losing references.

[joe1013]

i want to make terrain. created a cube h=112640, w=337920, b=225280. selected a brickwork texture and subtracted cube. set zone info actor to b terrain to true. went to text editing, package name-minskmap, group-heightmaps, name-heightmap1. xsize 1024, y size 1024. rebuilt level. redrew all actors to 25. rebuilt level. went to textured view in 3d view. in terrain editing, clicked layers tab, clicked undefined slot, selected a base level texture ("dry dirt"). clicked new. package-minskmap group terrainlayers name-dirlayer1.alphah-1024, alphaw1024, alpha fill=white. uscale 64, vscale 64. hit ok. rebuild. everything in place. save map to this point as minsk map. next time i open the map i receive the following message entitled, "LOAD ERROR", "THE FOLLOWING RESOURCES WERE NOT FOUND WHEN LOADING THE MAP. ANY REFERENCES TO THEM WERE SET TO NULL."THE FOLLOWING ARE THEN LISTED AS THE "MISSING RESOURCES", PACKAGE MINSKMAP HEIGHTMAPS, PACKAGE MINSKMAP TERRAIN LAYERS, PACKAGE MINSKMAP HEIGHTMAPS HEIGHTMAP 1, TEXTURE MINSKMAP TERRAIN LAYERS DIRTLAYER". UNDER A SEPARATE BOX ENTITLED "MISSING FILES", none are listed. what gives? what am i doing wrong. why are these items failing to be recalled when map is reopened. any help would be greatly appreciated. sincerely =OF=JOE1013.

[Psycho_Sam]

Try adding some puncuation and paragraphs to your text next time as it's very difficult to read.

You need to save your terrain texture as a 'MyLevel' package not 'Minskmap'. You can save it seperatley as 'Minskmap' but then you need to save that package too. Its better to use MyLevel as you then keep it all within your map save file.

[worluk]

also 1024 for a heightmap is quite pushing it imo

[sandorski]

"Dry Dirt"--don't put spaces in names. In fact, don't even use Directories that have spaces in their name. UEd/RO-Ed hates spaces.

[Xendance]

Why don't you just save all those textures, heightmaps etc. in the myLevel package?

[Psycho_Sam]

Thats what I said

[joe1013]

will try these suggestions. i guess i didn't understande that "myLevel" was so important. thank you for your insights. will try it and advise if this solves the problem. thank you so much for all you assistance. sincerely, =OF=JOE!)!#

[Slashbot_427]

Originally Posted by worluk

also 1024 for a heightmap is quite pushing it imo

RO-Orel has a terrain 512x512, scaled up by 16 times so that each quad is 512x512UU ( 5km x 5km). 1024x1024 is a really big terrain!!!

Remember each point in the terrain is represented by a 16 bit value (2 Bytes) so 1024x1024x2bytes= 20MByte file size before you add anything else. By the time you add terrain layers, static meshes, custom textures etc, you could be up to 30-80MB. I found at one point that Orel 2 was at 85MB before I compressed some textures that brought it down to 55MB. Thats a big map file as many further files get loaded from default packages when you run the map ingame.

Unless you REALLY REALLY REALLY need an extreme amount of detail in the terrain or a ridiculously big map ( the subtracted cube you made is HUGE- around 1877m x 5632m x 3754m), go for a 256 terrain size.

Its fine when you just start out editing the level, but as you get towards the end, with all the other stuff involved the editor crashes often, runs like crap (slideshow), and slows your map making right down. With Orel, adding something simple like a tree to the level or changing a texture and test it would take around 1.5 Hours!! the pathnoding on such a big level is also pushing the limit. I had over 2500 pathnodes on orel and it would take around 1-2 hours to rebuild the path network. I replaced them with RoadPathNodes that brought it down to about 250 I think. It still takes about 10-15 mins to rebuild. Also I found I had around 3.7GBytes of different versions of RO-Orel on my harddrive as I ended up having to save about every 2 minutes or I would risk losing work due to crashes. Such a big level quickly turns into a hard battle against your hardware, and the engine limits. Thats not so much fun.

EDIT:

Just an extra bit. What if you want to make a forest- if you put 1 tree every 100m (not exaclty a forest!!!) you will end up with about 2000 trees. Think how long it will take you to place, rotate and scale 2000 trees!! You run out of static mesh capabity very quickly. Not sure what the engine limit for SM is, but when Orel got to about 3000 SM actors I lost references to them and got horrible glaring show-stopper problems, like the ones you can see in RO-Road to Orel beta 2( drive through buildings- BUT you cant shoot throught them).

Sorry... not trying to discourage you at all, but if this is your first proper map attempt ( like Orel was for me), you probably have a great idea for it, but you can run into problems you can't get past. Try starting with a small level that you can 90% complete in less than a month, with another month for tweakage.