MAKAMAP FOR DUMMIES

by TOM BOLTON

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Print this out !!!

It just amazes me the little tid-bits that well meaning folks leave out of their tutorials assuming that you already know that particular thing. As I started off making my own levels this just drove me nuts. It was like they’d tell me that to start my car I had to engage the ignition causing the spark plugs to explode a small amount of gas in the cylinder causing blah blah blah. What they would never tell me was to put the key in the ignition on the steering column and turn it clockwise.

Right of let me state that you are going to need all of the information you can get. Get all of the tutorials you can find. Later on you can decide which ones you really need and which ones work best for you. Level building for Redneck Rampage is not an exact science. It’s a lot of hit or miss guessing that requires a lot of patience.

Never be afraid to post stupid questions on the message boards. It’s much better to ask a stupid question than to do something stupid that ruins something you’ve put in hours working on. The same guys who wrote the tutorials visit the message board at www.jonhunt.com regularly so post your questions there. These guys are directly responsible for helping me to retain what little of my sanity I had when I began level building. Also remember, they once knew as little as you do right now.

I learned most of what I’m writing in this tutorial from the other available tutorials and from posting on the board and got great replies, so I’ll acknowledge that a lot of this information came from Jon Hunt, Matt Newcomb, Bruce Hamilton, , John Weber, Speed, Mac & numerous others

For this tutorial I am using Redneck Rampage Rides Again as the program to run makemap. If you’re using the original game make the appropriate substitutions. (C:Interplay\redneck instead of C:\Interplay\rides)

Getting Started.

Before you even get started you have to have the right programs. They’re on yer disc in the folder called "goodies". Click on the "my computer" icon on yer desktop. Open up "C" and find the folder you’re going to place the makemap folder in. (Interplay/Rides if yer using Rides Again)

Place the cd in your cd-rom. Click the "explore cd button on the window that opens up on your screen. Click on the goodies folder. Then right mouse click on Editset and select copy. Go back to C:\Interplay and place the cursor over the Rides folder and right click and chose paste. You have just added Editset to your rides folder. Do the same with Kextract, Kgroup and Makemap.

Close up everything and restart your computer in MS-DOS. At the prompt type the following. (It doesn’t matter if you use upper or lower case letters. The computer isn’t a third grade teacher)

C: [press enter]

CD\INTRPLAY\RIDES [press enter]

kextract [space] redneck.grp [space] tiles*.art [press enter]

The computer will take a couple of minutes to extract all of the art tiles you’re going to need to make your levels.

Once it’s finished extracting the art type exit and press enter. You’re back in windows. Click on your "My Computer" icon and click again on "C" and then on "Interplay". Once the Interplay folder is open click on file in the top left corner of the screen and choose "new" and select folder. You now have a new folder in the Interplay folder. Name it "Works in Progress". You will be keeping extra copies of the maps you’re working on in there.

Now open notepad. Type the word makemap. Click file and choose "save as" and save it as m.bat in the rides folder. Open a new page with notepad and write the word setup and save it the rides directory as s.bat. Now when you’re opening makemap or setup you won’t have to type so much. The dos commands will be

C: [enter]

cd\INTRPLAY\RIDES [enter]

M [enter] or S[enter]

This will make it a little easier as you go back and forth between makemap and setup, which you will do a lot.

Now as I stated before, you’re gonna need all of the tutorials you can get your hands on. The best one to start with is Matt Newcomb’s "BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO MAKING A LEVEL’. Play around with the first two lessons in it until you got them working correctly.

Five things you won’t find in them that will save you a lot of grief are as follows. (ok, twelve things.)

Once you’ve selected a wall texture or a sprite you can change it dramatically by using the 2,4,6,8 keys on yer number pad. Fool around with this.

Scroll lock will assign the starting point if you place the arrow over the X and click the Scroll Lock Key (In 2d, of course)

In 2d you can move yourself anyplace in a big hurry by placing the arrow where you want to go and right clicking the mouse. I spent hundreds of hours working on maps before anyone gave me this little all important bit of information.

If you have the same texture on 2 or more walls and it doesn’t seem to be aligned right, hit the period button (.) while pointing at one of them. Try aiming the arrow at the others and play around with this until you’re comfortable with the procedure.

When you re-open makemap, you can select which map you want by going to 2d and clicking the Esc button on your keyboard. A menu will open up about two inches from the bottom of the page. Pick what you like.

Making doors? Here’s a couple of tips. If you put more than one door in a sector you’ll notice that when you open one of them, they both/all open up. Give them different high tags on one of the sector effectors. (I.e.: 100,101,102 etc.)

Made a door but run into some invisible blockage when you try going through it? In either 2D or 3D point at the sector, speed and music sprites and hit the "B" on your keyboard. Check em out at ground level before you put them back in. The B key is for blockable and you may be bumping Leonard’s head on blockable sprites. (It works the other way too, if you want to make something solid that’s not.

Now you’ve got that door working, but wait, the door knob’s on the wrong side on one side of the door. Aim your cursor at it and hit the F button to flip it. This one drove me nuts for a couple of days until Jon told me.

Here’s a great tip from Jon Hunt. When you’re making something that requires aligning two or more sprites, like the end of a log, a truck, a juke-box and such, hold down the shift key and use the 4 or/and 6 keys on the number pad. This works great for aligning walls too.

You’ve put an air-boat sprite in yer map, but when you go to tide the dang thing, there’s still one where you just left from and yours won’t shoot it’s bazooka. Look at it in 2d, and if it’s pink, put yer cursor over the sprite and hit B. For some reason the air-boats don’t like to be blocked.

Here’s a hot piece of advise. I could never get the makemap for the original game to work right on my computer. The stuff in the RRRA goodies folder works just fine for Redneck Rampage. The makemap that came with redneck Rampage was real slow and kept freezing up on me right from the start, instead of waiting until I had something worth losing like the RRRA version.

You’ve built a door, yet from one side when you open it, it looks like yer stoned on bad acid. It’s crossing another sector isn’t it. Fix that, as in make it go the other way and it should work ok. Keep this in mind when making new doors.

Here’s a great tip from "Big Rodge". Point yer cursor at the floor or ceiling texture and mash yer E key. It makes a remarkable difference ! (This does not work for the sky)

 

When you get to the point as to where you’re actually getting somewhere, you should return to 2D very often and hit Esc and then choose save. You can’t save your work often enough and it will drive you nuts when you find you’ve corrupted a map you’ve spent hours or weeks on. On top of this when ever you’ve accomplished something really neat you should quit makemap, saving your work of course, and exit DOS. Open up windows explorer and go to the Rides folder in Interplay and do the following.

The first time you really have something worth saving, hit save in 2d and go back to windows. If you’re in 3d and you’ve just finally got something you’ve been having trouble with DO NOT TRY GOING BACK TO 2d. Hit Esc and then the y key twice to exit and to save your work. It really sucks when the makemap program craps out as you’re going back to 2d, and pal, it does !!! Go to the rides folder and right click on the "newboard.map" and rename it with a word beginning with the letter A. I use acme and alpha alternately. This way when you’re re-opening it in Dos you won’t have to scroll all the way down to find it, it will be on top. (Right above Jon’s Ancients once you’ve downloaded it)You’re going to have all the tutorial maps as well as the other levels you’ve downloaded in there and it’s going to get crowded.

Right click on your map and send a copy to your briefcase. Then drag that copy, or copy paste it to the folder you made and named "Works in Progress". If you dragged it from your briefcase right click on it and send a copy back to your briefcase. Always keep these two extra copies. You’ll be amazed at your ability to corrupt hours/weeks worth of work and trust me on this, you’ll be glad you took the extra effort. You’ll be double glad after you’ve corrupted the copy in makemap, dumped it, replaced it with the one in your briefcase and corrupted that one to, not having replaced it in the "works in progress folder" because you were on to something and in a hurry. You’ll still have the extra one in your "works in progress" folder.

Well that’s what I have so far. Check back to where you got this from every once in a while to see if I’ve added more as I will be sending in updates as I remember stuff. And when you run across something obvious that you thought should have been mentioned in a tutorial send it to me and I’ll add it in. We’re all dummies at makemap from the get-go !!!