A pair of map ideas (pictures)

[Forboding Angel]

Ye olde lightmap

saklightmap.jpg

Saved at a horrid 25% jpg quality so that I could actually attach it

(226.83 KiB) Downloaded 27 times

[Beherith]

The depth where flash and subs can cross is -15 to -20.

I made the first map, just missing some trees, ill upload it tomorrow.

[smoth]

OMG HAO ARE YOU GETTING THE HEIGHT FIELDS IN!?! Beherit pm me on how to do this please.

[Forboding Angel]

O_o

[smoth]

I tried importing one of my height fields into the editor and it did some very weird shit. So don't O_o at me.

[Machiosabre]

aren't these ideas just oki-river and verdant?

[hunterw]

The depth where flash and subs can cross is -15 to -20.

I made the first map, just missing some trees, ill upload it tomorrow.

win

are you using the world in conflict map editor for the texture?

[Forboding Angel]

I tried importing one of my height fields into the editor and it did some very weird shit. So don't O_o at me.

there are 2 ways to do it

greyscale it
blow it up to final texture map size, run through design map editor
generate heightmap

greyscale it
blow it up to 1/8th the size of the final texture
ignore design map, run calc wizard for all the other maps

There aren't a whole lot of ways to screw up the process, especially if you bother to look in the bundysoft wiki which is very well kept and put together.

THat's why you got O_o


BTW, n1 berith, looks neato. Wish I had known that you had already done it tho, otherwise I wouldn't have wasted the time

[Gota]

Behe pelase change water texture it looks very repetetive.
Besides that,win.

[ralphie]

THat's why you got O_o

O_o he's not talking about L3DT

[smoth]

forb you ass, I wasn't talking about l3dt. I have world machine LURK MOAR, I am trying to use the WICEDitor.



beherith, that happens to my heightfield. :\ any ideas?

[Forboding Angel]

Now exactly how the fuck would I know that genius?

FFS

[smoth]

beherith uses the WICED tool for his maps. He said so in a thread earlier. again, lurk more.

Also, heightmaps having to be greyscale is a bit common sense. You also know I never use l3dt. I didn't like the tool.

[Forboding Angel]

That screenie didn't belie that he was using the WIC editor.

I know that he used it once, that doesn't mean he's going to use it all of the time.

[Saktoth]

Oh stop arguing kids your daddies and mommies love you both equally.

Thanks forb, you can always release yours if you like but since its not finished i guess you probably wont want to bother, thanks for the effort!

On metal placement: I try to set the starting mexes up so it scales from 3 players up to 6, with an ideal being 4 players with 3 mexes each (12 per side). I dislike maps where player count is fixed by mexes. This might mean more walking to cap starting mexes but meh. There are 4 kbot-only mexes (2 in the starting position so you can just take it with com), 2 shared land/sea mexes, 4 more under range control of sea, 2 in hover/amphib spots, 4 in air spots, etc. So, i tried to consider it carefully.

On this just being okiriver/verdant: Verdant ill have to check out i dont know it/cant find it on UF. As for OkiRiver, no, though i can see the superficial resemblance. This map is specifically designed to integrate all forms of combat- oki river is mostly flat, large (20x20), and featureless, with island hopping in the middle. Its really only a sea/land map. Both of my maps are designed as no larger than 16x16. My second map has a large air/AT only area and a kbot-favoured area, something oki doesnt have.

Behe: Thanks! It looks really great, and you even look like you got all the slopes right, and nice texture. If you could start up CA and make sure hovercraft can travel up the beaches (Hovers have lower slope in CA, and the beaches shouldnt really be very steep anyway) that'd be neat. Look forward to a release.

[Forboding Angel]

Well it was pretty close to done, but there's no sense re-inventing the wheel. I was just bored tbh

Besides it seems that though behe knows what he's doing

[Warlord Zsinj]

Erm, one criticism I guess I have, and this isn't a specific one but a general one that I find of a lot of (but not all) spring maps;

We've got a super sexy engine for making 3D mountains, yet most maps tend to go for mountains that aren't all that much more advanced then many of the maps you'll typically see in the likes of red alert or C&C1:



In otherwords, the design is ultimately boolean, and the heightmap more or less follows this. You've typically got two perfectly flat height levels divided by an impassable cliff, with convenient ramps linking the two levels.

In Spring we've got an opportunity to make very different and interesting levels in height (the aircraft problems still give you plenty of room to move in terms of height), and the detail allowed for by texture stretching still gives you the opportunity to make level transitions that are more complicated, more interesting, and more realistic then straight up-and-down cliff transitions.

The map concepts shown in this thread are not actually the biggest culprits of this that I've seen - but they're definitely falling into the category of not really pushing the visual or gameplay impact of the heightmap, in my opinion.

[Beherith]

Erm, one criticism I guess I have, and this isn't a specific one but a general one that I find of a lot of (but not all) spring maps;

We've got a super sexy engine for making 3D mountains, yet most maps tend to go for mountains that aren't all that much more advanced then many of the maps you'll typically see in the likes of red alert or C&C1:

In otherwords, the design is ultimately boolean, and the heightmap more or less follows this. You've typically got two perfectly flat height levels divided by an impassable cliff, with convenient ramps linking the two levels.

In Spring we've got an opportunity to make very different and interesting levels in height (the aircraft problems still give you plenty of room to move in terms of height), and the detail allowed for by texture stretching still gives you the opportunity to make level transitions that are more complicated, more interesting, and more realistic then straight up-and-down cliff transitions.

The map concepts shown in this thread are not actually the biggest culprits of this that I've seen - but they're definitely falling into the category of not really pushing the visual or gameplay impact of the heightmap, in my opinion.

Yes, I have tried making the mountains much nicer, but mapconv's -l lowpass filter really smoothes out all your detail, and you just have to use it if your using an 8 bit greyscale image cause otherwise it terraces like mad.

Can someone tell me precisely in what format will mapconv eat 16bit heightmaps?

For this map my excuse is that I think having more binary heights results in better playability, cause I love being able to build up on unpassable cliffs, and it makes for more interesting use of even lower range units. Otherwise, there is no excuse for not using things like bryces erosion tool, or even a free tool like GeoControl.

Highly detailed mountains will result in less tricky buildable spots.

On the other hand, so far from all the texturing engines I have used (bryce, carrara, l3dt, WICed) only bryce actually textured the eroded and heavily detailed heightmap like its supposed to look in reality. But that thing takes freaking forever to texture (8 hours for a 12*12 map on a strong PC is very very slow)

WICed I love because it took me 3 hours to make this map from Saktoths heighmap example to the screenshot. It has a very great terrain editing tool, which, even though it can only use 513*513 heightmaps, thankfully uses 16 bit ones and has tools like smooth, slope, and a great passability visualizer, which make editing it in realtime 3d a breeze. Texturing on the fly is also excellent, you can just recalc the texture for a small 1024*1024 pixel batch in under 30 secs so you can fool around with the texture generating options for the best results.

If anyone is interested, ill start a thread on how to make easy spring maps with WICed

Edit: yaa, I know about the water texture being repetitive, gonna try some different seeds for the texture splatter, but it doesnt look bad at all when zoomed in to actual playing levels.

Also, if CA hovers have the slope tolerance of BA vecs, then yes, they can pass the beaches fine.

[SirArtturi]

In otherwords, the design is ultimately boolean, and the heightmap more or less follows this. You've typically got two perfectly flat height levels divided by an impassable cliff, with convenient ramps linking the two levels.

The map concepts shown in this thread are not actually the biggest culprits of this that I've seen - but they're definitely falling into the category of not really pushing the visual or gameplay impact of the heightmap, in my opinion.

Now this is a matter of adjusting the height when compiling. So then it means that maps would be a lot higher in footprints, meaning deeper slopes and higher ridges and so on. To make this work you would need to make bigger maps in width and lenghts. Otherwise I doubt even you wouldnt like the gameplay.

I really understand what you are after but i dont see much solutions to improve the realistic aspect without lacking the gameplay.

So Even though you had nicely detailed greyscale heightmap with lot of variety it wouldn't improve the looks unless you'd make the heights over 500 and map bigger than 16x16. And in my opinion the gameplay really becomes quite poor after that; Hills would be neither too steep or too big, distances would make it play slow and so on...

[Gota]

You cant make extrmely sophisticated eightmaps and mountsins because when the terrain is full of narrow passages and many random places where units cant cross you get a ver y messy gameplay where you cant predict how your untis will have t omove and thus you can randomly lose them.

Maps arent meant to be works of visual art they are meant to be fun and playable thus you have to have pretty extreme differences of either unpassable terrain passable terrain only passable for a certain kind of units but not another or have very clear places where units can or cannot move.