Maps & the Outline

Maps

Everything you place belongs to a map — a named collection with a centre, a radius and an on/off switch.

Permanent	Stays until you delete it
Temporary	Expires on its own — 120 minutes by default

Temporary maps are for events, a weekend camp, or trying a layout without committing. Expiry is swept once a minute.

A new map is enabled the moment it is created, so what you build appears for players as you build it. Turn that off if you would rather build in private:

Config.Maps.AutoEnableNew = false

Creating, renaming and deleting maps needs the manage capability — see Permissions.

Disabling is the safe alternative to deleting

A disabled map vanishes for players but keeps every object. Switch it back on and it returns exactly as it was. Deleting does not come back.

Each map records who created it, who last updated it, and when.

The outline

A tree of everything in the current map. This is where a large build stops being unmanageable.

Select	Click an entry to select it in the world
Hide	Take it out of view without deleting it
Rename	Give it a name you will recognise later
Reorder	Drag to change the order
Teleport	Jump the camera to it
Copy to map	Copy it into another map
Move to map	Move it across

Renaming matters more than it sounds. Twenty p_crate01x entries tell you nothing; "saloon porch — left stack" tells you what you are looking at six weeks later.

The order you set is stored per map in outline_order, so it survives a restart and is the same for anyone who opens that map.

Copy and move between maps

Copy to map duplicates the selection into another map, leaving the original. Move to map takes it across.

That is how you split an over-large map in two, lift a building you like into a reusable map of your own, or promote something out of a temporary map before it expires.

Moving an object can stretch a map's radius

A map's centre and radius are derived from what it contains, and the radius is what decides when players start loading it. Moving one distant object into a map can pull its radius a long way out.

What loads for players

Players are not running the editor; they load the enabled maps.

Setting	Default
SpawnDistance	250 m	How close before objects appear
Hysteresis	40 m	Stops objects flickering at the boundary
MaxEntities	900	Ceiling across everything loaded
SpawnBudgetPerTick	12	How fast they stream in
FreezeByDefault	true	Placed objects do not get pushed around

A dense map inside a small radius will reach the 900 ceiling before it finishes drawing. If a build looks complete to you in the editor but incomplete to players, that is the first thing to check — see Configuration.

Limits

All off by default:

Config.Maps = {
    MaxObjectsPerMap = 0,   -- 0 = unlimited
    MaxObjectsTotal  = 0,
    MaxMaps          = 0,
    DefaultTemporaryMinutes = 120,
}

Worth setting on a server where several people build. An accidental 500-object Scatter is easier to forgive when it cannot be the fiftieth one.

Reloading from the database

rm_mapeditor_reload

from the server console re-reads every map. You need it when something changed the tables behind the resource's back — a row edited by hand, a backup restored, or a second server writing to the same database.