Overview
A guide on using the Dunderheads level editor
Introduction
A map maker will be coming very soon to Dunderheads.
I have created this guide to explain how you can create maps for Dunderheads, and to highlight the important features of the map maker.
I look forward to seeing what you can create soon!
Navigation
The most important aspect of making a map is navigating around it. Familiarising yourself with this information (particularly the basic controls) will make it much easier to make maps.
- You can move around your map using the W A S D keys.
- Press the shift key to speed up movement
- Press L to lock or unlock your mouse cursor to the centre of your screen. This is useful when you want to move objects around, without your mouse going off the screen in windowed mode.
- Press K to lock or unlock mouse rotation. This is very useful for placing many objects in a specific area. If rotation is unlocked your view may change every time you move your mouse to select a new object from the selection list.
- If you have locked mouse rotation (using K), you can still look around by pressing and holding your middle mouse button / scroll wheel.
By default you will be in fly cam mode. Fly cam mode can be used to quickly navigate around your map and view it from different angles.
You can enter fly cam mode (from player view mode) by clicking this button on the top bar:
When using the fly cam you can press the space bar to fly up, and control to fly down. Remember, you can press shift to fly faster.
You can press the player view button to run around your map, just as a normal player would:
You can continue to edit your map when using the player view. This mode is very good for making edits while play-testing your map.
This view will give you a good idea of how your map will look when played in normal games.
Editing Terrain
You can edit terrain by clicking on the terrain button. This is found to the left of the top bar:
A panel will appear down the bottom of your screen. This panel contains tools and settings for editing your terrain.
Select your brush type from the bottom panel. See the next section for a description of my favourite brushes.
The location and size of your brush will be shown when you hover over the terrain.
Left click to raise terrain, and right click to dig/lower the terrain.
Toggle the non-stop editing button to make a single edit to the terrain each time you click. This is good for editing in fine detail.
You can change the size of your brush using the slider in the bottom panel.
The edit speed slider can be used to change the speed you raise or dig terrain when non-stop editing is enabled.
There are a lot of brushes that you can use. The best thing to do is just experiment using all of them. Here is a list of my favourite brushes:
- Additive Sphere – This is the standard brush for raising and lowering terrain. This brush is very good for making hills and holes.
- Paint – You can use the paint brush to change the colour of the terrain. This can be used to paint snow, stone, mud, sand or grass onto your map.
- Smooth – You can use the smooth brush to smooth out rough edges left behind by other brushes. It is a good idea to go over your map with the smooth brush to ensure players will be able to walk over your map without being bumped around!
- Flatten – The flatten brush will raise or lower terrain to the specified level. This brush is very good for making cliffs and hills/mountains that are flat on top. You can use this brush to make perfectly flat sections of land, which are needed for plane runways.
Placing Objects
You can place, move, rotate and scale objects by clicking on the object edit button. This is found to the left of the top bar:
A panel will appear down the bottom of your screen. This panel contains a scrollable list of every object you can place.
Click any of the buttons on the left side of the object scroll list to filter objects by type.
Click on any object in the scroll list to select it. Right click on the terrain to place this object.
You can left click any object you have placed to bring up the transform tools.
Click the first button (or press t) to bring up the move tools. You can move an object by clicking and dragging on any of the arrows that pop up around the selected object.
Click the second button (or press r) to rotate the selected object.
Click the third button (or press e) to scale (change the size) of the selected object.
Click the fourth button (or press y) to bring up the move and rotate tools at the same time.
Instead of using the transform tools, you can directly change the position, rotation and scale of an object by changing the values that are shown on the panel to the right of the screen when you click on an object.
Saving and Loading your Maps
You can save your map to your computer. This is important to do regularly, so you don’t lose your work, and so you can work on your map later.
To save your map press this button:
A file browser will pop up. By default, maps are saved into a Dunderheads/Maps folder in AppData. When you save your map, you should create a new folder, and name the folder. Select this new folder and press the save button.
You can open maps you have previously saved by clicking on this button:
You can then click on one of the folders you created previously and load up that map. Your game may freeze for a few seconds while everything is loaded.
Setting Special Map Options
You can configure special options for your map by clicking on this button in the top panel:
This will bring up the following panel:
Toggle the Enable Water button to add or remove water to your map. If enabled, a water height input field will be displayed. You can change this value to raise or lower the water.
You can change the colour of the sunlight in your map. This is useful for making a map look hot, cold, night-time or day-time.
Click and drag around the colour selector to change the colour of the lighting in your map.
You can select the skybox of your map from the skybox dropdown. The skybox will change the look of the sky that is displayed over your map. There are many presets to choose from. Take a look at a few of them, and pick the one that best suits your map. Keep in mind, the look of the skybox will change depending on the lighting colour, and the position of the sun (see section on Sun Position).
The ambient sound is the background sound that is played throughout your map. You can change the ambient sound to fit the atmosphere or theme of your map.
Here you can choose to play rain or snow particles over your map.
Sets the position of the scene cam to the current screen view. The scene cam is shown before and after games. For best results, position your screen to look at a nice area in your map and press this button.
Click on the light bulb icon to set the position of the sun. The only value that will have any effect is rotation, so there is no need to move or scale the sun.
Rotate the sun to change the direction that shadows are cast from. Rotating the sun will also change where the sun is displayed in the skybox. You can rotate the sun down towards the horizon to get a nice sunset effect.
Required Map Objects
There are a few important objects that are required for your map to work. It is very important to set these objects up properly before publishing your map to the workshop.
You must have placed at-least one Team 1 and one Team 2 spawn point. The more spawn points you place the better, as players spawning on each-others heads will be less likely!
You should design spawn areas carefully. You don’t want the enemy team to be able to shoot into a spawn point easily. Try to surround spawn areas with objects, or place spawn points up on raised terrain.
You should surround your spawn areas with spawn protection zones. This will stop enemy teams entering the other team’s spawn zones.
You can only place one team 1 spawn protection zone, and one team 2 spawn protection zone per map. Therefore, you should group spawn points for each team together.
When you place a spawn protection zone, you should scale it to entirely cover all spawn points.
The map boundary stops players from leaving the map. It is very important to have a properly sized map boundary.
Place a map boundary object and scale to to cover your entire map. Make sure it is high enough to allow planes to fly (if you have planes in your map).
You can only have one map boundary per map.
Make sure you place at-least one capture point per map. Objective names will automatically be assigned to each capture point.
