I put some extra shading into the texture map as I wanted a high sun but that made the map look rather flat. I have lost count of the number of times I have rendered and coverted this map, including overlaying a satelite picture, I thought it looked better this way. If storm or Gnome will get in touch I can sort out the upload, its not huge ~22Mb you can try it for yourselves then we can discuss the game play issues.
But his maps generally play better than the straight-from-satellite textures, and they look good as they are - I think the near-photo realistic maps look a bit out of place, especially up against the low-poly TA stuff.
It's a difficult compromise; often the best looking maps have the worst gameplay. On the one hand you have people like Paulo putting out maps which don't look too crash hot, but have excellent pre-planned gameplay, and then you have extremely realistic maps such as this one, or some of mother's maps, which often look fantastic, but don't always play that well (like the lack of building areas issue in this map).
I'd have to say aGorm, and perhaps zwzsg are probably doing the best so far in terms of balancing gameplay and looks...
in all honesty I have harldly made any maps for this version of spring, Im doing lots of test maps with new features and stuff.
However I'm now determind to do CorePyramid again, with all the gr8 new stuff, and I bet I can get it down to 5 megs! Despite the fact it will look sooo good and you'll all be drooling over it. I promise.
(And yes... the current maps I've done are a bit bland but they still look good, thats being smart)
The new version of Death Valley will soon be ready,
New features and improvements include;
New textures - looks much better.
2 more start points - for bigger teams or different strategies.
New Metal map - to make the new start points viable.
Various tweaks - the stuff I cant remember just now.
Smaller - No no its still 16x16 but now its <10Mb YEAH!
Mmm, nice. I like the seperation between the mountain region and the valley/river region. Hopefully players are forced to duke it out among both areas with clever metal and geo placement...