[agracier]

Actually i've made several different villages, farms, factorys and save them as a template
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Sounds sensible. How do you save them, in which kind of format? I've tried opening up individual missions in the Mission building version of FMB, but that won't work.

Do you save your templates on a blank map or something like that?

You can copy any objects and also group of objects in mapbuilder FMB. But you must assing keys in conf.ini. Backup original conf.ini first. Open conf.ini and add these lines in hotkey builder section:
Ctrl C=copy
Ctrl X=cut
Ctrl V=paste
save and now you can copy/paste.
This is very good for making cityblocks and stuff and you can copy entire airfields too. Saves a lot of time. But you must save/quit/put new actors.static in to the mapmods/maps/xmap every time after copy/paste from another map.
Remember when copying airfields. Don't rotate! Try to find airfield with runways in right direction! IL2 engine is quite clever to find waypoints if they are not excatly right direction. Making airfields in full FMB is the most diffficult part. You have to make every waypoint right. But with copyin excisting airfield you can save days!!
There is another method. You can edit map in notepad. You can make templates in normal FMB and copy/paste static objects from missionfile to mapmods/maps/xmap too. (Xmap is yours map)
You can't copy aircrafts and stuff like that!!

Thanks for the notepad info ... sounds a bit daunting when things aren't done visually, but it might be the thing anyway.

But what I would really like to do, and which doesn't seem to work, is to open a mission file, (file extension .mis) and to open that in the map building FMB. Then to copy elements from a mission file to a map in progress.

There are some very well made towns or grouping of buildings in many missions and I thought it would be interesting if they could be copied into a map in progress and be embedded in the map.

I was especially thinking of lowfighter's factory template which is in .mis format.

But it seems that the map building FMB won't allow .mis files to be opened.