10 · Mapping

Tribes 2 ships a complete map-making toolchain inside the game. Press F11 and you are in it. No external editor, no export step, no SDK — terrain generation, texturing, object placement, lighting and bot navigation are all built in.

This section documents that toolchain from the game’s own manual and scripts. Sections 17–20 then follow NecroBones’ community tutorial, which covers the workflow and judgement the manual does not.

Sierra shipped a manual and almost nobody read it

base/scripts.vl2 contains a help/ directory with eight .hfl documents — the Torque Mission Editor manual, integrated into the game [script]:

1. About.hfl                        450 bytes
2. Mission Editor Overview.hfl    4,234
3. World Editor.hfl               5,626
4. Mission Area Editor.hfl        1,033
5. Terrain Editor.hfl             2,044
6. Terrain Terraform Editor.hfl   2,242
7. Terrain Texture Editor.hfl     1,377
8. Terrain Texture Painter.hfl      634

.hfl is a markup format read by the in-game help viewer, using the same <font:>, <a:>, <lmargin%:> tags as GuiMLTextCtrl (GUI system). Its own opening page is candid about the provenance [script]:

“The GarageGames Torque Engine Mission Editor is included as part of the Torque Game Engine, and now as an integrated tool in Sierra’s Tribes 2.”

Sections 11–14 are essentially this manual, restated with the surrounding evidence and cross-linked into the rest of the handbook.

What a map actually is

A map is not one file. It is a .mis plus a set of companions that must travel with it:

flowchart TD
    NEW["File ▸ New Mission<br/>default terrain + sky"] --> TF["Terraform Editor<br/>procedural heightfield"]
    TF --> TE["Terrain Editor<br/>manual brush corrections"]
    TE --> TX["Texture Editor + Painter<br/>materials by rule, then by hand"]
    TX --> MA["Mission Area Editor<br/>bounds, centre, mirror"]
    MA --> WE["World Editor<br/>interiors, spawns, flags,<br/>generators, stations"]
    WE --> HDR["Add // MissionTypes and<br/>// DisplayName headers by hand"]
    HDR --> LIGHT["Relight Scene<br/>or -light"]
    LIGHT --> NAV["-navBuild<br/>-spnBuild"]
    NAV --> TEST["Test: gametype, bots,<br/>a second client"]
    TEST --> SHIP["Package"]

Two steps in that chain are easy to miss and both fail silently:

• The header comments are not written by the editor. A .mis without // MissionTypes = never appears in any host menu (Missions).
• -navBuild is a separate run. buildMissionList decides bot support purely by whether terrains/<Name>.nav exists [script].

Getting in

Tribes2.exe -nologin -mod Construction -mission Slapdash CTF

then F11 in game [script]. The editor operates on the currently loaded mission, so you start a mission and edit it live — there is no separate editor executable.

The editor GUIs are loaded unconditionally at boot by console_end.cs [script]:

loadGui("GuiEditorGui");
loadGui("consoleDlg");
loadGui("InspectDlg");

with the editor logic in scripts/editor.cs, editorGui.cs, editorRender.cs, editorProfiles.cs and pathEdit.cs, and the C++ side registered as EditManager, WorldEditor, TerrainEditor, MissionAreaEditor, CreatorTree, EditTSCtrl, GuiTerrPreviewCtrl and Terraformer [binary].

Command-line map operations

Three launch modes exist purely for map processing [script]. Each sets $Host::Dedicated, enables the Windows console, and calls CreateServer() directly:

Tribes2.exe -light <MissionName>

Tribes2.exe -navBuild <MissionName> <MissionType>

Tribes2.exe -spnBuild <MissionName> <MissionType>

There is also Tribes2.exe <file>.dif, which sets $LaunchMode = "InteriorView" for inspecting a building on its own [script], and -show for the shape viewer (Console functions).

Where mapping sits relative to the rest of this handbook

Missions covers the .mis as a data file a mod reads. This section covers making one.

A caution on scope

The editor is Torque’s, not Sierra’s, and its manual describes the general tool. Where Tribes 2 differs — the mission-type headers, the team/base object naming conventions, the power system — the manual is silent and this handbook fills the gap from the shipped missions and scripts.

Anything about .dif interior authoring is out of scope: interiors are built in external tools of the Torque Constructor lineage, which are not part of the game and not documented here. Maps place interiors; they do not create them.