I am trying to make a minimap of my first project so I can show my progress here, but when I zoom out far enough to see the whole map the water is invisible. Since playersa are goint to want to know exactly where the water is in order to plan their attacks, how can I make the water visible from very far a away?
Not sure tbh. I just change the zoom so that the bottom of the map starts to stop rendering, leaving the "water" areas the color of the fog in the background. then I take that to an imagine editor like paint.net and select that color with a 15%~ tolerance and change it all to my desired water color.
Maybe it's obvious but when you are inside a brush or are outside the skybox, as you would be if you are taking a minimap screenshot, the water along with some other things is not rendered. I don't know about experienced empires mappers but I usually just draw it in with paint.net. That way you can avoid the unsightly tiling of the water you'd get otherwise.
Unfortunately, V3NOM, this is a shortfall of the Orange Box. Before Empires 2.2, the water would still be rendered while in the level overview, but now it isn't. Metal Smith's workaround is what a few people have done. What I do though (see: emp_tropicvendetta & emp_frozensummit), is I just take the screenshot and then I paint water onto the minimap in PhotoShop before creating the minimap texture. As Varbles mentioned, Paint.NET can also be used - really, any imaging software can be used to manually add the water. If you want someone to do it for you, I don't mind. Just send me your screenshot in a forum PM and I'll help you. What? No. Uninstall Empires immediately. You might try and be legitimately helpful next time, because namedropping a totally unrelated server cvar is just like shouting "purple monkey balloons" when someone asks where the nearest pay phone is. Yea... it's going require that you take a hint. Don't worry though... our expectations of you aren't that high. Now, run along and cuddle with your purple monkey balloon.
I always replace the water with a neon green texture, fastcompile the map and use that for the minimap.
don't act like an ass shandy, I misunderstood his problem. I try to help, which is more than what 80% of this community does.
You could try to just quickly raise the skybox height, do a bsp compile, and then take a screenshot. It won't have shadows though, so you'd have to do a fast compile for that.
make a skybox extention to where you want the map to be captured (like a small tunnel leading up) then compile normally
