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Map Thread Guide

Chaosy

Tutorial Reviewer
Level 40
Joined
Jun 9, 2011
Messages
13,182


Map Development Thread Guide

By Chaosy


Introduction

Greetings, this tutorial is supposed to show you a few tricks with BB codes to make your map presentation look awesome.
This can be applied for your map development thread, which can later be copied to the map section if/when you release the map.
This wont improve the map itself but it will make more people check out your map, and it seems like a more serious project overall.

This is not a template, it is a guide. If you want an already finished template go here: http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/miscellaneous-tutorials-456/map-description-templates-171659/

Content


To start with, your thread needs to be informative. If you make a thread that says "Guys I made a ORPG, play and have fun! *link to map*".
It will not be taken seriously most of the time, not to mention people want to know what they are downloading. The following sections are included in most map threads.

  • Title
  • Introduction
  • Features
  • Screenshots
  • Progress
  • Credits

I usually include way more than this, but I consider it good enough if it's done properly.

Colors


Colors are a wonderful way to give a certain feel to your thread.
For example if you have a campaign about a human general, having a blue color to the text seems pretty logical. However there are bad colors, and good colors.

Try to read this
Try to read this

The light blue color is just about 10x easier to read according to wikipedia and other scientific research. (not really)

It is usually a good idea to use a mix of colors that are similar. If use an orange color for an orc based map you could do something like:
Introduction

Write whatever here.

Title


The title which is usually the name of your map in big letter at the top of the thread, which is the first thing a user will see. Thus, it is important to make it look good. Plain text is boring, we are going to use an image instead.

And since not all of us are gifted artists (curse you, talented ones!), we will take a shortcut.

Go to either www.cooltext.com , www.flamingtext.com or any other similar website to create your title image.

While some think the animated ones are really good, they are not. Try to keep it simple. As such I took the following image.
e7a48d5459bbb006bf4eb4456cd2686f.png


Do note that some filthy websites put their logos on the image which force you to remove that with a (free) photo editing tool such as Gimp.

To make this easier, I just wrote an extra row which means the little logo is isolated and easier to remove. Select a region with the rectangle selection tool and press delete.

88c82533e0346f1a7cad97998b0fc8c9.png

45721c4ba6e444fbe003dd5dd592ffcc.png

854740482cc170ad8a039209da8b38b0.png


Screenshots


Most people can do this. However few can make it look good. We are going use the
BB code to make our screenshots look much better in our presentation. This method can be applied in more than one section.
Basically the stable tag create an invisible multiboard, you put one image in each column.

[stable]
[img]IMAGE LINK 1[/img][c]
[img]IMAGE LINK 2[/img][c]
[img]IMAGE LINK 3[/img][r]
[img]IMAGE LINK 4[/img][c]
[img]IMAGE LINK 5[/img][c]
[img]IMAGE LINK 6[/img]
[/stable]


[c] means new column, and [r] new row.

I used for for my RP characters, but it's the same method, I just have text in some of the columns too. It's important that all images got the same size, you can simply resize images in paint or just google a website that will do it for you.


8a82f0e1a1eeef27aa15d51c3aa83c69.png
NameEirlys 'Sapphire'

Race
Valkyr

Age
Unknown

Position
Commander

Alignment
Chaotic Evil
21c4dab6313299a291791c0a368c535e.png

Name
Azele Frostborn

Race
Highborne

Age
2300

Position
Champion

Alignment
Chaotic Evil
2e174f9a1adf7bea1326776af0f5efb0.png

Name
Regan Barlow

Race
Half Angel

Age
Unknown

Position
???

Alignment
Natural Evil
d7df33fe0e3e8671b5e73eb246bca821.jpg

Name
Amy Barlow

Race
Half Demon

Age
Unknown

Position
???

Alignment
Natural Evil

dd9983b41c0ac534f9353be18d32a8eb.jpg


Name
Linnea 'Amber'

Race
Angel

Age
Unknown

Position
Commander

Alignment
Lawful Good
ce94ea6cc06a1812e5929ea6bef491ae.png


Name
Khor

Race
Angel

Age
Unknown

Position
Champion

Alignment
Lawful Good

Features


I would suggest two different methods here. Either [list] or [table] both works, it depends on preference.

[list]
[*]Feature 1
[*]Another feature
[/list]


Result:
  • Feature 1
  • Another feature

The other method is basically the same as the one used for screenshots, though I usually prefer table instead of stable here. The only difference is that table is visible.

[table]
Feature 1[c]Explain feature 1 here[r]
Feature 2[c]Explain feature 2 here
[/table]


Result:

Feature 1
Explain feature 1 here

Feature 2
Explain feature 2 here

Small tips 'n' tricks


If you put [stable] in front of a hidden tag the size get reduced, I used it in this tutorial.
[indent] is a relatively unknown BB code, but it is awesome, it make everything within it appear a bit further in. Yet again I use it in this tutorial bellow each title.
[center] is not used enough in most threads, you can center more than text, images, tables, lists everything can be centered. http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/map-development-202/ghostlands-260247/ is a wonderful example of this.

 

Attachments

  • Cool Text My Map Title 146528826534927.png
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Gorgeous!

P.S. I also wish people would be more accommodating for small monitors. >.>

Using hidden tags are great! And resizing things to have a small enough width to fit on a small laptop screen can go a long way (until we get xenforo which will automatically fix that problem).

P.P.S. If you have the time, could you attach the images to the hive? I make exceptions for sites like gyazo and imgur that will permanently keep their images, but it is still better to have them on our site so we control it. (after all, I used to think that Photobucket and Imageshack would provide 'indefinite' service, but we all know how that ended)
 
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