• TA Spring
• L3DT Professional
• Photoshop (commercial), the GIMP (free) or Paint.NET (free)
• Irfanview (optional)
• Mapconv

In Spring parlance, the texture map is also referred to as the terrain map, whereas in L3DT the term 'terrain' always refers the heightmap itself. Wherever possible, this tutorial avoid using the term 'terrain', which is ambiguous, and instead use the terms 'heightmap' and 'texture', which are unambiguous.

The size of a map in Spring represents the texture size, not the heightmap size. A 1×1 Spring map is a 512×512 pixel texture.

The heightfield size is given by:

HFsize = 1 + TXsize / 8

Thus, for a 16×16 map in Spring (8192×8192 pixel texture), your heightfield will be 1025×1025 pixels in size. Furthermore:

• The metal map is the same dimensions as the heightfield.
• The feature map is one eighth the size of the texture map, so for a 8192×8129 texture, the feature map is 1024×1024 pixels in size.

Are there other constraints on sizes?

Absolutely!

L3DT generally does not permit odd-numbered heightmap sizes, so you'll have to generate a 1024×1024 map, for example, and then re-size on export. Also, the largest single-file map you can make with L3DT (not using the map tiling system, which Spring doesn't support) is currently 8192×8192 pixels. This limit will be raised in future versions, eventually.

Also, Mapconv will generally crash if odd numbered map sizes are used (in Spring units), so it is recommended that you use multiples of 2×2 as your basis. That's equivalent to 1024×1024 texture pixels, or around 128×128 heightfield pixels, or indeed 16×16 of L3DT's design map pixels.

» Making the heightmap