Thus eventually someone figured out a simple ingenious ploy. Render a space tileset with stars and build things on platforms, basically islands with a starry texture for the sea. Many maps where made this way and FF continued to use the same style as TA and use the platforms behaving more like a ground based air mod in that respect.
This worked because the user had a 2 dimensional perspective of the map and an orthogonal perspective of the 3d units, and radar wasnt affected by asteroid.
Sadly this specialized OTA methodology is being applied to spring with horrific results.
these maps may look fine from the minimaps:
http://spring.unknown-files.net/index.p ... &dlid=1341
http://spring.unknown-files.net/index.p ... &dlid=1381
http://spring.unknown-files.net/file/1323/Cosmos/
These map makers are capable of so much more, they could be producing maps thousands of times better using the same skill level but a different cocnept and methodology.
Those minimaps look very similair and indeed space maps in spring follow a set pattern. Space maps in spring follow the cult of OTA FF. They render stars on the sea, and have flat low lying asteroids, and lots and lots of them.
Runecrafter did start to get some of the idea right alter though. The map I posted above (number 3) doesnt have a sea texture and uses a skybox, but he still falls into the same traps, and his skybox while making it one of the prettiest space maps for spring is all wrong.
Just try looking at an FF map from any angle but top down:
Because of the way the mods work, mappers use very flat asteroids to prevent it looking silly, despite the fact it looks silly from any angle but top down. And because of the non orthogonal nature of springs 3D view, the way the map is rendered becomes obvious almost immediatly.
This is worsened by clip art syndrome, where mappers palce nasa images or renders of models onto the space scene of stars layering the sea as can be seen in this thread at smoths forums:
http://cs.selu.edu/~ssmith/BB/viewtopic.php?t=398
Minion was deluded, but he saw the light in the end. Sadly he never produced any spring space maps, but if he had, the new methodology would hqve made them far prettier than anything currently seen.
The current OTA methodology applied to spring leaves still a lot more to be desired, even the better of the OTA FF maps followed what I outlined in part 1
Ironically the map that applies the principles of part 1 best in spring is not a space map at all
Stratos is the pinnacle of spring space maps despite it not being a space map at all.
However, one retort space mappers in spring throw abck is this image:
which was quickly countered by sinbad, who ahd a marvellous fix:
This was rejected as it required skinning the ground with feature models, and might look odd from terain deformation, but it was silly because the whole idea of building on asteroids is silly to begin with. Why do you need to build a solar colelctor ontop of a manmade paltform? Is that not innefficient? A waste of resources?
Sinbad continued this idea and got good results with it but his examples where poor and thus he was forgotten and ignored.And as it is, space mappers put too much stuff in their maps, with all this stuff how is it we can see space at all?
The whole concept of large platforms andlots of asteroids is poor, and it lead to lots of OTA FF maps that look very similair. Indeed they dont look realistic and as can be seen from the minimaps further up they look similair in spring too. But most of all they arent necessary.
