Higher heightmap resolution

[Caydr]

I find that at a 8:1 ratio, far too much of the detail in a heightmap is lost. Would it be possible to improve this to something more like 4:1 or even 1:1?

[Torrasque]

Hum, I fear that it will hardly decrease performaces...
But anyways, letting to the map maker the choice is good.
And I fear that a lot of non-expermimented map maker will use 1:1 when it's not usefull...but it's not an argument.

[Caydr]

Well even 4:1 would be a tremendous improvement.

[Caydr]

According to my calculations, if a 8192 map is approximately equal to a 10x10 (some say 15x15 but I think that's bunk), the approximate size needed to do a 40x40 map would be 32768 (4x the current). I think that's a good round number to use, not too high, not too low.

[Brasaral]

I have created a 8192*8192 .BMP file. It has 200MB. 32768*32768 would have 3 GB. That is something I don't want to work with. And even with a mapeditor, the final map would be how big ? 100MB ? Bigger than the spring itself.

[Torrasque]

@Brasaral A lot of new map to download are 4-5 mo big, so I think they are heavly compressed

[zwzsg]

Redhaven is 8192x8192. Greenhaven is 16x16. The texture map of Redhaven is made from a treeless map-wide screenshot of Greenhaven, including metal extractor graphic. So the (metal patches size/map dimension) ratio is the same in both map Metal extractor on redhaven covers a square with exactly the same dimension as the metal patches, just like in TA. Therefore, it is true that 8192x8192 is 16x16. Or at least unnoteciably close.

And no, I don't think heightmap should be higher resolution. My spring map folder is already 260Mb, I don't want it to start taking over all my hard drive when spring will be a few month old. Also, units have a certain size, and a pixel wide crack or bump would go totally unnoticed ingame.

[Redfish]

I think no one will make 1:1 height maps, because If you try to do it with say a 50MB BMP you can wait for like hours before the map is finished. Maybe eventually we could use a a polygon model as a map instead of the 3 bmp's. One more issue is I think to have an option to put in the smd file to make a map a metal map so the extractors exactly give the standard value for that map.

[Caydr]

The increase would not be so dramatic as you are making out, I think. But in any case, maybe it is just something I'm doing wrong. With my recent Australia map I used the method of taking the original heightmap and blurring it so as to remove the severe spikiness even at 30x -30n. But now there's almost no terrain elevation, it's almost entirely flat.

Map3, included with Spring, has wide height variations while not having spikes all over the place where there was a slight variation in grayness in the original heightmap. Maybe they'll post a tutorial on how they managed this at some point.

[pattern]

Since it's a heightmap the elevation is based on the contrast of black and white. Just upp the contrast using "contrast & brightness" or "levels", in for example, adobe photoshop. The grayer your heigthmap is overall the flatter it will be. The more contrasted the greater the differance in height of the different areas in the map.

[zwzsg]

Pattern: There's also those two parameters in mapconv.exe letting you chose the height of pure white and pure black, and so, the stretchcing of the scale.

[Sean Mirrsen]

These parameters are exactly why I suggested to use pure white or black for either of the extremes on the map. You can easily specify one extreme with one parameter, and then experiment to get the perfect second one.