LoTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 Scenario Design and Modding Preview

We also got to preview the new features in the World Builder. This of course is the BFME tool for scenario designers (in case you weren't familiar with the franchise). I played around with the World Builder for the original BFME just to get a feel of it. While it wasn't the easiest thing to use in my opinion, and I experienced a few crashes. It seemed to be very full featured, and given some experience I can definitely see anyone with talent being able to create maps for BFME that would be absolutely stunning. Since there is a lot of features and of course, oceans added to BFME2. The maps made in the original BFME can not be used as is for BFME2, but you can load up the old maps into the BFME2 World builder to update them for the new game! This will definitely make transitioning the design community to BFME2 much smoother and have a lot of fan created maps available for the new title very quickly.

In terms of features included in the BFME2 World Builder, besides adding support for the new game play elements in BFME2, like a new flammability property, which allows you to create 4 levels of flammability to satisfy the inner pyromaniac in all of us! Specifically you can have boiling oil set the landscape and unfortunates standing on it on fire! How cool is that?

It also looks like they put a lot of work into just creating an easier tool to use. Things like new drop down menu choices for the various parameters you can set, so as to take a lot more of the guess work out of configuring your creation. A scripts searching tool. Tab organization in the object properties. Easier river creation and placement. Wave options to create just about any kind of land/water interaction you want for some serious eye candy. Terrain copy and pasting, which will make creating symmetric multiplayer maps much easier. Post effects which can alter the entire map at once instead of tediously applying texture effects on each tile manually. And of course Hotkeys!

The developers even wade in to talk about and give their opinions on the maps that the fan community have created. They mentioned a few of their personal favorites, and even gave some advice to map designers. The rules of thumbs that they go through when designing their own maps. They mentioned that while some of the maps looks great, they sometimes are problematic in terms of playability, and create difficulty for the AI and game engine to handle. For example the map size can be a maximum of 500x500 tiles. Slopes on the land should be 15 degrees or less to avoid units sliding. Keep key map features away from the edge of the map. Use a maxium of 500 trees and 14 types maximum. Try to spawn stuff programmatically with scripts instead of having them fixed initially on the map, and create landmarks in the map so that people can recognize where they are on the map without refering to external references. Make paths at least 2 and half horde size wide and avoid winding paths, dead-ends, cul-de-sacs, jagged terrain features, lips/overhangs on plateaus to prevent pathing and line of sight problems. Make good use of the impassible and preferred path painting tool to help unit pathing. Use the untaintable brush to prevent the game engine from applying spell effects to areas that doesn't add to gameplay to decrease the load on the game engine. Finally, try to make the terrain, especially main "battle areas" as flat as possible, as this will help the game engine run much more smoother not having to deal with so many polygons on screen, if at all possible. There are probably a few more suggestions I forgotten to mention. But hopefully their plan to also provide documentation for the World Builder will also come to fruition.

The developers also want to give recognition to the various fan based map designers, and there were ideas floated that possibly there will be some efforts towards creating a so-called "Developer's Seal of Approval" for fan based creations, where the top rated fan creations will be regularly reviewed by select members of the development team. Those that they particularly enjoyed and judge to fit their own in-house standards for map creation will receive a sort of official recognition for the map, as such.

I hope I have given you all a good glimpse at the possibilities that are waiting for fan based designers and modders in BFME2. I am certainly looking forward to exploring BFME2 in this regard. I hope I have conveyed the energy I received from the folks at EALA for BFME2 and specifically their commitment to supporting the creative segment of the gaming community. Certainly, it is the first time I saw a company taking the time to let modders show their stuff to the people that actually produce the games. With this in mind, I hope many more of you will take up the challenge and maybe we will see some of you and your creations at the next EALA summit!

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