New Map - Terra

[hunterw]

DOWNLOAD LINK BUTTON (CLICK HERE)

IF YOU HAVE BETA TESTED THIS MAP YOU NEED TO DELETE YOUR BETA VERSION OR BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN!!!!!!!1111111111




overhead:



metal:



vehicle F2:



bot F2:














Terra is a very barren canyonland-themed 12 x 14 tourney-style map that fits 2 to 6 players.

Yeah, so? What's different?

A couple of things:

-Wind is 1 to 25, making them profitable to build, but unreliable. Don't be dumb and build wind farms exclusively, because you might find your boy caught with his pants down when the wind dies.

-Three strengths of metal spots. Here are numbers for a BA metal extractor:
4 high-yield center spots: +5.4 each
10 hilltop spots: +2.4 each
53 ground spots: +1.6 each
Those four center spots are worth ~3 and a half regular spots, so they should be highly contested!

This map is designed to be played from top to bottom, but left to right will work as well. There are designated starts on all four corners, although starting in the middle and pushing to the closest of the four high-yield spots may prove to be a good tactic...

[Decimator]

Interesting, loaded it up and it looks like it'll play well in E&E. I'll have to host it tonight.

Edit: looked at it a little more, and noticed that GD lvl2 constructors couldn't get onto some of the hills. If that could be fixed, it would be a wonderful map for E&E. As it is, we can still reach those, it's just more difficult.

[RogerN]

Edit: looked at it a little more, and noticed that GD lvl2 constructors couldn't get onto some of the hills. If that could be fixed, it would be a wonderful map for E&E. As it is, we can still reach those, it's just more difficult.

It looks to me like the hill tops are intentionally inaccessible to ground units. Gotta use aircraft or spiders.

[Neddie]

Edit: looked at it a little more, and noticed that GD lvl2 constructors couldn't get onto some of the hills. If that could be fixed, it would be a wonderful map for E&E. As it is, we can still reach those, it's just more difficult.

It looks to me like the hill tops are intentionally inaccessible to ground units. Gotta use aircraft or spiders.

The scourage of limited playability strikes again! Can we airdrop the GD constructors there, or does it auto-revert their position, Deci?

[j5mello]

airdrop should be viable as the terrain ain't that wacky

[Ishach]

I tested this map a few times and its really good for 1v1

[Forboding Angel]

Looks pretty neat. I have one request however...

Hunterw, will you please rerender it in high res with bumpmapping on? It would look really neat.

Just do it this way, import your hff file into l3dt, resize it to the exact size that you would use from compiling in spring - 1 pixel (so that l3dt renders it at the correct size.

Process attributes map at 4x res (if your comp isn't that spiffy, turn on 512 mosaic mapping)
terrain normals 4x res
light map (make sure to set the light source to come from the correct direction) 8x res (use mosaic tiling for this part definately)
Terrain 8x res (mosaic tiling here as well).

Unless I'm mistaken that is the stock desert climate from l3dt yes? If so, then send me your heightmap and I will render it for you and pm you a link via yousendit.com.

The blurryness is very visually unattractive, and it could look pretty killer!


Edit: Forgot to mention... That's a very nice custom detailtex there, fits nicely.

[smoth]

I really would like to see a nicer texture though. this one is just too muddy.

[Decimator]

Got a chance to play a few games on this tonight. It plays very well in E&E, so I'd suggest improving the texture as the gameplay is pretty solid.

[Forboding Angel]

Another issue, unit lighting is way to dark. Unrealistically so, could you lightern it up for us please? This map plays really well in EE btw. Good job!

[hunterw]

Process attributes map at 4x res (if your comp isn't that spiffy, turn on 512 mosaic mapping)
terrain normals 4x res
light map (make sure to set the light source to come from the correct direction) 8x res (use mosaic tiling for this part definately)
Terrain 8x res (mosaic tiling here as well).

I did:

attributes @ 4x
normals @ 8x
light @ 8x
terrain @ 8x

with no mosaic anywhere. Doesn't seem like mosaic would matter one way or the other - I have enough ram so I don't use em, but maybe I'm mistaken.

I did overwrite the referenced sand with my own sand, and modify the strata .png and strata strengths in the climate, but neither of those should cause the entire texture to be muddied, so I'm not sure what did it really. I'm not too worried about it - I'll play around with L3DT and find out wtf is wrong before I do the next bigass 4v4 map. This map can sit around and be ugly cause it's just a bare-bones 1v1 and really what it's geared for is tourney style gameplay. If someone finds a huge problem with gameplay and it needs a new version I'll fix the texture though!

[smoth]

Cool, I will look forward to the next one then!

[Forboding Angel]

ahh ok I know the problem then

aaron must have not set bump maps the way that I do. Gimmie an hour or so and I'll upload an revised default desert climate.

*me goes off to work*

[Forboding Angel]

Uh oh. This is gonna take more work than I feel like doing. There are 11 land types with a zillion different texture blends. My climates have 4 or 5 layers, with abotu 4 blends per layer.

Oh boy. Have you considered making your own climate? It would honestly be better/easier than me trying to get this looking good.

[Ishach]

I like the plain colour, you cant get terrain confused with units at any zoom

[Forboding Angel]

I like the plain colour, you cant get terrain confused with units at any zoom

That's not what I was talking about at all...

[hunterw]

I bet what did it was the 4x attributes. I think when working with strata you need a per-pixel attributes map.

[Forboding Angel]

actually, I believe it's probably the lack of proper bumpmapping that did it(not your fault, I actually looked at the climate itself and was slightly agast).

Trust me, you do not wanna use per pixel *shudders*. It takes years to finish a map using that.

Tonight I'll try to set you up a desert climate using those textures while using one of my climates as a base. Should yield good results. Can you tell me the filename of your custom texture that you used for the ground?

[LordMatt]

Looks like a good map.

[Forboding Angel]

Hunterw, Workin on that climate. It'll be a little bit, but hopefully soon. BTW when I give you this, I suggest you use it as a template for other climates. If you read the wiki on the l3dt site there is a tutorial for creating normal maps easily with l3dt. I suggest you read it for further referance.