Welcome to the Mechstorm MW4 Map editor Tutorial.
Introduction:
In this tutorial I will talk you through all aspects of map creation using the official map creator and mission editor software for Mechwarrior 4. You will also need a paint package like Adobes Photo shop, a terrain generator like Terragen or Bryce and lots of spare time. Before we begin I would like to start this tutorial by talking about the middle of the map making process. This may seem like a strange place to start but you will understand why in a moment.
Before you can even start to make your map you will need a set of TGA files saved in 24bit & 32bit formats. This makes it very hard for Paintshop pro newbees to produce the files the map editor will use. This is why I mentioned Adobe Photoshop above. Also the part of the map making process that takes the longest is the very start. The reason is simple. Your images will be stretched and blurred by the editor to such an extent that most of the detail will be lost. Until you see this and allow for it in your own TGA files, you will probably scrap your first few maps. Only large changes in colour seem to make it through the map creator intact. Subtle differences in colour are blurred into the background and hidden on the file map. The map creator gets around this by allowing you to use a small detail texture that puts the detail back on to the terrain. Striking the right balance is important and takes a lot of practice. If you do not have to throw away your first few terrain textures I would be very surprised.
Creating your own textures.
The map making process starts in a terrain generator like terragen or Bryce. Good artists may be able to create their own from scratch but I will assume you`re like the rest of us and not that good. I will not be covering Bryce or terragen in this tutorial. The scope of this tutorial is purely based on getting you to a point where you can produce good maps, so I can play your maps instead of my own for a change:)
We start in a terrain program. You need to render your terrain from directly overhead. Having shadows on your map may not seem like a good idea but trust me, it really does bring your map to life. So set the sun in your terrain generator program so it casts some small shadows. Now you need to create the terrain. This is done differently in a lot of programs so I'll leave you to figure that out in your own time. For now you need to render your terrain in one of the following sizes. 512x512 for a very small map. 1024x1024 for a small but playable map (great size for your first map) or 2048x2048 for a decent sized map. All 1024x1024 maps are roughly 5 megs in size. 2048x2048 is roughly 20meg in size. You can make maps at other settings but these are the sizes we are concerned with here. 
For the best results render your height map first, this will be a greyscale picture showing white for high points and black for low points on your map. Anything in between will be grey. Then pick a texture to use for the actual terrain and render it off. If you like the results save of your work. In order to get the detail most people like to see on the finished maps, my advice is to render 1 terrain texture for each type of terrain you will see in your finished map. So if your map will have mountains, pick a texture that looks right for the mountains only and render it off, if your map will contain sand, pick a texture that will look right for the sandy areas only and render it off. You will now have 1 height map and 3 different renders of your terrain. Using the paint package you feel most comfortable with cut around the hills or mountains in the mountain render and precisely place them over your chosen terrain texture. Do the same for the sand areas until your terrain texture has clearly visible sandy areas and mountains. You can skip all that if you wish and just use the one texture for your terrain but your map will look very dull and the mini map will be featureless.
Here are two mini map images from actual maps I have created. They show one of my Grandcanyon map without the above technique and my stormy map with the above technique.

I think the results speak for themselves. The bright green areas are all thats left of the original texture. The light green is actually a sand texture rendered off in Bryce from precisely the same top down view as the stony texture and the original grass green texture then made slightly transparent. I cut around the terrain by making the stone and sandy layers transparent enough from me to see the grassy texture below them. That way I could see the grassy hills and valleys through them and easily trace them with a custom selection tool. All the shadows match exactly because all renders were taken with eactly the same settings. This map could have been a stone or a sand map very easily instead of a grassy map. The maps we have produced so far using this technique have proven to be the best yet. 
Every stage that comes after this will look terrible if you rush this stage. This is the most important stage in creating a new map and cannot be rushed. If you make a mistake here, you cannot easily fix it later.
Now we need the greyscale height map (actually it`s RGB but it looks like it`s greyscale). In order to make this look good and correctly show hills and valleys you will have to render your map a few times to test the height map is correct. If your valleys are too steep or too shallow in the editor then you can use your paint packages brightness, contrast and levels settings to adjust them. Then recreate the map and see if things have improved. This can turn a flat map in to a gorgeous canyon or flowing hills map. It takes 5 minutes to do and the results can be very good indeed. Resizing small height maps to make larger maps can result in the hills being flattened. This method can be used to correct the problem. Finally you have to smooth out the edges of the map so they are level. This prevents some nasty polygon effects when the height changes quickly. I make a simple border around my maps that makes the edges of the map all the same height. It`s not as good as smoothing the edges manually but it does solve the problem quickly.
Sizing your TGA's 
Now you have your Height map and your finished terrain texture, you need to resize them. Assuming you rendered your terrain texture to the size you wanted it to be in the first place, for example 1024x1024 pixels your height map will need to be half that size. So reduce the height map to 512x512 pixels. If you make your terrain texture 2048x2048 pixels then your height map will need to be 1024x1024 pixels. Smaller sizes such as a terrain texture of 512x512 are also halfed. Using Adobe photo shop, save all your tga textures as 24bit tga's and name them so you can tell your height map from your terrain textures easily. 
We now need detail textures which are always 256x256 pixels in size. This is a normal texture that overlays the terrain texture to put back the detail that`s lost during the map creation process. You can use only 1 detail texture for all the dry land on the entire map. Luckily the detail texture assumes the colour of the underlaying terrain most of the time if it`s a subtle texture and so will look good on grass and concrete. Large bold detail textures can be good but can also completely spoil your map sometimes. Now we need you to add an Alpha channel to your detail texture. This is a grey scale image with white/grey and black areas. White will allow the detail texture to be visible on the finished map. Black will allow the terrain texture to show through. Any shade of grey will appear to mix the two textures depending on how light or dark a grey you`re using. You do not want to use a one colour detail map so heres a tip. Cheat. Load your height map into the paint package and resize it to 256x256 pixels and paste it into the alpha channel. Make all changes to the detail texture you require and save it as a 32bit tga file with the alpha channel intact.
I`m assuming you`re making a map thats about 1024x1024 which is a good size for quickly making maps and seeing the results. You should now have the following files.
1 Terrain texture 1024x1024 pixels
1 Height map texture 512x512 pixels
1 Detail texture 256x256 pixels
Water textures are always 256x256 pixels and require 2 detail textures like the one described above and 1 terrain texture. If you are going to use water on your maps, the river should have banks of roughly 45% to avoid tearing in the game. More on this later.
The Map Creator.
Now we need to load our tga files into the mission editor. The following pictures should show you the settings I used to make the River Raid map which can be found in my map creator guide which was used as an early tutorial for Mechstorm team members. 

Here you need to give your map a name.As large maps can support lots of smaller missions , your best choice of name would be something other than a name for 1 map. You see, this map you`re about to create might actually have 6 missions made from it. So choose a name thats not going to actually matter as the file this will create will not be visible in the game anyway. For my story series of maps, I chose Stormy as the name in the map creator. Stormywater is a mission that uses the stormy map you see. Now you should be able to see the connection but you will still be wondering why. Don`t worry all will be explained in the next chapter. 
Select your Height map for the Heightfield and make your settings as I have done above. Moving the smoothing passes further across to the right smooths out your map, whilst moving it the left makes it more bumpy. The setting I have chosen produces a nice bumpy map with lots of smooth areas that makes it very playable and interesting. The final pass and use Intrest data fix some small problems that will appear on your map if these are not ticked. Intrest Data actually allows the program to decide if one area requires more polygons than an other area. This is good because I find it produces better maps if ticked.

Now we tell the program where our terrain & Detail textures are. The fade in setting is the max distance the detail texture will be fully visible. You may want to set this to about 500, though the settings above produce good results. The fade out setting is the distance that the detail texture completely disappears at. The Detail Ratio means this detail texture will be applied 16 times to each 1x1 section. Again 16 is a nice figure and produces good results.
If you want to use water on your maps here are the settings I use for my rivers.

I`ve found you can set the water as high as 7 but any more than that and you`re going to have problems with Diashi's shutting down in deep water. The Ratio's work in a similar way to the other detail texture ratios and the water texture is the texture used on the surface of the water. The Detail texture is laid over as described before and the underwater texture is the same again e.g its laid over the terrain texture. Be careful when you`re using water. Several maps will need to be created and your height map edited before your river will look right with no tearing. Another tip. If you`re usiing water, make your rivers jet black. This will be the very bottom of the map. Otherwise your water may never appear on the finished map.
Now click on Create map. and wait for it to finish making your map.
The Files and Directories
Before we continue I would like to cover where your map files will be created. All of your maps editor files will be kept in Mechwarrior4/contents. Look in maps, missions and textures for the name of your map. There you will find the map files you need. Also check the dev teams Material document (released with the editor docs) at this point as it explains how to get footstep sounds working on your map. If you don`t do that then all mechs will make no walking sounds on your maps at all. The files you need and what you have to do with them is explained in that document. 
Any maps you save will go in mechwarrior4/resources. Check user missions for your 4 map files after you have saved it off the first time. You will need to edit the NFO file to take in to account the types of games your map will support. Lastly but most importantly, every map has a data file. If you do not change the name of the mission in the Mission editor using mission properties then your map name will have exactly the same name as your data file name. EG mymap.mw4 for both files. I am sure you can see what trouble this will cause if somebody extracts your maps zip file without the directory structure intact. One of them will be overwritten and your map will not work. The map name in mechwarrior4/resources/maps is the biggest mw4 file and one that is probably the most important.
Let me explain. The file in resource/maps contains the textures used by the map. You can edit boundries, buildings, gametypes and save your map off under any name but if its using this files textures it will always require this file to be available for all the missions to work. In short you could create 300 missions and save them all off in the Usermissions folder. All 300 missions that were based on the content/maps/mymap.mw4 file would require that one file to work. This is good because it means you can reuse the largest map file over and over again and only upload 1.5 meg maps instead of 5meg maps or 20meg maps later on if you have already made and released the initial data file. 
New maps, however created in the map creator, will produce new data files in mechwarrior4/resources/maps which you can use to make new missions with. All the new missions will require the new data to work. So you must provide the file from maps and as well as the files from usermissions if you want others to play your maps.
The Mission Editor:
Once the map has been created you can start to add new gametypes, place buildings and team dropzones as well as setup special effects, make weather or ground fog. All this is done in the Mission Editor. In this section we will talk you through the important areas.
As this is your first map you need to go to the file menu and select NEW. A list will appear. 

Select the name of the map you created in the Map Creator and change the Mission name to something that describes the mission you`re about to create. If the name you`ve chosen is different from the name of the map you created, you avoid the problem mentioned earlier of on mw4 file overwriting another. If it is the same you must be very careful when packing up your map and include paths to the directorys. You will have to also warn the people to extract the map using the full paths to avoid the overwriting of one important file. It is however much easier to chose a different name at this stage. Click on ok when you`re done.
By now you will be eager to see what your map looks like. This is where you get your first chance to decide whether the map is good or bad. If it is bad you must return to the start of the map making process and correct any mistakes. As this is your first map we can assume it`s really bad and continue on regardless. How do we know this ? You did not see our first few maps. They were truly terrible. Talk about ugly, blurry things. My canyons looked like small hills, the textures looked like they were created on a Sinclair Spectrum. Were talking BAD!. So don`t feel bad if your maps look like that. 
Now go to the View menu and make sure Game View is ticked, then look for the Game View window and open it. You can scroll around the map using the W/S/A& D Keys, Try using shift and control with them too. You will soon get the hang of moving around the map. 
Explore and try to spot your mistakes before moving on to the next bit. go back to the start if you have to. Try to experiment with different map creator settings to see what effect they have on the final map using the same tga files over and over again. 
Mission Editor Windows
The Mission editor uses the following windows to help you do certain tasks. 
Overview properties:
This window can be used to show or hide objects in the main Overview window.
Overview window:
This is where you place all your map items, change the game borders, place trees and special effects.
Objects Manager:
This is a list of everything you have placed on your map.
Resources:
This is where you select the items to be placed on the Overview window map.
Game View:
As we have already seen, this allows you to look at the map and objects on the map you have created.
Mission Properties
Before we go rushing ahead placing lots of objects on our map we need to setup a few items in the mission properties window. So go to the options menu and select mission properties.

Here you can setup your fog colours for day and night as well as fog fades. I find a distance of about 400 to start and 1000 to end roughly works with the detail fade in fade out settings in the mission creator, this gives the map that "nice clear day" look. Height fog is the ground fog. You need to know the height of your map to get this to work. Start is the starting height of the fog. End is the highest point your fog will reach. Placing value in 10 in one and 20 in the other produces a ground fog 10m above the very bottom of the map that disappears at 20m above the the bottom of the map. Remember in the height map, black is the very bottom so if your height map does not have any black on it then the bottom of your map is much higher then 10. You need to find the correct height manually if this is the case. You can use the ground fog setting to create some nice early morning fog effects. 
The Heat efficiency is how hot your map will be. Dustboul is a hot map and so is set to 0.7, Lunacy is a cold map and is set to 1.3. Choose a setting that is right for your map.
Day and night time skies should be chosen based on your map and the fog colour set to something that works with the map and the sky colour.
Supported Game Types

This is where you chose what multiplayer games your map will support. Once chosen your Overview will add the parts each gametype needs in order to work for you. The exception is custom gametypes which always need to be set manually. Custom game types include custom scripts which normally must be placed in the contents/missions/mymap/scripts directory before they will show up in this window when you click on select script (These custom scripts must also be packed up with the map if they are to work.). If your own scripts do not seem to fit into any of the custom games listed, select CustomUndefined, then click on the left arrow and select custom undefined from the left window followed by select scripts and choose your script before closing it again. Choose the number of teams the gametype supports and their alignment and select ok.
We have now setup the basic stuff your map will need in order to work.
Overview window
You can see what your fog settings & sky look like on your map in the overview window. This is handy for producing that special look and adding atmosphere to your maps. 
Now we want to move the teams start points away from the Nav center. Just click and drag them to a position more suitable for team games. Do the same for the flags, and any other items. Player start is normally the starting point for none team games and should normally be placed at Nav center. But why do things the normal way when you can place it anywhere on the map. For that matter, why does the CTF have to have the flag and the capture point in the same place. The answer is it doesnt. So take some time and think about placement. You could create a new game type without even writing a single line of script if you plan it carefully enough.
Take a look at the resource window. Browse through the buildings, the mechs and other items. To place these on the map just select one, go to the Overview window and click on the map. Click on the item that gets placed on the map. This opens up a second window that allows you to set up aspects of that item. These include the objects position (eg 3 feet up in the air or 1 ft under ground). This is handy for placing objects on slopes because the Mission editor would normally bury one part of an object and leave the other part sticking out of the side of a hill. A very odd view for anybody playing on your map.
Take a look at the Misc setting in the resource menu. Click on Fxgenerator. Now go back to the Overview window. Place the fxgenerator on your map somewhere. Zoom in and click on it to open up the generators properties window. 

Here you can choose the type of effect that will be visible on the map and set whether it will occur only at night or randomly. Lightning is very cool when you see it in the game but be careful. Some effects change MW4 from a frames per second game to a frames per minute game. So space them out, do not use too many and always test your maps by going to the location containing the effect yourself and see what happens.
Most objects you can place have a properties window like this. You can choose AI scripts for mechs or create them yourself. plus skins, placements and a lot of other things. Have a play around and see what you can do. The borders around the map can be moved. This is how you can divide up a large map into a smaller map and use it for several missions without using the same map area twice. 
Once you have placed all your objects and moved all the players starting points, hills and flags you need to go to the tools menu. Select snap objects to terrain then go to Create Lattice. Waypoints for bots will now be calculated. When it`s finished, choose the tools menu again and select Recal Lattice links. This creates bot paths between the waypoints and makes the bots movements that much more smarter on your map.
My advice to you would be to explore the Mission editor and experiment yourself. You may find things we have missed this way. The editor is fairly easy to use if you get to grips with these basic functions I have described. When you have finished close the Overview window and select the file menu. Click on save to save your map.
The NFO Editor.
Assuming the team bug is fixed in the final release you can now setup teams for team games using the NFO editor. When you`re done or if the NFO editor lists CTF as a 1 team game, go to Mechwarrior4/resources/usermissions and choose the NFO file for your map. Where it says http, enter a website where your map can be downloaded. People trying to join servers that do not have your map will get the chance to go to this website and download the map. Check the teams are correct for all game types and save the NFO file.
Packing up your map.
Assuming your map and data files are both called mymap, then you will need the following files.
mechwarrior4\resource\maps\mymap.mw4
mechwarrior4\resource\maps\mymap.dep
mechwarrior4\resource\UserMissions\mymap
mechwarrior4\resource\UserMissions\mymap.tga
mechwarrior4\resource\UserMissions\mymap.nfo
mechwarrior4\resource\UserMissions\mymap.dep
mechwarrior4\resource\UserMissions\mymap.mw4
Put all this into a zip file with the paths saved with the file. If the player places those files in the same locations as you then the map will work fine. IF you edit the map after releasing the mission then your version will be different from the released version and that will cause you lots of problems. Always save off new versions with a slightly different name to avoid this.
Remember, if you create a new mission in the mission editor and you have already released the following files with another map.
mechwarrior4\resource\maps\mymap.mw4
mechwarrior4\resource\maps\mymap.dep
Then you can simply pack up the files in "mechwarrior4\resource\UserMissions" instead and place a readme in the zip file saying your old mission that includes the "mechwarrior4\resource\maps" files is required for this mission. This turns a 1024x1024 map froma 5.5meg download in to a 1.4 meg download after the first mission has been made and released. This is how you can make several missions yet only the first mission archive is over 2 meg. 
Final Thoughts
Much of this is based on my findings in the beta editor. Some features were so buggy we could not use them and may be absent from this tutorial as a result. I have covered the hardest part of making maps for mw4 in great detail The map editor itself is pretty easy to use but the steps leading up to it can only be described as a bitch, simply because of how the editor treats your TGA files when it makes the maps out of them. The tips I have offered along the way should help you avoid tripping over some of the more common problems we faced whilst learning how to use the editor. Map making is fun but its not quick. It takes me at least a day just to create the map from scratch. Making a good mission for a map is another days work. If you can make a map in less than a day, please do not upload it. It will probably be terrible. Take your time. Do a good job and the world will see your map for what it is. A work of art and not a rush job. Do not let your first few failures put you off making maps. We all produce bad maps. You will develop a way of testing your textures quickly as you learn more about map making. Eventually you will be able to test, edit and test the maps look again within 10 minutes. This helps a lot when you`re trying to match a terrain texture with a detail texture to produce that special look for your own style of map.
Giskard