Scenario Design – Tips ‘n’ Tricks

By storm legion of the Eye-Candy Guild
Scenario Design Workshop


Overlapping and Building Movement

Unlike some other game editors, in Rise of Legend’s editor buildings can overlap, go up to any height, or be half-covered in the ground. But, unfortunately this is only in the editor and while you don’t load (if you do save the map with overlapped buildings, then sometimes when you load they may have turned, in which case a little rotation should fix it still)

To get to do this, first you have to disable the ground automatically morphing to give the building its ground. Do this by clicking on the advanced button on the left side of the building-selector panal. Then, a new panel will appear on the right of the selector. From here, uncheck the first selection, “Deform terrain and lock Z”. This will let you move around the building, up or down and stop the terrain from automatically morphing.

To overlap your buildings, just move a building over the other, you can place turrets on top of ammunition depos or whatever you want to create new building formations and other great designs.

(the same can be done with prefabs against anything else, and prefabs won’t move out of position when you load)

Building Overlapping opens up millions of new possibilities with the editor. Take a look at the Steam Cannon made from building overlapping if you want ideas.

Lighting

There are a lot of very very helpful lightings in Rise of Legends that can make your scene, cinematic, or entire map come to life. Just remember that each lighting also has its own type of fog and some are thicker than the others. (but this can be changed by adjusting the fog focus in the Props menu in cinematics)

Some of the lightings are so alike that it seems pointless to call them different names, while some are so different it makes you wonder why there arn’t any in-between lightings. Still, lightings are very helpful and after you’ve experimented with them a few times, you’ll know which one you would need for some shiny metals, or for bringing the lava from a mere terrain texture to something with a little substance.

Here’s an example of 5 lighting effects, the first two are very similar to show you how similar some can be, the next one goes towards the desert gold that most desert lightings have. The second from the right is an example of a lighting for shiny-metal and the last one is the only night lighting.

Please note however that a few main-lightings have not been used at all for this, there’s still the green, thick volcano lighting, the heavy red volcano lighting, the teal of cuotl lighting and more.

And of course, the lightings were used all in the same level of fog, but some of them work better at thicker or thinner levels, so experiment and you’ll be amazed at what you can do!