This appendix provides gives you a quick rundown where the data that the mission editor uses can be found. You can then add new decal textures, detail textures, sky boxes, and stamps to further customize your map.
The layout of data is as follows:
An important thing to take note of is the sun direction, try to keep it away from the far-morning and far-evening times, as these can cause the shadow system to become very expensive, and even break down. Exact mid-day should also be avoided, as there are a few things that rely on the sun not being directly above the terrain.
Keep the sky distance as close as possible, as it is used for culling of units, and the further away the sky is, the worse the performance will be when the camera is tilted down close to horizontal. It may take a bit of fiddling, but using the fog to blend into the sky is a simple way to mask how close the sky is to the camera. Ideally the sky would be 120–150m away.
When creating a new scenario, choose the smallest size possible, as the larger the scenario, the more memory that is required, and often this means the game will also have far more units, objects, etc to process every frame, so the entire game will be slowed down. So don’t create a 1024x1024 scenario if a 1024x512 will do.
Decals should be used sparingly – mainly for covering up seams in the detail texture between chunks of terrain, or where extra detail is needed. Do not overlay several decals to ‘get the right look’ – create a single decal for this and reuse it as often as possible. Applying the appropriate techniques, you can get a lot of detail out of just the terrain detail texture, without using any decals at all in some cases.
Decal textures should adhere to the same rules as normal textures (power of two dimensions), but also have a 1 pixel fully-transparent border around them to prevent stretching at the edges (you’ll know why this is important when you see it). Keep decals as small as possible – remember that they’ll probably be no larger than 100–200 pixels on screen, so there isn’t any need for them to be even 256 a lot of the time; 128 may be quite sufficient.
Here are some of the more common command line arguments that you might be interested in:
Mission Editor