Ships on land guide
By nottud
created 8/21/07
Intro
As you saw a while ago, I made a thread on water rise and where you can build deep underwater. As some of you might have guessed, the opposite is also true. I have made a map where ships move over solid ground!
The image above shows a map I have made where I use this trick.
How to do it
There is actually more than one way of doing it.
How to make ships go on areas of the map
Cover the whole map in water or just areas which you want the ships to go. Then add the trigger called: zRaise/lower all land. Put in a large minus figure. (-20 will be more than enough) Then playtest the scenario, the trigger makes the land and waterheight go down together. When the land height reaches it’s minimun height, the land stops moving but the water doesn’t making the whole map drain of water. However the game still thinks water is there so the ships effectively can move around on solid ground.
How to make ships move around on islands in the sea:
This is what I used in the screenshot above. (However I had the starting sea level very low at the start (-10) to make the island as high as it is in the screenshot) This method is alot more difficult because you need to do a bit of counting and maths. First of all, you need to create you sea. Note – the sea must be lower than 0 metres heigh for this to work! (The water, not the land below it) Next insert the trigger called: zFlatten area of map. To work this, imagine the map is like a sort of graph. If you rotate the map 45 degrees so that the top corner is in the top right position, your map should look like a square. Imagine the bottom left corner of the map is the origine just like on a real graph. The x axis is like the bottom edge of the map while if you pretend the z number is like the Y axis. Each gridsquare is 1 unit. If you know maths, you can figure out that if insert 4 basic straight line equations, you can form a square – 2 x axis equations and 2 y axis equations. An equaution like x = 2 means the line will pass through the x axis at 2 parallel to the Y axis. The trigger layout looks like:
X1
Z1
X2
Z2
The X1 means your first x is equal to equation and X2 is your second one. Same with the Z ones. Using your math’s skills, count along the gridsquares to the map and insert the equations (in the boxes, you enter the number you want the letter to equal to) to form a square.
If you find me nattering on a bit, you can insert the trigger on a blank 200 by 200 sized map (1 gridsquare per 2 metres) and experiment. I inserted some default numbers into the trigger that works beautifully on a 200 by 200 map. Experminet till you fully understand how to use it.
Anway, when you have made your square, playtest the map. If your water was less than 0 metres high, a square island should have formed. You will find that you can move your ships across them too! However, as you might have suspected, because ships can move across it, land units cannot because like the last example, the game still thinks that there is water there. If you want a different shape, simply insert more than 1 square and overlap them. To make the island more realistic, use the: zSmoothen area of map trigger to smoothen the land out and make it more realistic. If you find this method too complex, stick to method one.
Afterword
I appologise for the complexity of the second method but if you are totally stuck, just play around with the numbers in that trigger untill you get a feel for them and how they work. As you may imagine, there are quite alot of things you can do with this trick. Below are some named examples:
Secret areas of RPGs where you can get to a special reward by sailing over land that looks exactly like it’s surroundings.
Pit of doom type maps but with ships – see screenshot above for the example. To make land impassable by ships, simply raise land out of the water in the editor manually before playtesting. (for the screenshot, I had a ring of raised land around the arena to prevent ships sailing down the cliffs when the game started.
Make a sea battle but on dry land! This could be a very amusing map since the entire game would be ships sailing around on a completely dry lake!
Simply just to show off and make people go wow and how do you do that!
And there are many other ideas that have not just come straight off the top of my head as I was writing this guide.
Have fun and enjoy experimenting and making ships go on land!