Link to Springfiles.com
The project started with two objectives:
- Play around more with voidground/voidwater
- Make a metal map that looks better than OTA style
The two main limitations I noticed:
First, at different zoom/viewing distance levels steps and spikes appear on straight lines.
Second, especially at steep corners one pixel in the diffuse map is way too big to get a smooth line (and voidground doesn't allow to hide this with blurring; visible especially at the sides of the ramps).
Remarks:
As on Violet Rampart, I had to displace the diffuse map with respect to the height map file so that both match after compilation (this time 33px to the right in the coordinate system of the diffuse map).
I decided to keep the "shinyness" (specular) low and the map overall a bit on the dark side to not disturb in-game. Grayish units on a grayish map, you know...
Vents: they are not 100% symmetric to match with the texture (but the difference should be negligible in-game). In addition, I included bitmaps for smoke from Spring itself with a slight color shift to the red to adjust the vent smoke color to the map color scheme (most people probably won't notice any change, so it also shouldn't have annoying side effects on games using these).
Playing with possible map features, I use (for me a first) a normal map and a lightemission map. While the normal map works quite well on the platforms and barricades, I could't get it to work as envisioned on the gratings. Initially I had hoped to accomplish a better 3D effect at, resp. around, the holes. There was also a skyreflectmod map, but it ate half of my fps performance. So, for the sake of playability I dumped it again (file is included it anybody wants to try).
I didn't find a lightning setting where I was happy with advmapshading on and off (off, the map looks now a bit too reddish).
I used only 2D programs: Inkscape (initial height map and some simple texture design), Krita (height map in 16bit) and Gimp (everything else). In the end, I guess the height map at the steep borders would have been easier to make using a 3D program.
Credits:
Two things helped tremendously to make it "shiny":
The beautiful Eta_Carinae_dark2 Skybox from Beherith and the following two great metal texture sets:
One from jylhis: http://jylhis.deviantart.com/art/Free-M ... -318314339
The second from p0ss: http://opengameart.org/content/rusted-m ... xture-pack (released under CC BY 3.0)
In addition, I again used some detail textures from Beherith's collection
The inspiration for the gratings on the ramps came from Yak's tests
As always, it uses the map blueprint container.