Drawing Boards: Advanced Topics
The fluff terrain uses shown here work starting with version 0.49.2 (except for the buildings which have been around for a while already) and with the Saxarba tileset. In older versions and other tilesets they will largely have no effect; boards using these fluff effects are therefore generally backwards compatible and usable on other tilesets.
The terrain type "Ground Fluff" contains the ground textures of grass, desert, mars and tropical themes with different levels of transparency as well as fully opaque. These can be used to create a soft transition between two types of theme. They can also be used to have the trees, roads or other theme-dependent terrains on a ground texture of another theme.
In the How-To image below, the upper half uses the desert theme. Therefore all woods appear as cacti. The transition is created by adding increasingly opaque ground fluff showing the tropical base texture from right to left.
The lower half uses the tropical theme; therefore all woods appear as tropical woods. Here, the transition is created by adding increasingly opaque ground fluff showing the desert base texture from right to left.
Ground Fluff:1:5 looks exactly like desert theme floor while Ground Fluff:3:5 looks exactly like tropical theme floor.
Water no longer fills each hex but instead has an outline that makes it look somewhat more natural for both lakes/oceans and rivers. This happens automatically as long as no exits value is used for the water, e.g. "water:3" for depth 3 water. Without an exits value, MegaMek will choose exits automatically to align the water hex with neighboring water hexes (of all depths), creating a continuous outline.
This behavior can be overridden by explicitly setting exits. When a water hex should fill the hex completely regardless of neighboring hexes, use water:d:63 (with d being the depth value).
Note that terrain at the water's edge like sand or the theme itself should continue into the water hex as it will be visible wherever the water does not fill the hex entirely.
Normal pavement (pavement:1) will continue to behave as before. Pavement:4 offers pavement with a smoother outline with the same texture as pavement:1. As existing maps usually use pavement:1 they will not experience any automatic changes with MegaMek version 0.49.2.
As described for water above, MegaMek will automatically create a smooth outline for pavement:4 when no exits value is specified. This behavior can be overridden by manually specifying an exits value or by using pavement:1 which always fills the hex entirely.
Rectangular shapes like runways can be created by providing some manual exits values at the corners. See the screenshots below for how to do this and which values to set. Note that exits values above 63 cannot be set graphically using the "Exits" button but must be set using the arrow buttons or by directly entering the number into the exits text field. Exits values above 63 do not really correspond to neighbor connections but can still be used for fluff graphics as in this case.
Note that pavement:4 currently does not support different textures for different elevations. It will look the same for every hex level.
Several alternatives to the standard single hex and multi-hex buildings are available.
The buildings in the following image are modular, multi-hex buildings that can have any desired shape (i.e. number of hexes). They are available by choosing a normal light, medium, heavy or hardened building, adding Building Fluff:100, and then painting in the hexes.
The buildings in the image below are non-modular, i.e. they are either single-hex or multi-hex with a fixed shape. They are available by choosing a normal light, medium, heavy or hardened building, and adding Building Fluff:XX, where the image shows the number to be used in the place of XX for each of the buildings.
In the case of a single-hex building, painting a single hex should make that building appear. If the building is adjacent to another building (as many of them are in the image below), the exits value of the Building terrain (not the Building Fluff) must be manually set to 0, i.e. the hex must contain the terrain "Light (or Medium, Heavy, Hardened) Building (Exits: 0)" and "Building Fluff XX". For example, the uppermost building in the image below contains the terrains "Heavy Building (Exits:0)" and "Building Fluff 19" in addition to the CF and building height.
In the case of a multi-hex building, no exits value should be set (so that MegaMek can set them automatically). Carefully paint the exact hexes that make up its shape. This should set the exits values appropriately and make the building appear. If an adjacent hex that falls outside its shape is set accidentally, it should be cleared again. If the hexes of the remaining building do not all clear up automatically, use the button "Validate" to make the map editor re-calculate all hexes. If the building is adjacent to another building (as many of the multi-hex buildings in the image below are), the exits values of the hexes that touch other buildings must be set manually. The rules for this are the same as for roads and the graphical exits editor can be used. Always make sure to set the exits on the Building terrain (the exits value has no effect for CF, height and fluff).
