So I'm sure other people have really gorgeous real world terrain images or matt paintings etc that provide them with inspiration when thinking about creating maps. and since I saw this on reddit today I thought I would post it here to provoke thought.. would be cool IMHO if others posted their inspirational images too and eventually have it sticky

I always thought the Giant's Causeway would make a good map or Columnar basalt in general...


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant's_Causeway

I've been messing around with a Small supreme battlefield remake and I think I might make the theme something like this

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/ ... hotography

Here is a National Geographic slideshow about a massive cave in Vietnam. Some of the forest pictures might be great inspiration, and the pictures don't cease to give me the chills.

Even ZK's spiders and jumpbots would suck on that kind of terrain.

features eat fps like crazy right now

At what point do you usually decide what kind of terrain style to use for a map? Before or after making height/metalmaps?

I like this..

you should create a new topic for that question.. :D

Really ugly .. except if you got a team that has units that look like features :D

Found out about this one via.
https://plus.google.com/104601966579636 ... tG92C5YyQ5

They're all very pretty landscape.
They would all make awful-playing maps.

When thinking of a map, don't think of a pretty landscape, think of flows.

in traditional gameplay that is.. if you modify a mod towards a map, it can work out.. thats one of the reasons i regret that behe never released his mountain map to the bigger public... just because base building aint possible, doesent mean that the mods without it aint worth supportin.

My Caldera would work as a map... here's a rough height map copy pasted from google maps.




Team A starts at the "top" and team B starts in the Cone... the edges of the caldera and island are unpassable by land units except that team A can get to the edge of the cone on top.

Then make it, stop talking about how you know it all and just do it.

Imo these pics serve as inspiration for texturing styles. They dont have to make good maps, that burden is on the mapper. They can help the mapper get ideas about the texturing though.



not so much the picture as the memory of the park inspired me.

edit: btw sinbad i toyed around with asymmetric ledge harassment in my aberdeen maps and another one, and its a tricky thing to pull off, people get annoyed easily. And in those maps everyone can harass someone else (just not the guy harassing them). Imagine how annoying it would be to have that asymmetric setup in 1v1.

For that map setup to work, you could make the players both start in the water on opposing sides. Or better, on small islands in sw and ne corners. Then it's up to them which side of the island they want to enter.

Or make a bigger archipelago still, it's one kind of map I've been wanting to make - kinda like Sands of War but less focused on the sea.

The Chocolate Hills of Bohol Province, Phillippines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate_Hills