage bonuses and extend their longevity.

A map will not be playable without Horse-enabled Creature Spawn Points.

Wolves
Wolves aren’t essential, but they’re fun. Wolves will hunt down all units (except the Packmaster and Werewolf) and attack them if given the chance.

To specify the creature generated by a spawn point, Right click on the point to open its options menu. Choose the Creature from the menu, set the number of creatures desired, set the radius you’d like them to spawn in, and hit OK.

Defensive Objective Points

These tag points are used to communicate strategically valuable map locations to AI players. Good candidates for this type of tag point are hills, locations near boulders, resource fields and choke points.

Defensive Objective Points are not required, but will increase the AI’s ability to use the map effectively and generally provide a better experience.

Water Gather Points

These tag points specify where a Peasant can gather water from a body of water. These can be placed one at a time manually, or by clicking the Generate Water Points button on the Paint Lakes Tool. (See Paint Lakes above). Water Gather Points can only be placed in shallow water that is denoted as passable by the Define Path Data Tool.

For more information on Water Points, see Paint Lakes Tool description above.

For more information on passability, see the Define Path Data Tool description below.

Define Path Data Tool

This tool lets the user see areas of the map where units cannot walk and add additional impassibility for map tweaking purposes.

There are two categories of passability that can be viewed: Walker and Building Placement. Check the “Display Passability” check box to view these passability maps. Default passability is generated by the map’s slopes and water depth.

Walker Passability
The Walker passability map shows in red the areas where units and creatures cannot walk. Units may not walk on slopes greater than 30 degrees, or in water depths greater than one meter.

Building Placement Passability
The Building Placement category shows were the player cannot construct buildings during the game. Buildings may not be placed on terrain with a slope greater than 10 degrees. Build areas on all maps should be large enough to accommodate towns.

In addition to viewing impassability, one can tweak a map’s passability by adding bits of impassibility. To do this, check the Edit Passability check box and paint.

Paint Impassibility

Left click

Remove User-Defined Impassibility

Ctrl + Left click

User-defined, artificial impassibility is represented by blue squares.

When painting impassibility, it is a good idea to fill in any passability holes on maps with user impassibility by using the Edit Passability option. This will prevent misleading clicks on unreachable terrain, as well as other potential technical problems.

Adjust Clouds Tool

In this panel the user may specify various weather settings for your map. For example, one could make a map in which it rains often or not at all. Rain has gameplay uses above and beyond its aesthetics; rain makes rice grow back faster and allows Zymeth to call lightning down on surrounding enemies.

Rain starts at a Humidity value of 80.

Max Wind Speed

This sets the wind speed, a purely aesthetic value. Raising this will raise the speed at which the cloud map scrolls over the terrain.

Initial Humidity

This determines the humidity level of the map when the map is first loaded. In order to make a map always load with rain, set this value to at least 80.

Min Humidity

This slider determines the minimum humidity level possible on the map. If you want it to rain all the time, set this above 80. Note that the Minimum Humidity value cannot be set lower than the Initial Humidity value.

Max Humidity

This slider determines the maximum humidity on the map. Set this below 80 if you never want it to rain.

Place Sounds Tool

Sounds can be used to further enhance the atmosphere of a map. These are localized ambient sounds, and will play when the camera is within their sphere of influence.

Place Selected Sound

Left click

To adjust the area affected by a particular sound point and the sound point’s volume, right click on the point and set them in the Options dialog.

Place Lights Tool

Use this panel to adjust the lighting of your map. Double-click on a light in the list to change its color and direction. After changing the lights, click the Recalculate Lighting button to view its effect on the map.

Additionally, one can set the Shadow Brightness on the map. After adjusting the slider, click the Recalculate Lighting button to view its effect on the map.

MISC

Stats
Use the statistics to view specific numbers of things either on the screen or over the entire map.

Screen statistics are useful for balancing individual areas of the map. For example, one might zoom the camera to one corner of the map to see how many rice plants are local to this particular corner, and then increase or decrease the rice depending on how much is in the other areas.

Map statistics are useful for viewing total numbers throughout the entire map.

Using a custom-made map in Battle Realms
Once you’ve finished construction of a map in the WorldMaster, make sure that you have the following things: • Enough start points to accommodate the desired maximum number of players for your map • Enough resource locations for those players • At least one horse spawn point

At this point in time, you should give your map a name. Go to the Level Settings dialog in the Edit Menu, and type in a name for your map. This is how your map will be sorted inside the game.

Save your map out to the Levels directory of the folder where you installed Battle Realms. Typically, this will be something like
“C:\Program Files\Liquid Entertainment\Battle Realms\Levels”.

The next time you play the game, your new level should appear in the list of levels to choose from.