I ported this map from OTA, but this time I retextured it. It wasn't actually any official Cavedog map, it's made by someone called Vampire, so I took some liberties of rebalancing it.

This map has crazy tidals, 75, but there are only a few ponds where you can build them. This map is traditionally quite porcy with those high mountain ranges (they were made originally to negate the power of berthas), but there are a few places where noobcannons can reach the bases.

Also the mountains have two drill holes, maybe originally for radar installation. Well, spring radars are blocked by terrain, but maybe some sneaky guy can install a radar jammer there

Have fun playing spring.

Here are some screenshots:

holy porc, batman! does a nuke get from one side to the other without slamming into a mountain?

That and the texture-stretching on those high mountains is kind of... hideous.

You'd probably get the same gameplay (spiders-only on the mountain-things) with better appearance and without the frustrations of vlaunch failures if you trimmed those down.

They were that high in the OTA version too, it's so that you can't shell the base with berthas, and to make the bombing harder.

This is a beta version, that's why I release it. The mountains can be adjusted in the smd-file, so I might very well do that if people wish.

I can see that logic - impeding LRPC fire is a legit goal.... but once you start impeding vlaunch fire it becomes confusing to players.

I don't think that nukes are impeded, although I didn't test that specifically. Can't you in any event just nue the mountain and then the base goes too? I thought spring nukes don't limit the explosion downwards.

I want GD2 GW back!

I'm making some fixes to this map, with one of the problems being that it has invisible trees. Anyone knows how that can happen?

I'm using the engine default trees, which a map guide says uses green 200 to 215. It also says there are just 2 different trees, so I tried experimenting which colours are the relevant ones. I put 4 dots of each green colour in the featuremap, and some of the trees become visible and some invisible.

There seems to be no correlation between whch green colours make visible trees, it just seems to be random.

About 30% of the trees become visible, the rest become invisible. I know they are there because they can be reclaimed.

IMO you should dump the god damn engine trees. They look horrible.

We have tons of cool tree features. Beherith imported a lot from 0 A.D and I made a set of different kinds of trees.

Yes, I am using the ad0 trees in my other map (although I renamed them to latin, aleppo pine = pinus halepensis).

The problem with those trees is just that they don't fall when a commander tries to walk through them, sometimes in xta you need to get somewhere quickly, so people might be annoyed if a tree is in the way.

But they do look nicer, and I added stumps for them too when they get damaged.

You still can crush them by adding a mass to them (Can't remember the exact numbers but it was somewhere between 15-20 when tank could bulldoze the feature. Commander naturally can crush more heavy objects. Try it out yourself!

Only the falling animation will be missing.

the "oolok trees" have messed up textures or something.
shadows are very weak, almost invisible.

(tac) nukes can shot most places it seems.
the cliffs look better then expected but still steep & bumpy hills never look really good in spring...

played a 4 player FFA earlier which lasted 1h 20min or something and no progress could be made from any side. Well, it was ffa andi think nobody everybody was playing super serious, but still.
Maybe for 1v1 / 2v2 it might be better.

give them lower mass, it is used for crushing. if no mass is set it defaults to metalcost or something else which might possible be too high.

Lua it?
only problem is to decide where you put the Lua.
Do you put it in the map? Then every map needs to include it.
Do you put it in the game? Imo that is the better idea but then you get conflicts with map that also have a feature-death-animation-lua.
So it is more the old meta-problem of map-vs-mod and not so much a technical one.

I gave them mass already. They are metal trees so I have them about 350 (unit) in mass. Is this kilograms or pounds? How much does a tree weigh anyway? I just guestimated that.

Default mass is 0.4 * metalcost + 0.1 * damage.

no use to figure out "realistic" values for tree mass. mass is only used for transporting (irrelevant) and crushing.
Maybe sliding/bouncing units or something too but who cares.
Just use something that works with regard to crushing.
http://answers.springlobby.info/questions/400/how-exactly-does-crush-strength-unit-mass-and-feature-mass-all-interact