Remove minimum map hardness

[zwzsg]

Fresh craters are round and smooth. Don't add noise, or they'll stop looking like craters!

[Beherith]

How bout just a leetle?

[Argh]

Sweet

[Gota]

Would be cool to have an option,as a map maker,to decide the color of some part of formed craters...
For example if its a snow map make the crater get a new texture that looks like plain land without snow...etc.

[JohannesH]

Would be cool to have an option,as a map maker,to decide the color of some part of formed craters...
For example if its a snow map make the crater get a new texture that looks like plain land without snow...etc.

Its a nice idea, atm its often really hard to even see a crater on some maps without f1/f2, or at least how deep it really is.

[FLOZi]

Would be cool to have an option,as a map maker,to decide the color of some part of formed craters...
For example if its a snow map make the crater get a new texture that looks like plain land without snow...etc.

Could be lua'd, from the map side, i think.

[Saktoth]

CA's craters are already pretty lumpy:


This is because every weapon craters, so the craters are never smooth affairs.

[Caydr]

This is a BA/AA design paradigm issue, not a Spring issue. I set craters to be minimized because at the time AA was initially released, many maps had extremely deformable terrain.

[Saktoth]

Yup!


They were not re-added to BA after caydr because of the impression that they seriously effect performance (they dont, very much...)

[Argh]

Last time I tested (well over a year ago), craters still substantially slowed down Spring because of re-pathing every time an event occurs.

So, did something get fixed that makes this no longer true? I haven't tested this in over a year, so if it's gotten a lot faster lately, I'd like to hear more about this.

As for the OP's request... I think that it'd be cooler to just allow certain weapons to build hills instead of digging craters, instead of it being a weird map "feature", but that's just me.

[Saktoth]

Last time I tested (well over a year ago), craters still substantially slowed down Spring because of re-pathing every time an event occurs.

So, did something get fixed that makes this no longer true? I haven't tested this in over a year, so if it's gotten a lot faster lately, I'd like to hear more about this.

Every second weapon in CA craters. Rapid fire ones, large AoE ones, they all crater. And you can see the result in the above pictures. So no, they dont seem to effect performance very much.

[Gota]

Too much cratering is also not good.
Visually it looks great but gameplay wise..
When each shot craters the ground a lot it gets annoying to control units on the battlefield.


Microing rocko when the ground is full of tiny craters...no thx.

It would be cool to have slightly bumpier craters cause on some maps,like Johan wrote,you cant even see when the ground is cratered.

[Jazcash]

On maps with 0 water, the default water texture should become greyish so when big noox hit ground, oil spurts up and sets all the units on fire amirite?

[smoth]

you are wrong, all those clones produce a lot of poo, and all of that is stored in giant under ground septic tanks. So it should be brown coming out the ground as septic tanks are ruptured and units are covered with flaming poo.

[rattle]

Im also not a fan of terraform, since its just apallingly ugly.

terraform could restore terrain to the original heightmap...

[Pxtl]

I tried a game of CTA (Classic TA) back before I started work on HA. Cratering made most units unable to pass through chokepoints simply because negotiating the pockmarked terrain would slow them up so much they'd be easy pickins.

[Saktoth]

Again, it works fine in CA.

Very occasionally, after like half an hour of intensive fighting over an area, the ground is so messed up that it starts to impede vehicles, but this makes it a perfect time to switch to bots, allowing you to exploit foxholes and such.

Its certainly no worse than clogging due to wrecks.

Anyway this is getting really off topic. What happened to my meltyheck?

[SirArtturi]

CA's craters are already pretty lumpy:


This is because every weapon craters, so the craters are never smooth affairs.

And how is that possible? I mean, the sand texture for craters...

In general, I like the terrain deformation, but as long as maps are not done by random generation or procedural methods, It just breaks the map design itself. Decals are different issue...

[CarRepairer]

CA's craters are already pretty lumpy:


This is because every weapon craters, so the craters are never smooth affairs.

And how is that possible? I mean, the sand texture for craters...

That's F1 heightmap view! The non-colorful kind.

[MidKnight]

This is turning out to be interesting. It seems that the check to keep the ground flat under a building is performed before the building gets destroyed by the explosion... So the ground is kept flat even if the building is destroyed by that very blast!

Will something be done about this anytime soon?