Help using WM to create maps for Battlefield 2 (BF2)

Hello there WM gurus!

I’ve created maps for the Battlefield series for a while now but never really got into the realistic terrain generation piece. I’ve always used the editors provided for the game engine. That’s getting old and I want to branch out into using 3rd party tools to generate more realistic terrain.

I’ve looked at Terragen and World Machine. There’s quite a few map creators out there using Terragen and they’ve put together tutorials, etc. There’s very little along those lines for using World Machine.

My preference is to use World Machine, both for the interface and price. :smiley: What I’m lacking though is the know-how. Like I said, I’m new to terrain generators and there aren’t too many people that I know of using WM to create maps for the Battlefield game. I’ve found maybe a handful of threads but they don’t provide me (a new user) enough information to really proceed.

So what I would like to do is learn the process, document it, and hopefully provide a tutorial for battlefield mappers on how to use WM. The goal being to promote better BF2 maps and drive people to using WM.

My first draft of the tutorial will only talk on the basics of creating a heightmap in WM and most likely just reference the user manual. The steps that are missing however are the steps to export the heightmap in the right format, cut up the heightmap into the appropriate sections (i.e. 3x3 grid) and import those sections into the Battlefield editor.

I need help with those steps. Does anyone have experience doing this or is able to point me to other reference material? (note: I’ve found five threads here but they haven’t been all that helpful to a new user – me.)

Sounds like a cool goal.

I don’t know too much about the Battlefield editor, however, and what it needs / what features it provides. That is going to play a large part in determining what the workflow is to go from WM into the game world.

Have any specifics?

I don’t have any specifics at the moment mainly because I have never imported heightmaps into the BF2 editor. From what I know, the terrain is broken up into nine sections forming a 3x3 grid. The middle tile/square is the playable area while the surrounding eight tiles/squares are there just for viewing purposes.

There was one thread here that may help. I don’t fully understand it yet but it may make more sense to you.

Thread: Building terrain in sections