New 8 player map - Iceland v1

[Beherith]

Look:








Purely World Machine.

Download

[Forboding Angel]

Behe posts map, it's win. Nothing new here.

[Google_Frog]

This reminds me of Warcraft 3.

[hoijui]

... nice! :D

not too much on topic:
about the grass... i guess this is only the cheap texture version i am seeing there (e.g. in screen00230.jpg). it made me think: why do all the grass leaves start at the bottom of the texture? would it not look much better if they started at random heights? it might be able to destroy the 2D look of it, and trick one into seeing it as 3D.

[Beherith]

The way grass currently works is the following:

Close up, each patch of grass is rendered blade by blade. Then the engine renders the view of the grass at 16 different angles, and stores it to a texture. This texture is put on a billboard if the grass is out of close view distance.

[hoijui]

ahh thanks!
so ... i guess the billboard textures are created with a camera aligned to the axis then. to achieve what i suggested, the camera could be moved up and faced down a little. what do you think?

[Beherith]

Look at the billboard from straight down, youll see it has the correct behaviour.

[hoijui]

i neither have spring compiling setup, nor a PC where i have fiddled with settings for spring to run without --safemode.
but looking at the code, it looks like (at least in my outdated version of develop):

for (int a = 0; a < 16; ++a) {
glRotatef((a-1)*90/15.0f, 1, 0, 0);

so the angles are:
-6, 0, 6, ..., 78, 84

maybe they should start at a higher value (e.g. 18 instead of -6), or the grass is not rendered fully into the texture, thus gets cropped, which creates this effect of too many of the blades starting at the texture bottom. to me, it does not look correct for the angle in screen00230.jpg.
but i will be quiet now, as i am just an idea guy by now.

[knorke]

looks nice as expected, like the patches of green in the snow.
but the heightmap does two things i never liked in maps:
-in some spots the "layered trinagles" cliffs can be across a bit. Sometimes that is worth the effort it to get a con in reach of a good buildspot but it requires tiring use of F2 and clicking.
-Random unpassable lines/spots that trap units.

[Beherith]

Knorke, indeed it is, but you know my policy on visuals vs gameplay. I won't do the impassable typemap as it opens a whole new can of worms... If you can exploit the map, good for you, its the reward for being pro.

[Anarchid]

From what i can tell, it plays quite nice in zk 1v1. Only bad feature is that godde wins, maybe worth fix?

[knorke]

hm yes players might always find a way into "blocked off" areas.
but when there is a wide looking ramp with only a narrow useable section ...that is always annoying.
Even, or especially, to "non-pros."

I think in such cases it is ok to sacrifice a bit of visuals for smoother gameplay.

[luckywaldo7]

I love the hills you have going around the edges. Visually they create a great distinction as to where the 'playable' area is. Not just in the way that you can see 'hi, look, there are hills here', but the noisiness compared to the flat terrain makes the division of the battlefield subconsciously intuitive.

And I guess they look good when you are looking at them also. :D

From what i can tell, it plays quite nice in zk 1v1. Only bad feature is that godde wins, maybe worth fix?

Thanks; I am going to do terrible things with this.

[Beherith]

Knorke, you are right, that is worthy of a do-over. Too bad its so much work

[Mr. Bob]

The snow is a bit odd. Ideally, snow specularity should be almost unnoticeable, as light hits the snow and spreads throughout, rather than it hitting it as if it was a solid mass. (Which gives you smooth highlighting.)

What people usually do, and what I think works pretty well, is they drop specularity altogether, and simply make the diffuse of the snow ludicrously bright. Especially with an rts, where you're essentially never going to have an area where the geometry is complex enough to constitute more complex specularity. Then, turn down the ambient lighting so that the shadows are very contrasting. (Skyrim did this a lot.) The problem is that snow has a pretty intense sub surface that captures pretty much all of the light that makes it appear white, so its hard to light it correctly with solid polygons. Currently, it sort of looks like glazed frosting. But, if you fake it, it should look pretty sweet. Don't be afraid to make it fairly monotone, I guess. Dark contrasted shadows should take advantage of that.

Granted, I have no fucking idea how spring's shaders work, and I also don't code for shit, so this applies on my end. http://www.angelfoodcomic.com/wp-conten ... -doing.jpg

[Google_Frog]

The heightmap seems to be poor for gameplay, example in this thread. http://zero-k.info/Maps/Detail/26890