http://www.rapidsharing.com/0bed6cce958 ... 8b114d7695
Mirror1:
http://s58.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2LOV ... POBJJIFW9E
My Huge, beautiful creation
Moderator: Moderators
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Forboding Angel
- Evolution RTS Developer
- Posts: 14673
- Joined: 17 Nov 2005, 02:43
My Huge, beautiful creation
Playtesting completed, primary download link:
http://www.rapidsharing.com/0bed6cce958 ... 8b114d7695
Mirror1:
http://s58.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2LOV ... POBJJIFW9E
http://www.rapidsharing.com/0bed6cce958 ... 8b114d7695
Mirror1:
http://s58.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2LOV ... POBJJIFW9E
Last edited by Forboding Angel on 12 Dec 2005, 01:21, edited 2 times in total.
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SwiftSpear
- Classic Community Lead
- Posts: 7287
- Joined: 12 Aug 2005, 09:29
Looking forward to future maps ...
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Forboding Angel
- Evolution RTS Developer
- Posts: 14673
- Joined: 17 Nov 2005, 02:43
well I rendered it for 28 x 28 but mapconv sucks and won't read a 900 mb image file (grrrr)
regretablly I had to scale it down to 20 x 20, but it's still plenty huge for a 5 vs 5
About the terrain... I am using l3dt, only 4 climates are included with it, and 3 of them suck.
I'm trying to hack togethers an evergreen climate, but I'm losing detail... So until I figure it out, the terrains will be much the same. BTW the atmospheric changes do a lot for it.
Also, the time of day depicted here (at least I tried to) is about 5 - 6 am in the summer, when it's just starting to get light and the mist of dew is starting to evaporate.
edit:
I forgot to mention something...
The file size is very large. Unfortunately it is impossible to scale that down.
I prefer quality in my maps. It's easy enough to slap 2 textures in spring and let it handle terrain generation, but it's fugly.
Road to war is a perfect example of this. I'm not slamming the map, hell, I play on it all the time. But it is rather ugly. I'm not slamming decimator on this. He's a very cool guy, and road to war is a great map, but I'm more into asthetics AND gameplay, not just gameplay.
So unfortunately 56kers will hate my guts, but oh well.
regretablly I had to scale it down to 20 x 20, but it's still plenty huge for a 5 vs 5
About the terrain... I am using l3dt, only 4 climates are included with it, and 3 of them suck.
I'm trying to hack togethers an evergreen climate, but I'm losing detail... So until I figure it out, the terrains will be much the same. BTW the atmospheric changes do a lot for it.
Also, the time of day depicted here (at least I tried to) is about 5 - 6 am in the summer, when it's just starting to get light and the mist of dew is starting to evaporate.
edit:
I forgot to mention something...
The file size is very large. Unfortunately it is impossible to scale that down.
I prefer quality in my maps. It's easy enough to slap 2 textures in spring and let it handle terrain generation, but it's fugly.
Road to war is a perfect example of this. I'm not slamming the map, hell, I play on it all the time. But it is rather ugly. I'm not slamming decimator on this. He's a very cool guy, and road to war is a great map, but I'm more into asthetics AND gameplay, not just gameplay.
So unfortunately 56kers will hate my guts, but oh well.
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Michilus_nimbus
- Posts: 634
- Joined: 19 Nov 2004, 20:38
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Felix the Cat
- Posts: 2383
- Joined: 15 Jun 2005, 17:30
As I said in game today - the map file is way too big... really. Some of us don't have connections available that can do 30 MB downloads instantaneously.
Tell you what - let's compromise. Give me a day's advance notice when you're putting out a huge map, and I'll arrange to go war driving the next day to download it off of someone else's ultra-high-speed connection!
By the way, you can shave off a whole 50 kilobytes by ZIPping the map!
Tell you what - let's compromise. Give me a day's advance notice when you're putting out a huge map, and I'll arrange to go war driving the next day to download it off of someone else's ultra-high-speed connection!
By the way, you can shave off a whole 50 kilobytes by ZIPping the map!
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Forboding Angel
- Evolution RTS Developer
- Posts: 14673
- Joined: 17 Nov 2005, 02:43
@ felix
sdz = wip format
sd7 = 7zip format
Pros to sd7:
Shaves off about 7 megs
cons:
The uber compression make opening the maps take longer as well as pathing etc, plus the minimap will load very slowly.
Pros to sdz:
Minimap and map file loads in spring much faster than sd7, zip is easier to work with than 7zip.
Cons:
Larger file size
Reasons I'm not going to change it:
1. I like my maps looking professional. Many spring maps look absolutely fugly and I refuse to lower my standards. Any retard can use a 32 x 32 texture and let spring do the terrain for them, but it looks terrible.
2. Tell you what, when you see me post a new map and you want it... Pick a time when you will be leaving home or busy for 15 minutes (I think that's about how long it took for you to get it) or so and set it to download.
3. I make maps firstly for me. Second to my own tastes is the community. I like having my maps played as I feel that they are of some of the best quality around.
4. Most people on the internet nowdays are on broadband. Get used to it. Hell many OTA maps are over 30 megs in size, so why are you complaining again? I am on roadrunner cable and I can download 30 megs in about 15 - 45 seconds. I know that you are on DSL; if you would simply go to http://www.speedguide.net (like I suggested) and optimize your connection you would be downloading much faster as well, not to mention lagging less in game.
5. While I'm gonna sound like an asshat for this... I simply don't care. It is not required that you download or play on my maps. I am not forcing you. I appreciate the support though, and I do try to keep the file sizes down, but sometimes it is simply unadvoidable (spelling?) and I apologize for that. I sympathize with all narrowband users, but I am not prepared to sacrafice quality for filesize.
I just spent several hours dling freespace 2 from underdogs at 8 kbps (8 kilobits / 8 = 1 kilobyte per second) and it's a 219 meg file. Trust me I understand.
I am not trying to slam you or dog you in any way, I'm simply trying to convey my feelings on the subject.
sdz = wip format
sd7 = 7zip format
Pros to sd7:
Shaves off about 7 megs
cons:
The uber compression make opening the maps take longer as well as pathing etc, plus the minimap will load very slowly.
Pros to sdz:
Minimap and map file loads in spring much faster than sd7, zip is easier to work with than 7zip.
Cons:
Larger file size
Reasons I'm not going to change it:
1. I like my maps looking professional. Many spring maps look absolutely fugly and I refuse to lower my standards. Any retard can use a 32 x 32 texture and let spring do the terrain for them, but it looks terrible.
2. Tell you what, when you see me post a new map and you want it... Pick a time when you will be leaving home or busy for 15 minutes (I think that's about how long it took for you to get it) or so and set it to download.
3. I make maps firstly for me. Second to my own tastes is the community. I like having my maps played as I feel that they are of some of the best quality around.
4. Most people on the internet nowdays are on broadband. Get used to it. Hell many OTA maps are over 30 megs in size, so why are you complaining again? I am on roadrunner cable and I can download 30 megs in about 15 - 45 seconds. I know that you are on DSL; if you would simply go to http://www.speedguide.net (like I suggested) and optimize your connection you would be downloading much faster as well, not to mention lagging less in game.
5. While I'm gonna sound like an asshat for this... I simply don't care. It is not required that you download or play on my maps. I am not forcing you. I appreciate the support though, and I do try to keep the file sizes down, but sometimes it is simply unadvoidable (spelling?) and I apologize for that. I sympathize with all narrowband users, but I am not prepared to sacrafice quality for filesize.
I just spent several hours dling freespace 2 from underdogs at 8 kbps (8 kilobits / 8 = 1 kilobyte per second) and it's a 219 meg file. Trust me I understand.
I am not trying to slam you or dog you in any way, I'm simply trying to convey my feelings on the subject.
To make your minimap load faster, you can put a minimap file in the .sdz/7 file. Im not sure exactly how it works, but apparently if you include a file called mini.dds in the archive, the lobby will load that instead of generating one. It might work with other file types like bmp and jpg, so tis worth testing. If you work it out, reply back here and I will add it to one of the tutorials.
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SwiftSpear
- Classic Community Lead
- Posts: 7287
- Joined: 12 Aug 2005, 09:29
Look at some of A gorm's maps. They look really good while at the same time aren't very big. The trick is finding tiles that you CAN spare, and using them. For instance, you have alot of grass feilds on this map, get 3-4 grass tiles and spread them over all the grass that doesn't absolutly need to be different (like the cliff walls). I can understand your desire to not make ugly maps, I don't really like playing ugly maps myself, but at the same time it's just bad mapping to not compress at least to some degree. 30 meg is a HUGE map file for a 28x28 map.
Any retard can grab a terrain generator and let it do the terrain for them. But it plays absolutely terrible.Forboding Angel wrote:1. I like my maps looking professional. Many spring maps look absolutely fugly and I refuse to lower my standards. Any retard can use a 32 x 32 texture and let spring do the terrain for them, but it looks terrible.
And 30Mb is the file size of more than fifty Azure Ramparts! Fifty! And I dare to say, that Azure Rampart or Core Prime Industrial Area don't look fifty times fuglier.
Even stronger, you map takes the same filesize as ... 224 times the map Over Crude Water.
Professional game maker don't ship games with a hundred map weighting 30Mb each.
Good spring map maker know how to manually tweak the texture map so as to achieve stunning looks with small filesize.
But of course just letting a terrain generator run by itself then tell all 56kers to **** *** is so much easier!
Oh and visible contour line certainly doesn't make your map look good.
Ummmm... just thought I'd pop in and say a few words...
The map looks nice (not my sort of cup of tea and apparently not zwzsg either but I can see that it certanly is detailed and nice looking). However I have to ask.... what compression were you running map conv on? 0.1? 0? 30 megs is crazy talk. I mean... come on, if you work it out as size per a square screen, for every screen your using 750 kbts. thats just madness when you take a map like CorePyramid, which is teh same size but only 3 meg!! Hell man acid bridge has a 24 meg sky box, and tahst only 4 meg to download!
Basicly if you tile properly, noone will notice the fact that teher are tiles and the map will look just as spiffy, only you wont get anyone complaining about teh fiel size.
Just so you know, I actully have a 2 meg line and even I would not download it normaly. Its not even a no no for 56kers. 30 megs just of putting. And honestly... just a few tiles can make it so much better.
aGorm
The map looks nice (not my sort of cup of tea and apparently not zwzsg either but I can see that it certanly is detailed and nice looking). However I have to ask.... what compression were you running map conv on? 0.1? 0? 30 megs is crazy talk. I mean... come on, if you work it out as size per a square screen, for every screen your using 750 kbts. thats just madness when you take a map like CorePyramid, which is teh same size but only 3 meg!! Hell man acid bridge has a 24 meg sky box, and tahst only 4 meg to download!
Basicly if you tile properly, noone will notice the fact that teher are tiles and the map will look just as spiffy, only you wont get anyone complaining about teh fiel size.
Just so you know, I actully have a 2 meg line and even I would not download it normaly. Its not even a no no for 56kers. 30 megs just of putting. And honestly... just a few tiles can make it so much better.
aGorm
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Forboding Angel
- Evolution RTS Developer
- Posts: 14673
- Joined: 17 Nov 2005, 02:43
hehehe
I struck a nerve huh?
mini.dds hasn't worked, I dunno why.
I will attempt to compile at a much greater compression.
And stop taking stuff personally, I say tomato, you say tomato. Different views on things.
Ya know the wierd thing. I can't figure out why it didn't compress smaller in the first place. The floor of the map is using the same tile.
About retards and terrain generators... Not every retard can draw well. and from what I've seen, rendered terrain tends to look better than drawn terrain.
VIsible contours don't look good? Well then I'll just make it one tile then /sarcasm. Without the contours you wouldn't have a clue what was lowland or mountain unless you were in something other than top down view. There is not reason to attack me simply because I don't share your views.
Ever played 2 valleys? Great map and wired is an awesome guy, but untill I viewed it in total war view I thought the sides were low instead of way high.
River dale come to mind. The section in the middle is actually a lower area, but from top down it looks like highland to me. River dale is still one of my favorite maps though. Props to whoever made that BTW. It looks to me as if it were drawn and for that all I can say is DAMN! Very beautifully done.
In closing I don't agree with some of you, but I will give some of these suggestions a shot.
THanks to agorm, swiftspear, and maelstrom for your comments (see, you didn't flame me, and what you said was constructive for the most part).
zwzsg, OVER CRUDE WATER IS 1 F@CKING TEXTURE! Azure is 2!
To me over crude water is cool. It's a metal map. It looks like a metal map and plays like one.
Azure ramparts, well heh. Lets just be decent and say that I don't care for that map myself. BTW professional forum goers know how to give constructive criticisms, rather than spouting a load from their mouth every time they open it. BTW running a terrain generator at high res with a 16000 x 160000 texture is nerve wracking. It's annoying and takes forever. You have to make sure that your Heightmap is perfect before you do it.
You know what? I can't tell you how bad I would love to flame your ass till kingdom come, but I will simplify it with me saying that: You are a little quick to get your feelings damaged, I don't care for the flame you lit on me.
With the retard thing I was making a generalization that was not meant to be taken literally. You made is personal. My solution is... if you can't post constructive criticism next time, THEN KEEP YOUR TRAP shut.
/me goes off to try compiling with an obscene amount of compression.
I struck a nerve huh?
mini.dds hasn't worked, I dunno why.
I will attempt to compile at a much greater compression.
And stop taking stuff personally, I say tomato, you say tomato. Different views on things.
Ya know the wierd thing. I can't figure out why it didn't compress smaller in the first place. The floor of the map is using the same tile.
About retards and terrain generators... Not every retard can draw well. and from what I've seen, rendered terrain tends to look better than drawn terrain.
VIsible contours don't look good? Well then I'll just make it one tile then /sarcasm. Without the contours you wouldn't have a clue what was lowland or mountain unless you were in something other than top down view. There is not reason to attack me simply because I don't share your views.
Ever played 2 valleys? Great map and wired is an awesome guy, but untill I viewed it in total war view I thought the sides were low instead of way high.
River dale come to mind. The section in the middle is actually a lower area, but from top down it looks like highland to me. River dale is still one of my favorite maps though. Props to whoever made that BTW. It looks to me as if it were drawn and for that all I can say is DAMN! Very beautifully done.
In closing I don't agree with some of you, but I will give some of these suggestions a shot.
THanks to agorm, swiftspear, and maelstrom for your comments (see, you didn't flame me, and what you said was constructive for the most part).
zwzsg, OVER CRUDE WATER IS 1 F@CKING TEXTURE! Azure is 2!
To me over crude water is cool. It's a metal map. It looks like a metal map and plays like one.
Azure ramparts, well heh. Lets just be decent and say that I don't care for that map myself. BTW professional forum goers know how to give constructive criticisms, rather than spouting a load from their mouth every time they open it. BTW running a terrain generator at high res with a 16000 x 160000 texture is nerve wracking. It's annoying and takes forever. You have to make sure that your Heightmap is perfect before you do it.
You know what? I can't tell you how bad I would love to flame your ass till kingdom come, but I will simplify it with me saying that: You are a little quick to get your feelings damaged, I don't care for the flame you lit on me.
With the retard thing I was making a generalization that was not meant to be taken literally. You made is personal. My solution is... if you can't post constructive criticism next time, THEN KEEP YOUR TRAP shut.
/me goes off to try compiling with an obscene amount of compression.
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Forboding Angel
- Evolution RTS Developer
- Posts: 14673
- Joined: 17 Nov 2005, 02:43
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Forboding Angel
- Evolution RTS Developer
- Posts: 14673
- Joined: 17 Nov 2005, 02:43