Great guides and articles on forums are made even better by using pictures. Yes they are a bit more effort, but in the end the results can be spectacular. I've written this short article to help you get on your way!

Materials
Copy of AOMTT
Some image processing program (optional)
A place to store your pictures on the web

Publishing your Picture to the Web

We'll say we want to show pictures of the Heka Gigantes in action. In its most basic form, a picture can simply be a screen shot of a game you play against the AI. During the game, zoom in using the + key, and press ctrl-F12 at the right moment when the action you want to record is happening. Exit the game, go into C/MyDocuments/MyGames/AOM/Screenshots and find your shot, then publish your shot somewhere on the web. The thing to remember about uploading (ULing) pictures to the web is that you want your source to be stable and relatively long-lasting. If you publish your pictures on a temporary source with finite storage or usage, people may not be able to open your link after a while. XP has an upload to internet feature that lets you publish your pics on an MSN user account. This is a good source as long as you maintain it. Alternatively, you can post the pic on your clan's site if you belong to a clan, on your own site, or perhaps ask one of the mods here to place your shot on the Heaven dbase- posters don't seem to have access to this feature directly. The point is you will need a web address for your picture. Once you've ULed your shot, note the web address. Also note that your pictures should be in AOMTT's image format or in jpeg or gif to make them compatible with Heaven.

You can simply post a link to your picture by placing your picture's web address between the bbcode using the [] brackets around the url and /url for example: url pic addie /url in your post. You can press on the edit icon on this post to open it and see the actual bbcode. The result is.....

http://www.dov.ca/portal/phpUPR/files/screen45.jpg

Beyond the URL Link

Alright, admittedly it looks better to have the actual picture appear in the post. To do this, place your picture's web address between the bbcodes using the [] brackets around the img and /img for example: img your pic addie /img. Just remember that your picture has to be around 700 pixels maximum width or it won't fit on Heaven's forums. The result is this:

Now time to get fancy. Get your hands on some image software: buy it, use a trial version, or find some simple shareware version. Of course having all the nice gizmos that photoshop and other powerful programs have is nice, you really only need to have crop and re-size features. The following picture is a cropped and re-sized version. Re-sizing just helps in your post's layout and obviously cropping will let you compose your images better.

Advanced Concepts

Now let's take it a step further. What about those funky angles we see in some pictures that are posted on Heaven? Well, time to venture into the AOMTT editor. Now before you all quit reading, I promise we will only touch on some basic features. Believe me, the end result is worth it! Please excuse the menu shots- they're a little fuzzy. I wrote out all the instructions in the text to make it clear. When re-sizing those menus to fit these forums, for some reason they get fuzzy when shrunk.

On the AOMTT main menu, click more, then editor. You will be taken to a blank map covered with grass. You can use a blank map but I prefer to generate a random map so I can have TCs and terrain features in the background. Select "File" on the top menu and pull down to "New". The New Scenario Box will appear and use the pull down menus to change the settings to (note you can chose any map you like). Press generate:

A 1 v 1 RM of your chosing will then be generated. Move your view over to the blue TC if it doesn't go there automatically. While you could use the default player civilization, for sake of continuity for our Heka Gigantes example, click on the top menu on Scenario>Player Data and under the Major God column, select Oranos or Kronos as the major god. Close the player data window.

Notice the blue TC changes to an Atlantean TC? Next click on the top menu on Objects>Place Objects. This opens two menus.

Under the Place Objects menu, "Place as" player 1. In the Objects window, leave it on "all" and search for the Heka Gigantes unit on the list. Click on the HG and place one using the left mouse button. I placed mine near the TC. You can re-position the unit once it's placed by clicking on the Objects>position object on the top menu and select the unit and drag it to position it. I decided to test the HG against three war elephants so I changed the Player Object Window to "Place as Player Two", then placed three enemy war elephants near my HGs. Now the fun part.

Press CTR-ALT-c. This allows you to change the camera's angle. Use the +, - keys, the arrow keys, your mouse wheel, and ctr-arrow keys (pitch), to set a pleasing angle. Pressing CTR-ALT-c twice returns you back to the default view. Restrict your pitch angle so as not to include the sky or too much background. You can get pretty fancy with those elements but that is beyond this post. Once you have set up your angle, you are going to create a trigger. On the top menu, click on Triggers>Triggers. In the Trigger editor, click on insert and a new trigger will be inserted. Then look to the right at the Trigger window and set up the following trigger:

Trigger: XXX (whatever it assigns)
Condition: always
Effect: Camera Cut
Then click on the Set Cut box once you've got the angle you desire.

After this is all done, click on the top menu under Scenario>Playtest. Test as Player 1 with a difficulty level of easy. Once you click okay, a game will start as usual (with the player interface) but the angle will not be the default one we are all use to when we play a normal game. The player will now have the point of view in whatever angle we set when we made our camera cut trigger. You can now micro the Heka to fight with the war elephants and take screen shots as usual. You can post the screen shots just as they are, or you can crop them.

Experiment a bit and you can get some real gems!

If you have questions post them in this thread and I or someone else will probably reply.

Have fun!

[This message has been edited by tbarak (edited 02-09-2004 @ 00:38 AM).]