So I've been learning how to make maps, and I felt like remaking Castles. Castles had a heap of cool stuff- a nice defensive fort feel, a decent 4-way FFA map, which we don't have enough of, while still being viable for teams, really soft sand that really shows up deformation and different deformation rates between its brick and its sand so that you can sometimes have bridges stretching intact into a totally destroyed (or now underwater) landscape.
Of course it had stupidly epic metal in the centre, which was underwater and hard to get into but always won the game, the castles were very spider and air vulnerable from all angles, it had a cloud metal map, and its defensive walls were often hard to use effectively.
I've been using Spring map editor because it is so incredibly simple and I am an impossible noob, sorry Behe.
I've tried to get into mapping a dozen times but the tools always take too long to adapt to and there was no streamlined export process, SME just made it too simple.Anyway, one thing I really love is (KaiserJ's?) preset pieces. They are perfect for a thing like Castles, and if you know how to use them, they can do amazing things to prevent your ground LoD from stuffing up your sharp edges, another problem that Castles had in spades. This is one of the reasons for all the black, it blends into the water and hides the LoD, but the only reason this is possible is the way the preset pieces work:
You can see the ramp starting to stuff up (and just how low the detail really is!) but the turrets stay intact.
I also didn't bother baking in any shadows or shading, because this map is all about deformation: I used some harsh sun settings and a lot of fine heightmap detail so that the landscape can really react dynamically.
Anyway, feedback from more experienced mappers is appreciated.
