World-Altering Editor


You might remember this thing called the "DTA Scenario Editor". We in the Dawn of the Tiberium Age (DTA) staff announced it in April 2022, and its first release soon followed. It has revolutionized mapping for DTA, multiplying the efficiency of our mappers and saving dozens and dozens of hours of work.





However, supporting just DTA wasn't enough. The rest of the community was still stuck with the terribly aged and often inefficient FinalSun and FinalAlert editors. I continued working on features to support Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 and their isometric 2.5D terrain, with the aim to bring more efficiency to mapping for the rest of the community as well. SCIPCION of the Global Crisis project soon adopted the editor and helped me with testing, but it was still not ready for the wider public.



But today, we've finally reached a point where I can say that the editor works as a full FinalSun replacement.

At the same time, it is obviously no longer an editor just for Dawn of the Tiberium Age. Hence it needed a new name. After multiple suggestions and some thinking around, I've settled on World-Altering Editor (WAE for short).


Logo of the World-Altering Editor, reusing the DTA Scenario Editor logo. Credits: Bittah_Commander

But here you might be thinking, why switch over? Why use the World-Altering Editor when FinalSun does everything you need it to do? Well, because the World-Altering Editor does several things significantly better, including:

• Far better performance on modern systems
  
• Zoom levels
  
• Auto-save function that periodically creates a backup of your map
  
• More efficient sidebar with object images, categories, and search
  
• More efficient tile selector that wastes less screen space, with TileSet search included
  
• Better trigger scripting dialog that allows you to view and manipulate all data of a trigger at once, rather than needing to constantly switch between tabs and open drop-downs
  
• Options for cloning TaskForces, ScriptTypes, TeamTypes, Triggers, and AITriggers
  
• You can copy/paste more than just terrain, including terrain objects, overlay, units, buildings, and even smudges!
  
• Preview showing what scripting elements reference a waypoint
  
• Advanced automatic map scripting issue checking that helps you avoid making dumb mistakes
  
• Many new tools, including a tool for checking the distance between two points, and a tool for calculating the amount of Tiberium in a specific area
  
• Terrain generation!
  
• Proper support for setting and clearing Ice Growth tags
  
• ...and more!

All this, while the editor has also been designed to be familiar to existing FinalSun users, meaning it's easy to pick up!

Here are a few screenshots of these features!


WAE's closest zoom level allows you to view the game like you were in the DOS age, while the farthest zoom level shows basically the whole map.


WAE's trigger window makes scripting quick compared to FinalSun's outdated UI design. You can also assign colors to triggers to make the trigger list easier to parse!


Can't remember what some waypoint was used for? With WAE, you can just hover over it to check!


Even the most experienced mappers sometimes make mistakes. These issue checks have saved us from hours of tedious debugging work.


The entire WAE user-interface showing an opened Tiberian Sun map.

System Requirements

WAE is over 20 years newer than FinalSun, so it also requires a newer system than FinalSun does. WAE requires the following:

• .NET 7.0 Desktop Runtime. You can download it from Microsoft.
  
• A 64-bit Windows operating system.
  
• A DirectX 11 compatible GPU.
  
• Considerable VRAM. This depends on which mod you use WAE with; vanilla TS assets don't require much VRAM, but as you add more and more stuff to your mod, WAE currently requires hundreds of megabytes or even over a gigabyte of VRAM. I have planned to optimize VRAM use in the future better.
  
• There is no specific CPU requirement, but naturally, the faster, the better. WAE can especially be CPU intensive if you zoom very far while editing the map.

Downloads

You can download this first release of WAE for the Tiberian Sun Client from my space on the CnCNet server: Rampastring.cnc-comm.com

WAE is not compatible with the original Tiberian Sun! All modern mods are based on the Tiberian Sun Client, so it has been the main priority.

Dawn of the Tiberium Age comes with its own build of WAE.

If you have a GitHub account, you can always download WAE's latest version by downloading the artifacts from our automated build: Github.com

What about Yuri's Revenge?

WAE does support Yuri's Revenge on its "engine" level, but we do not have a convenient YR setup available yet. We will release one at a later date.

Getting WAE to work with your mod

WAE has very few hardcoded features. Everything is accessible through the INI files in the Config sub-folder. Of particular interest to most modders are most likely Constants.ini and Theaters.ini. With some tweaking of the INI files, WAE should be compatible with any modern TS mod and also many YR mods!

Limitations

WAE is still in development and is not perfect. First off, some of the editor's tools are still new so they might have bugs or unoptimal user experiences. We'll most likely fix these and improve the tools over time as suggestions come up.

WAE does not currently render voxel graphics. Instead, voxel units are drawn with a string representing their object ID and an arrow that tells the direction they are facing. Voxel support is a big task, so I currently can't promise whether I'm going to add support for Voxels in the future, but there's a high chance I'll try.

Contact

WAE has its own dedicated channel, #world-altering-editor, on the C&C Mod Haven Discord server: Discord.gg

Join there for discussion, comments, and help!

Source Code

WAE is open-source, with its source code hosted at Github.com. I actively accept contributions, so if you have something to improve, feel free to create issues and pull requests!

The source code is licensed under GPLv2, meaning that if you make any edits to the code, you need to make your fork available to the public.

Special Thanks

WAE's open-source nature has already shown benefits. Thanks to Morton, who recently pushed some significant features to improve WAE's support for TS and especially YR!

WAE relies on some pieces of code from the following open-source projects. Hence I'd also like to thank their authors:

• C&C Map Renderer
  
• MonoGame
  
• OpenRA
  
• Westwind.Scripting

Disclaimer

EA has not endorsed and does not support the World-Altering Editor.