Spring RTS Engine

I think I might (possibly) get in trouble with this one, because it's a directly derivative work.

The Spring port was some crazy guy from the Early Days carefully porting that Bryce rendered map and heightmap, IIRC, then using some funny tricks to emulate it as best as possible, with the tech of the day. In many ways, it was the most faithful port of an OTA map ever made. I used to use it a lot to test NanoBlobs on, because that game was designed for small maps, and Ashap Plateau was one of the best-balanced maps for OTA.

However, the port had horrible lighting, and the bumps were treated like spikes, which both looked really ugly and seriously impeded movement. I just wasn't doing much mapping at all, other than making NanoArena.

But basically, if I released it with P.U.R.E., I'd be releasing a derivative that was based directly on OTA data, not just a loose concept, and while I don't think I'll get in trouble releasing it here, I do not want to risk it otherwise. It's safer, easier, and almost as fast to build an original heightmap, run it through WorldMachine / HeightMapTweak and paint it, frankly. I mean... it's 4 mirrored plateaus, with ramps. Not exactly a challenge to design, lol.

Do these metal values fit PURE?

No actually the original port of Ashap plateau was a direct rip from the OTA version using a 3rd party OTA map editor, hence the spikes.

Generally those kinds of maps look bad in spring as there is no back side to the hills, and the colour palette is 256 colours. It was far more fashionable to 'redux;' the map in a similar style but with an artistic twist, which is why we have our yellow sands of war, and a funky painted desert.

Fixed:
http://www.springfiles.com/show_file.php?id=2310

Argh thx for the retexture but plz in the future avoid releasing in such a strange manner...
I don't understand why you released it like that...
Did you intend on using it in PURE but than decided not to?
In any case the map is now fixed.

plz in the future

There won't be a 'future', man. I don't do OTA maps, and only made an exception for Ashap, because it's a classic.

hrey remake ring atoll pls thx

What about the rest of the classics?

I only made an exception for Ashap, because I used it so much when developing NanoBlobs.

I'm removing mining from P.U.R.E. entirely, as part of the general overhaul of the economics of the game, so my interest in metal patches, etc., is zero, because I'm not using that part of Spring any more. Sorry, it's really easy to do remakes from a heightmap, but I just don't have any interest in spending my time on this.

make painted dessert next

Heh. Strawberry fields and marmalade skies. Nothing like dessert, even if you can't eat it. Maybe call it "Just Desserts", and have players battle over floes of molten fudge, with pixelated whisps of cotton-candy snow gradually falling to the sugar-candy ground. That'd be a trip... where's PicassoCT when you need him to do something crazy-cool? Damn, I miss his crazy maps, even if they did hurt my poor PC.