TSE How do you start?

#1 Hi Matt,

It's extrememly frustrating trying to find your way around this stuff at the start. I have the grasp where most things are now, after a long time at it. But I remember my own outbursts from way back when, when the frustration at the scattered docs, incorrect docs and reliance on the forums became too much to bear. So I know where you're coming from.

You will basically be told to buy one (or both) of two books. They describe TGE but TSE is largely based on TGE, so they are useful. Have a look on the GG site for them. You will also be told to search the forums and the wiki. All good advice and really the only way to learn, along with messing with the code.

Lots of people use the starter.fps in one incarnation or another to learn. I personally prefer the water-terrain demo as it has nothing except the basic building blocks in it. Then you can copy over parts of the fps demo and you will quickly learn how things fit together and what things are missing as you transfer stuff. It is my *personal* experience that if you use the fps as your starting point you tend to get lazy and not fully understand things. After all they work, so why bother? It's more fun to add other things to it rather than poke about in working code.

Anyway, with regard to your terrain, you need to edit the mission file in your game. This will be in /data/missions. You will find some code like this

new TerrainBlock(Terrain) {
rotation = "1 0 0 0";
scale = "1 1 1";
detailTexture = "~/data/terrains/details/detail1";
terrainFile = "./features.ter";
squareSize = "8";
bumpScale = "1";
bumpOffset = "0.01";
zeroBumpScale = "8";
locked = "true";
position = "-1024 -1024 0";
};

Just change the terrainFile variable to point at your own terrain. That should do it.

If you already have a player standing on the existing terrain and your new terrain is higher at that point, your player will fall through and keep falling. You can move the player spawn point higher or the terrain lower to fix this.

Dave.

#2 Thank you for the help.

I was looking and in the current TSE 4.1 I don't see the new TerrainBlock function. I suppose I should put it in, but the other issue is that I'm using HTC to create terrain, but I can't seem to get into a server with the map I made. It creates a .mis, .chu, .tqt, .raw, and .jpg files. How do I make a new .ter file? What do I open one with to edit it?

I can start a dedicated server, and I have all the file mappings correct. I try to start another istance of TSE connecting to localhost, it tries to connect and fails, I see there are alot of files it's missing in the server console window. So I changed the default game to water_demo. Now I can connect but I don't see any terrain. It doesn't complain about not finding any files. All I see is grey fog and the skybox. I try to move around but can't find anything. I enter the editor and try to change the ceiling height? I think it was, but that doesn't change anything.

Well I've messed around with copying things into different directories to see if I can get something to work. I can still connect to the dedicated server but I still only see the skybox and grey fog after moving around.

Is there somewhere that it lists what directories are needed and what files are needed where? Or do I have to go through and figure out what is needed by sifting through all the .cs files?


Thanks,

Matt

#3 Matt,

As I said before, read the wiki. You'll have to import the old chu file and texture file into Atlas2 formats. Here's the link

http://tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/TSE/Atlas/Using_Atlas2

Once converted to atlas files you will need to comment out the terrain block in your mission file and replace it with one similar to the following

new AtlasInstance2(NewTerrain) {
canSaveDynamicFields = "1";
position = "-100.417 7.48933 75";
rotation = "1 0 0 0";
scale = "1 1 1";
detailTex = "~/data/terrains/details/detail1";
atlasFile = "~/data/terrains/testerrain/testerr1.atlas";
lightMapSize = "1024";
};


Dave.

#4 I'm sorry I saw where you said read the wiki, but in my wanderings I never found the page you listed. That page is exactly what I needed. Thank you!

#5 No probs, you'll find your way around eventually. Good luck.