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RA2/YR - Customizing Mirage Tanks: Make Them Disguise as the Trees on Your Map
by virtualoctopus. Published: 3/14/03. Last update: 3/14/03.
For instance, on a desert map, you would tend to place cactus all around, and it would look silly for the Mirage Tanks to
disguise as trees that occur nowhere on the map. Likewise if you are making a snow map, full of evergreen trees, you'd want
the Mirage Tanks to resemble the evergreen trees.
Making Mirage Tanks disguise as the trees on YOUR map is one of those little details that makes your map "special"
and "complete". Every map should include this detail. Here's how you do it:
After your map is finished, with all the trees already placed, open your map with Wordpad and look for the map's [Terrain]
section. This is the list of all the trees (and lamposts, etc) on your map. Find the trees you want the Mirage Tank to
change into. Usually these will be the trees that occur most frequently.
Still in Wordpad, add a new section, and call it [General]. It can go anywhere as long as it is not in the middle of an
existing section, but it is good practice to put it near the top (usually right after the [Header] section).
Right under [General], add the line DefaultMirageDisguises=. After the equals sign, type in the list of trees you want to
use. The game's default list is TREE01,TREE02,TREE03,TREE04. Let's say you want to use the 3 cactus types on your desert
map instead. So the new addition to your map should look just like this:
[General]
DefaultMirageDisguises=TREE28,TREE29,TREE30
Then save the map as plain text and you are done. In the game, Mirage Tanks will now randomly choose between the 3 cactus
types when they are at rest.
You can make this list much longer as well. There's no need to limit yourself to only 3 or 4 trees. I'm not sure what the
limit is for the length of this list, but there's no problem using 6-8 trees if that's what you want to do. You can also use
any object found on the [TerrainTypes] list in rules.ini/rulesmd.ini, such as lamposts and telephone poles. However this can
look silly on most maps. It's not a good idea to disguise as ore mines either, since they are animated.
Some things you must be careful of:
- Make sure your code contains no typos. If you've used a tree called TREE3, well there is no such thing as TREE3, so
when the Mirage Tank chooses to disguise as TREE3, it will be invisible. This is unfair, and you don't want to make an
unfair cheat map, or people will hate you.
- Likewise you should make sure that the trees you've selected actually appear in the theater of your map. You may have
placed TREE36 on your temperate map in the editor, but there is no temperate artwork for TREE36 - so again the Mirage Tank
can become invisible on this temperate map. There's no problem with using trees such as TREE36 in the desert, newurban, or
lunar theaters though.
(More Info: You can make sure that the Final Alert2 map editor only offers you the tree choices for each theater, that will
actually appear in the game. For details, see this related tutorial).
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