I played around with L3DT, the newest version at least is quite easy to make stuff in.
Could this ever play nice? It's got a flat metalmap with reasonable density and is very small, 4x4.
Only thing I changed was change all the jpg:s to bmp:s and scale the heightmap to half size. I also gaussian blurred it a bit. Then played around with the smd a few times and recompiled to get the height scale and water level right. Maybe next I'll make a proper 8x8 map.
You need to scale the heightmap to the same size as the texture map will be in final, then pull it into l3dt and render the texture. THis texture that you have is very blurry.
Please render at 1:1, otherwise I'll wind up killing someone.
I read the tutorial and I'm having trouble understanding where I went wrong. If I generate a texturemap 4x res of the heightmap in l3dt, and then later resize the heightmap to 0.5x then the texture map is 8x the final heightmap and was rendered full?
Or should I render the texturemap 1x the heightmap (meaning I should use a huge heightmap when rendering the texture map)? Is there a difference in l3dt?
use a huge heightmap. The texture is rendered to the size of your heightmap and then rescaled.
Rescaled is bad and looks quite fugly.
So simply use GIMP (please for the love of all things holy don't use photoshop for this) to scale the heightmap up using "Cubic", import into l3dt as a designmap, generate the heightmap and you're golden.
Forboding Angel wrote:use a huge heightmap. The texture is rendered to the size of your heightmap and then rescaled.
Rescaled is bad and looks quite fugly.
So simply use GIMP (please for the love of all things holy don't use photoshop for this) to scale the heightmap up using "Cubic", import into l3dt as a designmap, generate the heightmap and you're golden.
Thanks, the bolded bit was very explicit and exact. I tried it on another map, it seems to work at least somewhat (Although now the map main texture tiles a lot uglily for some reason, I guess the new map is so flat.)
back to the original question as to whether it would be fun on not to play.
i think it is a touch too small, if only because of the commanders and those pesky d-guns. you may be able to limit dgun to start position, but then another problem is that if the commander dies, his explosion will destroy the base anyway, where as in bigger maps there would be a bit more of a spread and it would be possible to make a recovery.
i do like the layout it looks very asymetrical, which is always exciting. and i feel it makes for more enjoyable gameplay, ie making the most of the advantages and disadvantages of your starting position.
the water allows another aspect of the game, where a player could hide for a bit, it depends on the resources available in the water, however the sharp height differences make shelling from second level ships difficult, which is a good thing.
but overall, if the map size was to stay the same, it would make for an interesting shift of tactics and strategy. and i think it would be more fun then speed metal. which is not hard.
overall i will give 6.5 useless mat awards out of 10
ps. i may have misjudged the height from the picture, which would mean that shelling from any 2nd level battleship a real option. but that's nothing a few bladewings or krows can't fix
