Battlezone Forums

A friend of mine completed work on an indoor map comprised of multi-level tunnel segments and I am trying to miniturize it. I've halved the physical size of the objects, halved the metersPerGrid setting in the TRN -- but now that the map is half the size but everything is spaced out so widely (as if the map was put through a potato cuber). I want to bring everything back to its original spacing relative to the size of the map so that it is all together. The BZN is ASCII, but editing the position of the objects the manual way is tedious and it's easy to make an easily overlooked error.

Is there an easier way to do it?

Well you would have to divide all the positioning data in the bzn by 2 as well, I cant see that being a pleasant process. It would seem easier to me to just replace everything in the editor.

can't wate to see the map.
indoors hmm.

Well, I did it. The tedious but accurate way of going into the BZN, finding all the 'Pos' entries, and halving their values. Took me about half an hour to do using the most efficient manual way possible (Find: 'Pos', F3, down arrow, replace, F3, F3, down arrow... replace, etc). I managed to make an exact, miniaturized duplicate of the map. The only problem is that the map edges (rubber band part, not untextured part) kicks in just a little ways before the edge of the 'arena'.

Shift F9 the map and move the 'edge_path' to move the 'rubber band' radius.

Excel ... Copy paste it in there and add some formulas, copy back the changed data to the bzn-file.

! I didn't expect that to work!
1/2 size terrain would be excellent for sniper dm maps.

Yes, it does actually work quite decently. Another interesting thing with smaller grid sizes is that it also lowers the minimum building segment size meaning you can create terrain-owning buildings and even make buildings interiors out of segments that are 1/2 to 1/4 of the size of a the smallest terrain base plate (ie: power gen size) that are perfect for pilot missions and deathmatches.

That said, such technique, while it works and is playable in multiplayer -- would also need to be tested on lower-end machines to see if it is too hard on the FPS (e.g. EPIC uses larger grid sizes to create massive view distances, in theory smaller grid sizes should work in reverse, and cause additional strain to the CPU or GPU per given view distance)

Well you only need to see out as far as a sniper rifles range and in a sniper dm you will probably never come across a full base or huge army of units.

Has something changed? Last time I reduced the size of the terrain grid below the default the game became laggingly unstable.