Mapping Tutorial

Mapping - Part III: Mapping Guidelines

Woah! Playing the map from part II was pure fun heh?! Okay.. it was a bit too small and there is absolutely no cover but.. - yeah.. okay, okay! you are right. It sucks! Creating maps is one (easy!) thing. Creating good maps is much harder. I'll tell you the most important stuff you should know about making GOOD maps for CS2D! (You should already know the first both when you read part II!)

The Right Size

Don't make your map too small and don't make it too large! Big unused areas on a map are bad! Huge maps are bad as well because you have to move too much before you spot the enemy. Maps which are small can become boring very fast.

The Border Thing

Always keep a free space of 1 tile or more between your map and the map border! Having no free tile there will lead to rendering problems with map shadows. Moreover the minimap will look better with these free tiles!

Everyone Needs Cover!

Nobody likes a map without any cover! So set some crates or walls for cover (with wall behavior of course!). Large open spaces without cover are deadly as well! Be careful with that! Try to keep open areas small or care about cover! Same counts for long hallways!

All Roads Lead To Rome - Alternative Routes!

One way is not enough. It will make your map boring. You should have at least two ways to access important spots like bombspots, hostages or spawns! Try it! You'll notice that it makes your map much more fun to play!

Maze Alert! - Too Many Alternative Routes

Too many alternative routes are bad as well. Don't exaggerate! It will confuse players and it will make it too hard to defend a spot!

Items And Secrets On The Map

Items and secret areas with healing or something are okay for fun maps but not for regular maps.

Many Graphics/Sounds/Objects/Effects

You have to be very careful with these things. They can have a very bad impact on the FPS when you exaggerate (everything becomes slow!). It can make your map look much better but it can also destroy it. A map which is not playable because of all the sprites is NOT a good map Also don't use music in your map. Otherwise many people will HATE your map for the music!

Your Name In Your Map

... is annyoing. You shouldn't use tiles to write your name/nick and you shouldn't use extra images for that crap. Use the briefing to show that you made that map! Briefings are txt-files in the maps-folder of CS2D! Simply create a txt-file which has the same name as your map! For example if your map is called 'myAwesomeMap' (file name 'myAwesomeMap.map') then your briefing has to have the file name 'myAwesomeMap.txt' to be loaded by CS2D.

Your Own Tileset

The very first tile in each tileset should be 100% magenta (RGB: 255,0,255 HEX: #FF00FF). This color is transparent in CS2D. It allows mappers to use the first tile for all places where the background has to be visible. Moreover you should use BMP or PNG as format for your tileset. If you use PNG you can also use alpha transparency and can make the first tile transparent that way instead of using magenta. Don't create a tileset with more than 256 tiles. It will not work.

Map Filesize

By default, every tile on the map is saved in one single byte. As soon as you use additional features like tile blending, custom tile rotation, brightness or color, EACH tile on the map will require at least two bytes or even more, depending on its custom settings. This means that just ONE single tile with custom attributes can potentially (nearly) double the size of your entire map. The actual impact of this is tiny though. CS2D maps are quite small in general and they are compressed for transfer so this is not a big deal. Nevertheless it's probably a good to know about this.

Okay... that's it for now. This list will be extended eventually.