What makes a good *a map?

[Silentwings]

I don't think people strongly dislike features, but my impression is that features on big team maps can get in the way of moving and fighting without adding anything to the gameplay, and at least in BA this means people are often indifferent to them. E.g. Industrial Revolution. But sometimes they do work; Altored Divide, SSB, Tropical.

I also personally dislike the features on several maps because they don't fit exactly with the texturemap. I never include features or grass in my own maps for this reason.

[smoth]

so the sparse forests I have been doing are considered bad?

[gajop]

Sparse (reclaimable/affected by AoE reclaim) forest is pretty bad as it just disrupts regular gameplay.
Basically if it's reclaimable you should first think of the gameplay aspects, and not realism or looks.

Another issue with features is how they would fade out arbitrarily depending on your springsettings, which would make some maps look bad.
That said, this commit may help with that.

I think ideal features (graphically speaking) would be ones that simply add to the terrain and cannot be destroyed/damaged/reclaimed, and have well designed (or no) hitboxes.

[Silentwings]

There are maps (SSB, for example, there are more) which became popular and have many reclaimable trees. It can be a nice gameplay feature. But I think non-reclaimable trees anywhere, or trees on fighting areas, in any significant number won't be welcomed by the big team BA crowd, at least.

For single player though, I think general beauty and clever features integrated into the texmap are a huge plus.

[Jools]

Forests would be nice if they add some tactical element and not just aesthetics. I think many maps also miss on the scale of the trees, i mean, compare a tree to a jet fighter for instance and usually the trees are much larger. But on the other hand, giant trees instead prevent the annoying reclaim issue, that units can't move anywhere without always reclaiming trees.

Btw, did someone get the forest fires working?

[PicassoCT]

We cant do that- we dont have the technology

[smoth]

we could pic if spring had proper shadows...


(don't get me started on how some people cannot get their toasters to run river valley 13)

[smoth]

Forests would be nice if they add some tactical element and not just aesthetics. I think many maps also miss on the scale of the trees, i mean, compare a tree to a jet fighter for instance and usually the trees are much larger. But on the other hand, giant trees instead prevent the annoying reclaim issue, that units can't move anywhere without always reclaiming trees.

Btw, did someone get the forest fires working?

Yeah, trees are fucking huge. Honestly I am interested in playing with the spring generated trees. I think they have great potential

Re: forest fires
Not that I have read.

[gajop]

the spring generated trees. I think they have great potential

Great potential for removal maybe. The engine should not come with any predefined models.

[smoth]

They are not modes, they are generated with dynamic lod, something we don't have for features.

[raaar]

Some of these may seem obvious and/or were already mentioned, but here goes:

- clear indication of paths for land and water, at a glance people should be able to figure out where units can and can't go

- avoid paths that are too narrow (less than 300 distance units wide)

- cliffs and water zones should be clearly visible on the minimap

- self-contained : no external dependencies. No wreckages of TA units with TA textures

- feature collision sizes should make sense (the ones on zed are too small, the ones on tumult are too big). Too small and it looks glitched, too big and it interferes with targeting too much.

- feature resource values should make sense (50-100 M for a small rock, 250 E for a mid-sized tree). Features with high metal content should have high reclaim times as well.

- metal spots and geothermal spots should be visible and intuitive. On some maps they're too faded or completely invisible!

- avoid creating metal spots where extractors provide less than 1 M/s. 2 M/s per spot is good. Each viable start position should have at least 3 nearby mex spots

- not sure if this is something defined within the map, but on some maps, like Altair v3, aircraft fly too low. On others with high cliffs they fly too high. It disrupts ground vs air gameplay

- ambient sounds are sort of ok, ambient music is not. There are some cool asteroid-like maps like Apophis but they all have some space wonder music that can become annyoing

- avoid very low or high gravity values, even for "space maps". "Realistic" low gravity makes high trajectory artillery look nonsensical

- avoid movement speed modifiers

- ambient light effects, some maps are too bright, others too dark, some seem to have an intense point-like light source that shows up on unit reflections and looks weird

- map between 8x8 and 16x16, no bigger than 24x24

- avoid high tidal strength (>18) unless the map has large water regions or a river. I'd say make it very low if map only has small ponds. Unlike the gravity thing, being "realistic" there won't screw the players

- avoid making the map too resource "heavy". Assume people are going to play it on 5 years old mid-range hardware

- avoid large dense grass patches over desert ground


I think DSD is a good map, it's just overplayed.

some good maps:
- ravaged_v2
- stronghold_beta
- intersection_v3
- folsom dam variants
- tabula variants
- nuclear winter v1
- tangerine
- desertsiege_v2b
- emain macha v3
- cold snap v1
- lost_v2
- icy shell v01
- Ganymede v1
- Titan-v2
etc. (there are many more)

[Anarchid]

They are not modes, they are generated with dynamic lod, something we don't have for features.

Actual LOD would be a good thing. I'm not sure i can accept TA "impostors" as a proper LOD system in 2015.

[Kloot]

LOD for modelled trees (or rocks, or ...) is easily done through the Spring.FeatureRendering interface in 101.

[smoth]

To my knowledge, no one has ever utilized the spring lod support for models or features.

"FeatureRendering" returns 0 results on the wiki search. Where can I find some documentation?

[Kloot]

Spring.FeatureRendering is a new addition in 101 (the next engine version) so no docs exist yet. None are really needed though because the interface works exactly like Spring.UnitRendering, the only difference being that its functions take feature ID's.

no one has ever utilized the spring lod support

Nor even a fraction of the total power of UnitRendering, unfortunately.

[smoth]

ah, VERY COOL!

I don't want to derail the thread but care to make a small post in lua about some of the areas that we have but are not utilizing? I would love to know what they are.

[PauloMorfeo]

... So 1 map per post, discuss a *a map, what you like about it, what makes it better than others?

I couldn't figure out from the entire thread what is a "*a map", though somehow you appear to be asking why we find map X, Y and Z "good" maps.

So, here goes: Comet Catcher.

I love the simplicity, its openness. It's almost an empty canvas which we paint with a carnage of metal. It's organic, not artificial - a certain area becomes a centre of focus because a nuclear reactor was built there or because a set of defences were created, not because the map is pushing us in that direction. It produces lots of "emergent behaviour", like Chris Taylor said about oTA/SupCom(?).

I like how units flow easily without bogging themselves down, sinking in craters, stuck in tree mazes, etc. Annihilation games are very suitable for open game areas because it is very easy to defend (a map consisting of chokes and passes like traditional Starcraft games would suit *TA games very poorly).

I like how the simplicity and metal spread leads to widely spread "territories" - games evolve to clearly noticeable and well defined territories with the zones of attrition, the borders. I just love to look at a section of the minimap painted with my colour, and another painted with the opponent's colour, while I engender a strategy of war to win the match and try to decide which borders need better defending.

I like how it isn't so big that it's boring to get units to reach the opponent (and you even can/need to harass early on), while on the other hand big enough that it removes almost entirely the problems of comm-rushing / traditional comm-bombings. When playing 1v1 it was very prone (in XTA) to strong early raids of Flashes or .. laser-equiv-from-Core, trying to keep in check the growing territories of the enemy, and fields of defences stopping/slowing down the opponent's raids.

I like how it's small enough to play 1v1 yet big enough to play up to 4v4. The team games were really nice, because, because of its openness, it's harder to get into those endless stalemates and it was frequent to be able to break the frontiers at any stage of the game merely by land battle (land units / artillery).

I like how it has a few metal concentrations which qualify as "starting positions". I like how there is *NOT* a big metal advantage in the middle, which keeps the game undecided even if one of the sides manages to control a bit more territory than the other.

I like how it has tons of space without feeling too big (the opponent being too far).

---

I dislike how ugly it is. I don't like much its appearance. And the remake in red, I think I dislike it even more.

[PauloMorfeo]

Gods of War
Was that how it was called? The red planet with 5 islands?

I liked how well balanced this map was, how it opened to so, so, so many different strategies. You could start air and harass the hell of your opponents or try to slowly gain another island. You could rush your comm to quickly claim another island but lose a lot of comm time. You could go land and rush a Big Bertha or something else. You could go straight sea (merely just an option, oddly enough in a mostly sea map).

I liked how games were so different from one another yet most of the times the games didn't end up ending/being decided all that fast. I guess I really like to play simcity... I loved how I could keep around playing simcity in my island (literally my island), while still enveloped in a grander scheme of things and a greater objective.

[PauloMorfeo]

Supreme Battlefield
I never thought this map works for me, I don't like it. Instead of ranting about why I like a map, I'll rant why I do *not* like this map.

Teams are way too far apart. Even in the narrow straight of land, aggression between the bridge-players takes so long to reach the opponents that it isn't so much fun. As far as it goes for the other players, it's just a complete "no way".

The front players, even for them is just a very lagged fight. The bridge is too short and you can't do much with it. All you can do is eventually engage in those nice artillery / tower-defense games but you don't have enough metal to properly do that and, by the time you do get to that, you find that it's almost completely useless and there's already overwhelming aviation, boats and missile structures.

The back players, it's just too long of a wait for any kind of action. FFS, even Big Berthas / Intimidators cannot reach anything decent.

This map is just waaaay too big!!! I wonder, but I think I would love a smaller version of maybe between 2/3 to 1/4 (and likely with a slightly wider bridge).

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What I *do* like about this map? It's pretty! Very appealing to the eyes.

[PauloMorfeo]

Azure Rampart

I really liked the mechanics of this map by Zsgsw .. svg .. wzs. (sorry dude, I could never memorize your nick :p)

Each player would quickly and easily take over they're own starting "islands" but then would have to struggle heavily for the more open middle. There was metal everywhere, meaning territory would = income. However, it was too low a metal production to make it possible for players to close themselves inside their "islands" and tech-up.

Since the islands were reasonably well defensible, the games would rarely end up too quickly. It would almost always have action from an early start, but it wasn't very brittle and would almost always lead to a reasonable (in length) war of attrition. I really like maps which produce gameplay that is not very brittle (as in, it gets decided in the first 3~5 mins).

It would almost always lead to extremely fierce battles to control a few more meters of the middle corridors to have a bit of an edge in the incomes which were reasonably low. So many maps were ruined because the developers added too much metal... Zgsw was knowledgeable/experienced as a player and set the metal amount very decently.

I remember I also liked the looks of that map. It was somewhat shiny and very different from everything else.

---

What I didn't like:
The playing ground-level was very high and the bottom of the rampart very low, which caused the camera to constantly "fall" outside of the rampart. Also, even the airplanes had problems, because they tended to also end up with huge elevation differences when entering/leaving the rampart.

There were quite a few "cheeses" that could be done with those "blocks" on the walls. Not entirely sure I liked the novelty/variety/organicity of that or whether I disliked it.