Advanced Strategic Command

documentation

Mapeditor

EDHEX.EXE

Originally the mapeditor was designed to be used by keyboard only (except the dialog boxes) and the mouse routines were added later. Keep that in mind when using the mouse and something does not seem to work. Just use the keyboard... The whole map editor is much less polished than the game.

The <F1>-key in the mapeditor brings up help. Most keys should be listed there.

Selecting items is possible with the keys <F3... Fn>, one <F - key> for each item category ( terrain, tanks, buildings, mines, etc).

Use <F2> to get the cursor back on the map. You can place items with <Space>. <F> is used to fill rectangles with objects. Go to the upper left corner, press <F> then to the lower right corner and press <Space>.

You can rotate some items with <D>.

I recommend to save often and under different filenames to prevent data loss.

Events

The events are one of the most important functions of ASC. An event consists of:

Just some more remarks on the events :

Importing Battle Isle maps

The game engine of ASC is quite different to that of Battle Isle, since when we designed it several years ago we never intended to make ASC Battle Isle compatible. A major difference are the buildings: In Battle Isle a shop is totally independent of the graphics that are used to show it on the map, while in ASC every shop type has its own graphics. When ASC finds a shop when importing a map, it determines the ASC-building-type by the graphics of the object on the shop's and its surrounding fields. This building type may have completely different settings than the shop in Battle Isle ! Or for many exotic shops ASC may find no matching building type at all.

The first possibility to resolve this problem is creating more building types in ASC, which is much work especially if a map like Steffen Fröhlich's city map should be imported.

But there is another possibility which requires some enhancements to the game engine: to make invisible buildings and combine them with any object. The ability to make invisible buildings is already implemented quite a long time in the game, but I must admit that we did not test it very intensively. Up to now nothing is allowed to stand on a building entry, neither a unit nor an object, but I think it should be possible to allow objects there without changing too much of the game engine. I will add this feature as soon as someone has made the necessary object types (that don't hinder or slow units entering them) and building types (which are just one field large).

Note that if a map is not completely imported because some terrain, objects or buildings are missing it is usually easier to build the missing items and than import the map again then adding them later to an already existing ASC map.

It is not possible yet to read the shop names form TPWM encoded files. Decode the files first if you want to keep the shop names.

After importing a map make sure that the airports have a runway that is long enough to be used by airplanes !