Tips and Tricks for Easier Map Editing
Set Player’s Start Position
To set the player’s initial position when your map mod is loaded for the first time, click on the little red flag among the toolbar buttons on the right, at top of editor window. I know the Help says that there’s a hotkey for this (S) – but in fact, this binding was discontinued some time ago. SCS just forgot to fix the Help. S does not work.
After clicking on the red flag, hover over a node for a second or so to match altitude, then click on the road surface and your “start car” should be placed. If it is not facing in the right direction, use the KP+ (num keypad plus) and KP- (num keypad minus) keys to adjust its rotation around Y axis. Note: these two keys do not rotate any other object on the map. They only work for the start-car.
Switch between camera modes
Your basic road layout can be done initially with the overhead cam view, but eventually you’ll need to decorate the world and adjust altitudes, patch landscape gaps, etc. You’ll find this more detailed editing activity much quicker and easier if you learn to switch easily and fluently between overhead cam and free cam, and also to switch the free cam back and forth between flying mode and editing mode.
In editing mode, your flying cam view will show object handles (nodes). Be aware that these handles don’t scale with distance, and you will see them all. So if you’re looking in a direction where there’s a lot of map detail you may see a dense cluster of nodes and have difficulty picking the right one. Zoom in or rotate around until the view is less confusing… or use the Isolate feature. In edit mode, you can move and rotate objects using large bright handles that appear when Move or Rotate is selected and you select an object. They are intuitive and quick.
It’s too confusing, I can’t tell what I’m moving (use Ctrl-I to isolate selected objects)
Often your decorated map gets crowded and confusing after a while. You’ve got nodes for roads and prefabs and terrains, trees and rocks and houses and people, parked cars, signs – it’s a mess. You’d like to adjust just one thing or the relative positions of a group of things, but there’s such a jungle of nodes that you can’t see what you’re doing.
If you select a node or group of nodes and hit Ctrl-I, everything else will disappear and you’ll see ONLY that item or group. You can then edit them, adjust them, etc. When you’re done, hit Ctrl-Shift-I to end the isolation and restore the rest of the world.
Conversely, if you hit Alt-I, then ONLY the selected item or group will vanish and the rest of the world will remain. So you can (temporarily) get rid of something that’s in the way of your editing, then use Ctrl-Shift-I to un-hide it.
Learning to hide and reveal objects and groups of objects will reduce your editing frustration considerably.
I need more nodes here! (Middle-Mouse-Click to add nodes to an object chain)
Say you have a road segment which you need to bend more gracefully, or you need to expand it a bit with a detour. But you only have one segment and you can’t really make it right by stretching its neighbours. You could unsnap it from its neighbours, extend new segments and snap it all back together; or you could generate new nodes inside the existing segment with Middle-Mouse-Click. When you Middle-Click on a road segment’s red handle, you introduce a new node at the mid point.
This is also handy for making nicely proportioned segments for e.g. a prefab to slot into. You can subdivide a segment into 4 even parts quickly, then delete the two inner ones, leaving two nicely proportioned ramps for a bridge prefab to fit between. You can do this same trick with “Building” (Series) objects like fences and hedges, introducing new nodes to make your long object more bendy and adjustable. You can also remove existing nodes with Control-Alt-Middle-Click, but this doesn’t always work. If it doesn’t work in any given situation, just delete one of the segments and drag the two severed ends back together.
I got an error message about UID (some long number)… how do I find it? (use F with copy/paste of UID)
If you’ve seen one of these error messages like “Building item too short”, with a long intimidating UID number, you might have tried the obvious: bring up the dev con and try to copy and paste the UID number out of it – but no, that doesn’t work. Your cursor won’t highlight text from the dev con. What to do? It would be very tedious to type in the long number or look the instance up via the Content Browser.
So you use your favourite text editor to edit the game_log.txt file, find the error message, copy the UID, return to the map editor, hit F (this pops up the Find dialogue box) and paste that UID into the UID field (near the bottom of the popup). Hit Find and you should be teleported instantly to the location of that troubled node.
I’m doing a whole section of highway that’s pretty consistent… (use Default option)
If you have a road segment look-n-feel that you’re going to use for an extended distance, set it as the Default. Then every time you use E to create more road, it will have the same properties.
Copy and paste objects to save time
If you’re placing rocks and other stuff that repeats in your map, you don’t need to hit E repeatedly; you can select an object, then hit ctrl-C to copy it. When you paste, it doesn’t appear instantly as your cursor, as it would in E mode. Instead you get a crosshair cursor immediately after the Copy. When you click somewhere with this crosshair cursor, the object is pasted there.
Merging objects
As you’ve noticed, most game objects don’t have collision property – trees can grow right through buildings, buildings can pass through one another, rocks are insubstantial. This means you can build large rocky outcrops from repeats of smaller rock units, because they merge together pretty convincingly. Give it a try – by varying rotation and altitude you can avoid obvious repetition and make quite long rocky scarps, shelves, cliffs etc. This is a good application for copy and paste.
That Autosave popup is so annoying
If the Autosave popup window is driving you crazy, you can tame it. You need to make a mod to the editor_data.sii file in def.scs – look for the parameter autosave_interval. If you don’t know how to make a basic mod of this kind, read the Basic Modding Guide WIP not yet written