Modeling the moon of jupiter "europa" - a real area!

[meme_1]

Hello,
is someone able to create a map so that we can fight on the jupiter moon europa? Here are some satelit pictures of that very interesting moon: (There may be alien wreckage see the 2001 and 2010 movies)
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... 0806175136

And better perhaps:
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... 0210220230

Maybe the most interesting:
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... 0227173141

That would be great!

The whole surface and propably the whole moon is one of water and ice. the trenches are iceshelves, tectonically broken and drifted, or crushed together. Like a frozen sea with an surface of ice, manifoldly crushed and frozen again. In some directions like an highway, in other directions nearly unpassable. Eroded by sublimation.

A link to the wiki page:
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_%28moon%29

The first picture is an impact crater called "pywill" - th crater is looking like a gunshot into a window.

edited size

[The Yak]

Here's a link to the map dev. wiki: http://springrts.com/wiki/Map_development

Have at er. If you actually want this there's nothing stopping you from making it yourself.

[PicassoCT]

Looks really really sweet though.

As with any larger endavour, similar things have been tried before.. although not with the new reflective mapping...

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... ilit=Lordo

[AF]

They're pretty but lets imagine what gameplay on such a map would actually be like, either the map would be perfectly flat, very big, or nightmarishly bump/uneven

[PicassoCT]

yes, if we ever would take realism to the extreme it would. But you know like everyone else we dont. We modify it slightly.. still it would make for some nice alien sceneray. And if you add a little modificator to the map, you could even make tiles were units have a hard time slowing down (every unit deaccelerator-value -0.3) :D

[Rumpelstiltskin]

What AF said plus youd get easily lost when looking at it from gameplay zoom level.
You'll be unsure where you are on the map since the terrain is similar and monotone.

What one can do is suck in an impression of the terrain and create a proper map using the color palette from the screenshots posted above...

[AF]

You'd also have issues figuring out wether a slope is a rise or a fall towards you, the whole concave vs convex issue

[KaiserJ]

ignoring the nature of the topography of the moon itself, the color scheme and geology is certainly interesting and could surely be incorporated into a functional map

[Johannes]

We already have Xantheterra, which is kinda horrible for the reasons stated though some do like it.

But sure, experiment with alien color schemes, there's not too much of that around.

[PicassoCT]

i would make for a nice hexfarmtype gameplay though.. with a ocean below.. maybe just make a better ice hexfarm skin that gets accepted by the BigZ

[meme_1]

Well...

I guess that the aproach to imagine, what it would be like to be there, create a highmap near to the orginal and make textures that are close to the photos is a good one. Shurely it would not be neccesary to model every crack there. The size of the factorys are assumed to be "small" so that they can be build nearly everywhere. Better to simplify, I guess.

Interesting: I have no clue how to slow down units on a plane. As you have read, there are some plains that are covered with ice-dust, or snow, that was produced by the impact of pywill. Units would indeed be slowed down there!

Refering to the other sites (not pywill): I imagine it to be quit interesting to develop strategies on a site, where units can drive fast in one direction, but not rectangular. One should enshure that driving units can do it at least along the biger cracks. Where you can find shelter on some spots from atillery, and trenches at nearly every location, but not in every direction, could give advantage for defenders. The eruptions, that have formed frozen hills at some spots, could possibly have some ressources in them.
I guess there must be at least some metal resources present on the surface, perhaps wrecked units. In pywill they would be propably most dense in the crater, asteroids often are made of iron.

Shurely, there must be took care that building a base can be done at several spots on the map, because this is an assumption of the game itself. Therefore some modifications on every "real" map should enshure that. I guess, then it is fun.

Myself, I could perhaps make it to create such a map, but I am afraid that it would cost a long time, and that it wouldn't simply be good. Therefore, if someone feels the creativity for that, please do it :) (There are many fantastic maps. I know I couldn't compare with the authors of these maps.)

Cheers,
C