Terrain and Pathing help

[azurespecter]

I'm making a current WoW based strategy war game that involves the entirety of Azeroth, Kalimdor, Outland, and Northrend, and all the other land masses to an almost pin-point accuracy. I've spent long hours attempting to make the terrain as close as possible to WoW.
I've had a few problems though that I am unsure how to fix and would like some help if possible.
The first is that I have somehow gotten dark streaks running through my map in certain sections that I am unable to get rid of. They appear in the editor and in the game when I test it. I've tried a dozen things but nothing has worked. So if anybody has seen this problem and knows how to fix it I would appreciate it.
The second think I would like some help with is with the pathing of bridges. Because of the large size of the WoW world, I've sized the terrain and units, and basically the entire game down. Everything except bridges though, because I can't figure out how to make them work properly with smaller pathing. I can make them look smaller, but units still can follow the original bridge pathing. As it is right now, I've made the bridges full size and it looks real enough, even if they look a little big, but the force bridges I'm using in Netherstorm absolutely need to be scaled down.
If anybody could help me out with these, I can go back and fix those problems so the map will eventually work properly. In the meanwhile I'll continue working with the player units and populating the map. If anybody would like more information on the map I'm making, I'd be glad to answer. And I'll definately need some more help before the map is done.

 

[Just_Spectating]

for the bridges, you can do one of 2 things.

either make the bridge have no collision and put invisible platforms at the points where you want your bridge to be walkable, or have the bridge have normal pathing with pathing blockers on the sides to make it so that the player can only go on the path you want.

 

[wd40bomber7]

I'm almost certain the black streaks are caused by the shadow map. To fix this, goto File -> Calculate Shadow map and Save
That will probably get rid of the black streaks.

 

[azurespecter]

Okay, I've gotten bridges to work with invisible platforms. But with the shadow map, my editor messes up when its calculating doodad shadows and goes unresponsive. Any idea why that may be? It sounds like if I can get that to work my problem will be solved.

 

[wd40bomber7]

Maybe its going unresponsive because its working? Sometimes a program will stop responding simply because its working too much to respond. I suggest you give it time. The shadow map is generated through some complex mathematics and if you have rather complicated terrain, its a lot worse.

 

[Wraithwynd]

Am I to understand that you are putting the whole WOW world on one epic sized map?

Sheesh! What a lot of work.

Are you using imported models? If then it may be one of those messing with your shadows. Might have to replace then with a default doodad, like a copy of mushroom Without pathing. I would tint it all red, no green, no blue to make it easy to find.

Go to advanced, replace doodad and replace one type of doodad at a time with your red custom mushroom.

Save the Map as XXX 2.0 (Your map name 2.0) Close the map. Open the map and see if the lines are gone.

To change back you will need to remove the pathing of your desired doodad temporarily, then advanced, replace doodads. replacing your red custom mushroom with the doodad you want. The restore the pathing of your desired doodad.

I had one of the pretty fir trees send green lines across my map which showed up in editor and in the game. That is how I found the problem.

The fix was to replace the exported file with the same. Then replace the place holding doodads with the "new" exported file.

 

[AmadiTheGreat]

Streaks like that? Or are they horizontal? Whatever though, they're caused by the same proplem: Some area of the map there is under minimum, which is somewhere around -300z or so.

 

[Just_Spectating]

ok, heres the problem... Its your shadows.. Its just the unit shadows but because you stretched the ground level sooooo low, it shows like that because the shadows ride on the ground and not floating. what i can see is that those lines are caused by your units shadows. check if those lines are there if the units arent ther.

 

[wd40bomber7]

Ummm. Hes not the one with the problem. Thats not even the cause of the problem. He explains what the problem is in the hope that the other person has that problem. I don't see what your talking about.... Though according to him it is caused by the terrain being too low.

Matter of fact, I tested what you said. I made it as low as possible in the editor and I placed units with shadows. It did strech them, but it didn't look at all like his picture.

 

[AmadiTheGreat]

The one in my picture is created with Terrain Deformations in-game. It might look different if made in WE.