Collaboration anyone?

[enetheru]

I would like to collaborate on making a map with someone.

reasons why?
* I don't play that much so my knowledge of actual gameplay is very limited
* i don't play anything but BA so making the map generic is out of my understanding.
* I really want to get something I've made played on but the above two factors kinda make it hard.

My area of expertise:
* terrain textures and height, ssmf detail mapping, normal mapping etc.

Where I fall down:
* features
* play balance

I'm happy to make whatever someone else wants.. and be directed, make adjustments as requested.

[Beherith]

I think your best bet is to remake a map then. I usually use springmapedit to decompile the map to height texture and metal maps, and I can help with exporting feature sets, or making new ones.
Choose any popular map that looks dated, and try to spruce it up. For starters, you can try cooper hill, as it is a popular tourney map that is quite small.
I will help you every step of the way, feel free to ask any questions and ill help to the best of my abilities.

[enetheru]

I think your best bet is to remake a map then. I usually use springmapedit to decompile the map to height texture and metal maps, and I can help with exporting feature sets, or making new ones.
Choose any popular map that looks dated, and try to spruce it up. For starters, you can try cooper hill, as it is a popular tourney map that is quite small.
I will help you every step of the way, feel free to ask any questions and ill help to the best of my abilities.

Excellent, will post progress here then :)

[FLOZi]

Feel free to remake any of the old S44 maps, Spiked's textures are looking dated now, but most of the heightmaps are sound.

[klapmongool]

Charlie in the hills could use some love too :)

[Johannes]

I'd rather see new maps than just old stuff rehashed, especially if it's only visual changes. Old maps are still totally playable no matter the looks, but there's never enough good maps.

I have some old height/metalmaps without texture sitting around somewhere, that you're free to use if you like (I'll probably upload some in any case - even if nobody bites, won't stop me from using them eventually if I get around to it). Just gotta go through them and see which ones are actually ready.
Or if you have some designes of yours, I can go through them and analyze their gameplay and offer suggestions.

I believe in making maps pretty game-specific though, so that you don't have to make compromises. Then again alot (most?) of maps in popular rotation haven't really been designed with any existing game in mind.

[klapmongool]

I'd rather see new maps than just old stuff rehashed, especially if it's only visual changes. Old maps are still totally playable no matter the looks, but there's never enough good maps.

I disagree. There is a ton of maps around and I doubt there is a single person who played them all. Of the insane amount of maps that already exists a small portion is actually being played. Even though these are the 'good' maps many of them could use some updating, visually but more importantly there are specific annoying defects.

I mentioned Charlie in the hills because of the metal spots (mex snap works with half of them, and only bad when it does) but there are plenty of good maps that could use updating and adjustments. If a mapper takes pleasure in making it visually more attractive that is also nice.

[enetheru]

well its first in best dressed, and since Behe actually offered to collaborate, I'm going to remake Cooper Hill(with his help when I fall over)

Once I'm done with that we'll see what happens next..

at the moment its enough trouble to get SME working correctly on my linux box without crashing, and properly exporting the height map.. i thought i had it sorted but it stopped loading again..

[Beherith]

Here are the sources; texture, heightmap and metalmap, along with the features: http://beherith.eat-peet.net/stuff/coop ... sources.7z
The feature text file can be used with my mapconv (2.4, windows only) with the option -k features.txt.

What I think can be done to make this map better:

1. Texture remake, different texture for vec passable areas, baked lighting, baked normals
2. SSMF; splatting, specular, and if you want, use detail normals (look at altair crossing v2 for details)
3. Grass, altair v2 has some nice grass, but custom shading and blade texture can be used (link to more info here: http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=23652 )
4. Rocks need a new texture, smaller hitshperes and footprints. The rock textures can just be cut and paste from the map's new cliff texture.
5. Trees need replacing, you can use the pines from emain_macha_v2, and the normal trees from altair v2 (though those have a waaaaay too large s3o radius so that needs a fast tweak). Pines are less resource intensive than the trees from altair.
6. The heightmap needs to be cleared up a bit, since the vec pathing on it is not only monstrous, its unbalanced and unintuitive:

IMO the vehicles should be able to pass along the bottom too, and they should be able to go up to the center hill from the top, but shouldnt be able to go to center hill from the bottom.
7. The fogstart smd param should be higher, like 0.7
8. Left start position has a double mex spot at start (can cover 2 spots with 1 extractor)

So its a lot of work, feel free to ask any questions, or if you need help with any of the above points, ask!

[Johannes]

On Cooper vehicles can actually pass through a spot on the south side, but the pathfinder does not recognize it anymore 99% of the time - you can fps them thruogh but that's obviously a horrible substitute.


Another thing I'd do with Cooper is to make the starting mexes identical. Atm east has a 2,8 and 2x 2,3 mexes on the start area, and west has 2x 2,3 and the spot where you can overlap 2,3 and 1,0 mexes therefor giving them a 3,3 starting mex. East has 1 more of the 1,0 mexes on the top right corner though.
Of course this isn't such a big deal when you've got so much rocks anyway, and the hill placement is a harder thing for east to deal with, but why not equalize it when you've got the opportunity, and helps the start uniformly considered weaker.

Oh and make sure it's somewhat easy to see where veh can pass, after you've tweaked the hmap. The whole map is bot passable iirc, so you only need 2 textures still to guarantee that.

[enetheru]

I've been super busy with non spring related stuff(work, salsa).
but so you know I haven't been idle, here are some WIP images..

Pretty happy with how the texture image is shaping up, rendering a full sized version of it now, while I am out partying.

I still need to do lots of work on it, define the splat distribution layers, create splat textures, but shouldn't be that much more work from this version.

changing the height map is no biggie, the textures are completely procedural, so if the height needs tweaking, re-render and "hey presto". enjoy

example.jpg

perspective render

(45.65 KiB) Downloaded 3 times

example1.jpg

top down render.

(46.87 KiB) Downloaded 3 times

[Beherith]

Nice, clean stuff. I tend to introduce much more noise (if not into the heightmap then into the texture through lighting. I recommend you tweak the grass texture a bit, as the repetition is obvious.

[enetheru]

Nice, clean stuff. I tend to introduce much more noise (if not into the heightmap then into the texture through lighting. I recommend you tweak the grass texture a bit, as the repetition is obvious.

Trying to keep it true to the original, which was very clean.
and that grass texture really annoys the hell out of me, i will replace it with something more tilable. :D

heres a segment of the finished texture render.. the rest of the tiles are still being processed.

Its time I left my house for the party, ciao
here's a link to the blend file for those interested
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B6SoY6 ... UlKWUtxdkk
its almost exactly the same, I've only tweaked it slightly since this version.

example2.jpg

(79.24 KiB) Downloaded 3 times

[Johannes]

Why not make the veh passabilities be visible on the texture?

[enetheru]

Why not make the veh passabilities be visible on the texture?

how is that possible considering different vehicles have different passibilities.. the only thing I can do is make the incline of the terrain visable by using varying texture maps. which is what I have done.

[Johannes]

All vehicles have the same slope tolerance except amphibious ones, which have the exact same as kbots have.

Showing passability gets trickier (but is still totally worth it) once you need different textures for hovers and bots too, but here it's only vehicles that need that since bots pass anywhere.

[enetheru]

All vehicles have the same slope tolerance except amphibious ones, which have the exact same as kbots have.

Showing passability gets trickier (but is still totally worth it) once you need different textures for hovers and bots too, but here it's only vehicles that need that since bots pass anywhere.

I didn't know that, cheers.

link to full texture 70mb https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B6SoY6 ... lBrT3RtOUU

[Beherith]

I love the cliffs, but look around for some better grass on cgtextures (free registration required) http://www.cgtextures.com/textures.php? ... ss&cat=238.
The current grass tiling is too obvious.

[enetheru]

I love the cliffs, but look around for some better grass on cgtextures (free registration required) http://www.cgtextures.com/textures.php? ... ss&cat=238.
The current grass tiling is too obvious.

yeah definitely, but I don't like the licencing of cgtextures.. i will find a suitable replacement

[enetheru]

So currently working on feature placement import and export from blender, that way I can effect the ground diffuse, detail distribution textures based on the features. should make things a little more cohesive.

It's not so hard really, just don't have much time these days.