Iced Coffee

[Shadowfury333]

This is a small map designed for 1v1 games, particularly for Zero-K.



It is fully SSMFed, partly as a test of the skyreflectmod option.

[smoth]

your specular map is too intense. That hurts my eyes to look at it man.

[Shadowfury333]

your specular map is too intense. That hurts my eyes to look at it man.

It's snow...that's what it does.

I can turn down the light from the sun, though, that should at least help.

Updated to tone down terrain light intensity and remove center metal.

[smoth]

My favorite thing in the world to do is SKI. No snow doesn't.

[Shadowfury333]

Is v2 at a good intensity, or will I need to reduce it further?

[smoth]

yep. Right now the whole map looks like polished ice.

[Shadowfury333]

I can rough it up (and I have for a tentative v3 once balance or design issues need addressing).

[smoth]

Best of luck, it seems like an interesting map.

[Anarchid]

Ice shines. Snow doesn't shine, snow sparkles.

I wonder if random-noise normals with similar noisy specularity would produce a nice "sparkling" snow texture.

[Forboding Angel]

Ok, so I may or may not have spooged all over this map...











I really like it, but your settings and setup is really bad. Hopefully the attached file will provide some assistance (it's your map minus the smf/smt files).

IcedCoffee.sdd.7z

(5.05 MiB) Downloaded 28 times

Ok, from the top...

Mapinfo.lua

I'm not sure what you were trying to accomplish with those lighting settings, but it looked like night, but not a normal kind of night... an eerie kind of night. Didn't fit well with the map at all.

The water settings were... weird. Basically black. I don't understand why.

I'm not convinced that you understand how specular works, and how normal maps work. Regardless, your specular map was much too bright (usually the image on a specular map is very bright). Unless you actually need specular, you're better off making a flat black image for specular.

Your normal map was odd as well. It was your map, with random bumpage that looked... bumpy. It didn't add any real depth to the map, and was just kinda "there".

Your spat tex scales were really far off the mark. If oyu compare the ones in this 7z and yours, you'll see how far off. Basically, your texture was being splatted in little tiny squares, making the whole thing look like a very tiny checkerboard lawn.

Your detail textures were a mess and not suited at all for what you were trying to achieve.

Your detail distribution kinda sealed the deal for me as far as you knowing how it worked. It was jsut noise upon noise upon noise.

Let me say this once... Noise is not good in your map! On anything! If you're using noise, you're sucking! This statement of course excludes experienced artists such as smoth, myself, behe, etc who know how to use it properly on spring maps.

But please, compare your splat distribution to the one I created:
Yours:


Mine:


As you can see, mine is very indicative of where each texture will be splatted. Yours is like looking at modern art. There is no point adding detail textures to a map randomly. Doing so will just make the map look bad.

Which brings me to my next point... Use 1024x1024, not 512x512. The "savings" aren't worth the detail loss, and aren't enough to matter anyway.

DDS is your choice. It's not necessary, but it certainly doesn't hurt anything. Just makes it more irritating to edit, but that's just me.

You'll notice that there is a file called "attributes.png" in the 7z. This is a file generated by L3DT ( http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/ ) (I highly recommend that you pick up a copy... It's extremely good) from the heightmap, and makes texture splatting distribution super easy.

Attributes map:



-------------------

Don't think I'm dumping on you. I am most certainly not. Most of these mistakes are just newbie mistakes that you learn over the course of making a map. Your texture and heightmap are freaking excellent and it's a wonderful map! It just needed some TLC.

I'm hoping that the files provided will help you understand how ssmf and mapping in general works. I spent about 2 hours getting it all squared away, so here's to hoping that examples helped

In order to load up the map with the features, it depends upon Spring Features 1.0 (which the lobby will autodownload for you), so make sure you have it. http://springfiles.com/spring/tools/spring-features

[smoth]

Ice shines. Snow doesn't shine, snow sparkles.

even the snow in antartica, which is ice-like, sparkles.

[SinbadEV]

Ice shines. Snow doesn't shine, snow sparkles.

even the snow in antartica, which is ice-like, sparkles.

smoth is the expert on snow because he's been to Antarctica.

[Forboding Angel]

He's just pointing out that even snow in particularly frigid temperatures to the point to where it's almost straight up ice blocks, sparkles as opposed to shining.

[smoth]

Sinbad I doubt you are half as detail oriented as I am. I don't look at details I obsess about them.

even icebergs do not shine. Unless it is where they meet the water and are wet. They do some awesome glowing depending on how much oxygen is still trapped within them.

http://www.performancepros.net/iceberg17.jpg
^iceberg sparkle

Icebergs that are pure ice looks like this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... ceberg.jpg

The can even get blue seams, or brown sediment looking like oreveins.

The coolest thing about icebergs is they can cause the water around them to glow bright blue. Light passing through them causes amazing visuals(see below link).
http://www.nancyleigh.com/core/wp-conte ... ceberg.jpg

[Shadowfury333]

Wow. Thanks for the constructive criticism and examples. This is my first Spring map, so a lot of the stuff is still new to me for how exactly it works. Given that my main mapmaking outlet has been Achron for the last couple years, I'm not surprised you liked and hated what you did (Achron allows full heightmap editing, but textures are all tiles that contain diffuse, spec, spec exponent, and bump components).

That being said, why features? I know you like to push them, but the map is meant to be barren, that was part of the intended design. Also, I'm not sure what you did, but the game now segfaults right as it is parsing map information (I've downloaded spring-features and copied my SMF and SMT into your folder).

Regarding noise spec: I found that unblurred noise tends to interact poorly with linear upsampling, and just leaves a bunch of suspicious squares.

[Forboding Angel]

Spring features goes in your games folder, not your maps folder.

Wrt features, because they make it look alive. You don't have to use them.

Removing the features:
In the mapconfig/featureplacer folder, just empty the object list in set.lua, so that it looks like this:

Code: Select all

local features = { 
	unitlist = {
	},
	buildinglist = {
	},
	objectlist = {
	},
}
return features

and make sure to remove spring features dependency in mapinfo.lua


***************

If you're used to full heightmap editing, you should go buy L3DT (there is a lite free version as well that might do what you need). You can edit your heightmap in realtime in 3d and see exactly what it will look like before even touching spring.

[Shadowfury333]

If you're used to full heightmap editing, you should go buy L3DT (there is a lite free version as well that might do what you need). You can edit your heightmap in realtime in 3d and see exactly what it will look like before even touching spring.

I've tried the free version. It worked okay, but I found it hard to fly around (fly mode tended to often not respond to keypresses). I used a combination of Blender (for start point), GIMP (for symmetry), and SpringMapEdit (for smoothing of heightmap, since GIMP doesn't do 16-bit channels yet, and compilation of SMF).

Also, I created a games folder and put spring-features in there. I also tried mods/ but that didn't seem to work.

[Forboding Angel]

No dude... Spring features is an archive, just like a game. Don't unzip it, don't put it in your maps folder or anything like this, and I don't know where you're creating a games folder, but games folder already exists, meaning that you are doin it rong.

Your games folder... Put the sdz/sd7 of spring features, next to BA, or KP, or whatever other games you play.

Assuming you're on winbloze, that would be my documents/my games/spring/games/

or linux ~/.spring/games


Fly mode in l3dt sapphire is wasd, e goes up, r goes down. Click and hold to aim the camera around.

[Shadowfury333]

Assuming you're on winbloze, that would be my documents/my games/spring/games/

or linux ~/.spring/games

I use ZKLobby, so everything is scattered in pool. However, I did make a my documents/my games/spring/games/ folder and stuck the archive in there, but it didn't seem to help.

Anyway, I've tweaked the spec map to make the metal spots shiny. I played around with noise for snow, but nothing made it "sparkle". It might work if specular maps could be splatted, but at the level of detail there is to work with, I'm not sure how sparkling would work.

[Forboding Angel]

I found the reason for your segfault error: http://springrts.com/mantis/view.php?id=3522

More info in the notes.

Edit: I was wrong. I'm just going to recompile it from scratch and see if I can figure it out.