The C&C World-Altering Editor (WAE) is a new modern open-source map editor for Tiberian Sun and RA2 Yuri's Revenge.
Developed over the past 3 years and heavily tested by community mappers, it has now reached the point where it can fully replace the old FinalSun and FinalAlert 2 editors. WAE provides various improvements over them and new tools to make mapping more efficient than before.
Features
To mention some improvements over the old editors, WAE has
- Smoother performance
- Preview of map lighting
- Wide range of zoom levels ranging from displaying the whole map at once to only a tiny piece of it
- Auto-save function that periodically creates a backup of your map
- More efficient user-interface with object previews, better categorization, better use of screen space, and search functions in all possible places
- Hotkeys for various common operations, such as pressing Delete to delete an object under the cursor
- Improved 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
- Copy/paste of more than just terrain, including terrain objects, overlay, units and even buildings!
- 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!
- ...and much more!
All this, while the editor has also been designed to be familiar to existing mappers, meaning it's easy to pick up!
Screenshots
You might not believe the feature list without some screenshots, right?
1) The World-Altering Editor can accurately preview the lighting of your maps.
2) 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.
3) Terrain generation can quickly generate details for an area.
4) The sidebar shows graphical previews of objects, making it easier to find what you are looking for.
5) WAE's trigger editor makes scripting quick! You can also assign colors to triggers!
6) Can't remember what some waypoint was used for? With WAE, you can just hover over it to check!
7) Even the most experienced mappers sometimes make mistakes. These issue checks have saved us from hours of tedious debugging work.
8) The entire WAE user-interface, showing an opened Yuri's Revenge map.
There is also a short demonstrative YouTube video of WAE's capatibilities from 2 years ago in Dawn of the Tiberium Age, from back when WAE was known as the DTA Scenario Editor: Youtube.com
System Requirements
WAE is over 20 years newer than FinalSun and FA2, so it also requires a newer system. WAE requires the following:
- .NET 8.0 Desktop Runtime. You can download it from Microsoft
- A 64-bit Windows operating system
- A DirectX 11 compatible GPU. It is recommended, although not strictly necessary, to have at least 1 GB (TS) or 2 GB (RA2/YR) of VRAM.
- There is no 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 WAE from our GitHub releases page: Github.com
For TS, WAE is compatible with the Steam release and the Tiberian Sun Client (which I heavily recommend if you want some QoL improvements for your Tiberian Sun). Pick the build for your edition of Tiberian Sun.
For RA2/YR, the YR download of WAE is compatible with all known released editions of the game, including the new Steam release.
Links and contact
I'd love to hear your feedback on the editor! You can post your comments here on ModDB, or get in touch on Discord or private messages on ModDB!
WAE has its own dedicated channel, #wae-chat, on the C&C Mod Haven Discord server: Discord.gg
You can also discuss WAE on the #mapping channel of the Dawn of the Tiberium Age Discord server: Discord.gg
You can find the C# source code of the editor from GitHub: Github.com
Feel free to fork and hack around with it! We also accept pull requests if you think you could develop some useful features!
Support
WAE is and will always be available for free. However, it has taken hundreds upon hundreds of hours to create that is off from the rest of my limited free time.
If you'd like to provide some extra incentive for keeping up the work on WAE, you can buy me a coffee at Ko-fi.com
Legal disclaimer
EA has not endorsed and does not support the World-Altering Editor.
Special thanks
WAE's open-source nature has already shown benefits. Big thanks to Morton and ZivDero who helped with developing features to properly support Tiberian Sun and especially Yuri's Revenge. Also, thanks to the Dawn of the Tiberium Age mod community for extensive testing and encouragement during these years.
What about FinalSun and FinalAlert 2? They were recently updated and open-sourced?
Work on WAE began over 3 years ago. Back then, these editors were very outdated and also closed-source. I couldn't anticipate that EA would eventually open-source and update them; last week's update and today's source code release came as complete surprises to me. Had I known about this 3 years ago, I might've opted to improve the old editors instead of creating a new one. However, after years of work, I believe WAE has surpassed the capabilities of FS and FA2, even with their latest updates.
I had also always planned to release WAE in spring 2024 and also announced this publicly in the modding community multiple times, so the similar timing with the updates to FS and FA2 is only a coincidence.
Have fun mapping, Commanders, and please share feedback on the editor if you have any! ♥
Congratulations on the release! I have been following this project for at least a year now, and the progress has been amazing. Truly a fantastic project! Kudos to you and all the contributors. I'll throw in an extra buck, too.
Hi, is there any tutorial?
Thanks in advance
Hi,
There is currently no tutorial, but we hope most things are intuitive enough to get started without one, especially if you have any previous mapping experience.
You can also reach out on the C&C Mod Haven Discord (or other C&C community Discord servers) if you have questions on how to achieve something through the editor.
We might create a user manual in the future though.
This is very interesting and useful! Thank you for your work!
Thank you so much for the awesome release! This will greatly improve YR modding. There is still work to be done, such as better cliff support and maybe random map generation, so please don't abandon this project now! With a bit of a push this could change the entire modding scene, so please have more fun with it!
I have no plans of entirely abandoning WAE in the near future. Although I will take a break from it for some time, both to relax (I worked pretty hard on the editor in the last few weeks) and also to catch up with some other things, so development will likely somewhat slow down.
Nice work, I will definitely try this as I need to make my SP campaign in my mod.
Well done! I have one question: How do you load tiberian sun mission-maps in this editor?
If you are using Steam Tiberian Sun, you need to download XCC Mixer (part of XCC Utilities) and extract the mission maps from the MAPS*.MIX files. Once extracted, you can open them with WAE.
If you are using the Tiberian Sun Client (which I heavily recommend you to do if you enjoy mapping or modding), you can find them from the /Maps/Missions/ subfolder. Simply open WAE and load one of the missions from there.
Thanks alot, Ramp :)
Excellent work. :-)
Question: If possible, how do you use WAE with mods like TI, Rubicon, MO etc?
I'm probably blind but so far I was able to use the TS version of WAE with TS Client only.
WAE needs to be configured to read files from those mods instead of stock TS/TSC. Optimally this will be done by mod authors: at least some of them have shown interest for bundling WAE with future updates of their mods, just like how they currently bundle FS/FA2.
If you want to give it a shot yourself, you can open /Config/Constants.ini and /Config/FileManagerConfig.ini, and check out the keys there. /Config/Theaters.ini is also important in case the mod renames theater files from the vanilla game (I don't think either TI or Rubicon do this though).
Especially TS mods such TI and Rubicon should be easy to get running. I wouldn't be surprised if Rubicon works after just changing WAE to look for Rubicon.exe instead of TiberianSun.exe.
YR mods, especially MO with its gargatuan number of assets and changes to the game, might take more effort. But there are already some mappers in the community who are using WAE to map for MO, so it's doable.
Thank you very much. :-)
So awesome!