Editor42 or Battlecraft 1942?

[Skull Kid]

I have been pondering this for quite some time now... which one do you here in this particular community use most? One of them, or both?

[Skull Kid]

Also, is it possible to make a map without Battlecraft 1942 involved? I mean, is Editor42 powerful enough to generate a fully-working map?

[fo0k]

they both have their uses but I spend my time in ed42 - with notepad it can get you a working map. Battlecraft is good for a blank, working map to use in ed42.

[Skull Kid]

they both have their uses but I spend my time in ed42 - with notepad it can get you a working map. Battlecraft is good for a blank, working map to use in ed42.

Ah, I see. Well, thanks for your kind reply .

[fo0k]

Have you had much luck with ed42?

[Skull Kid]

Have you had much luck with ed42?

I actually like it. even though I've heard many switches back to BC, I do like ED

[SeabeeCA]

I use both but I prefer ED42

[Senshi]

The thing that scares people from using BC42 usually is the texture tool which is confusing and unintuitive at first.

However, once you got used to it a bit and understood the filters and the overall intention of the texture tools/library, you start to love it and never want to miss it. It's such a fantastic way to easily customize and alterate textures or even mix up old/new ones almost "on the fly". The only thing more flexible in texturing is going straight to Photoshop, and for most maps you won't really need that, once you got some experience with the Ed42 texture tool. I remember creating various maps that were textured with a single library texture. That one contained various (as in dozens) of subfilters and layers that controlled specific slope/height settings and some random large scale patchiness to give things a nonuniform look. I repainted Gazala, Guadalcanal and El Alamein using that method, all switched to entirely different settings (Gazala&El-Alamein to wet winter, Guadalcanal to desert). the only manual thing left to do were the tracks and roads and skidmarks...and even those work quite OK inside Ed42.
Additional upsides:
- Far more flexible and enjoyable terrain sculpting.
- No need to create cumbersome and unflexible .lst files. Those are very annoying if you work a lot with new meshes and objects in your mod, updating things "on the fly"
- No 1024 objects limit. Absolutely mandatory for serious large scale maps with lots of fancy props. In BC42 you were forced to use multiple StaticObjects.con files, usually split in objects and vegetation. A tad annoying if you accidentally place props like fences or barrels right into trees that are not visible in the editor...
- Forest "generator" - awesome for quickly foresting up big areas or placing lots of cosmetic random undergrowth.

Downsides:
- No absolute object placement box. In BC42 you can doubleclick/Enter on a object and get a popup box where you can enter absolute pos and rotation parameters. This doesn't exist in Ed42, making "man made" alignments fairly difficult.

[Swaffy]

This is my breakdown of how I use the programs for map development:

Battlecraft '42: Initial map creation, just to get the basic map files to work with. Some texturing.
Editor '42: Most of my map development. (I don't know how to texture well in this, I need to be taught.)
Botinator: Initial creation of AI or to redo AI.
SinglePlayerCreator: More complex AI editing, such as smallones/pathmaps.

And some of the tutorials these guys took the time to make.

[cajunwolf]

I use both but started out with ED42 before BC came out. I now use both for different purposes. Most of my work is done in BC, especially setting up a new map. Surface mapping or material mapping which it actually is, BC owns at this, though you can touch up in ED42. Once I have a basic terrain layout that is to my liking in BC, I do most of my final terrain tweaks in ED42, with exceptions. As far as texturing goes, well ED42 hands down, though I do basic textures in BC prior so my material maps match up with little touch ups needed. Object placement, with a very few exception, BC owns at this as well as setting up spawners. Finally we come to pathmapping and well there is only one editor that can do that, ED42.

So in conclusion I flip between editors frequently while working on my maps, sometimes several times in an hour depending on what I am doing. I mean with a coupla batch files it's a cinch.