Spring RTS Engine

Heh, I like the simple solution. But I have a few small changes I want to make to the heightmap anyway, so I'll make another revision fairly soon that's 16-bit. I worked out a fairly easy way to do it with Photoshop and Wilbur (as far as I can tell, l3dt only does erosion in the designmap --> heightmap inflation). A nice side-effect is that the texture should look a bit better if calculated from a 16-bit heightfield in l3dt, because it won't find tiny jagged edges everywhere and go "look it's a cliff!!" I mean, the base textures won't be any more exciting, but the boundaries between them won't be so sharp in the wrong places.

Yeah I'm interested to see how it plays. I mean, I know how it plays between my brother and I, but I'm sure we're living in a metagame bubble. I think the layout discourages porcupining, but maybe not? Let me know if you try such a strategy.

smoth wrote:

Forboding Angel wrote:Just fyi, l3dt does heightmaps in 32bit.

8bits per channel is not good for maps.
I don't follow you.

l3dt has it's own format that it uses for heightmaps that is 32bit.

The conclusion being that you can make your heightmaps in sapphire (l3dt 3d hm editor) and export 16 bit RAWs.

I always fixed my ramps with photoshop, a tablet and a subtle ammount of smooth-blurry-feelings. And i started off in 16-bit (no upscaling/ refurbishing, downcubing and rasterising)

Further more - nice maps i'm looking @ here!
Me = getting in the mood for mapping

- Cheers

^^ yeah, that's basically the same method that I use, except I also use lowpass fairly often, assuming that the map I'm doing it a good candidate for smoothed over terrain.

Version 5, aka Not Done Yet But I'm Sick of Tinkering For Now

http://springfiles.com/spring/spring-ma ... nfluence-0
Hmm the download link appears to be broken. Try http://ge.tt/8pqjpBC?c



The river channels near the start locations are kind of funky and the "basalt veins" I added look a bit silly. But the heightmap is smoother, and 16-bit. At Least it should be. I'm a little baffled that photoshop has me specify colors as if they were RGB even though it's 16-bit greyscale.

Also, I thought I understood heightmin, heightmax, and water level, but apparently I don't. The bottom 30 8-bit greyscale values on this map are intended to be water. To acheive this while creating a map with 285 relief (not because 255 + 30 = 285, but because after making that mistake that just became the amount of relief the map is designed to have for ramps to work), shouldn't the minheight be -33 or -34 (and the maxheight 252 or 251)? If I do this, the water level is way too high. But if I put the water level where it should be, the total water depth is shallower than I intended (this is the way the map is now) because minheight is -23. What am I not understanding here?

The texture is now bump-mapped, and I think looks a little better. Unfortunately the "basalt" looks more like asphault dribbled uniformly onto the map.

For some reason on springfiles the download link points to http://springfiles.com/downloadmain/, i.e. points to no file, whereas the mirror link correctly points to http://springfiles.com/downloadmain/15642. Confusing.

version 6 (or how i finally saved my heightmap as .raw)

http://springfiles.com/downloadmain/15679

http://springfiles.com/spring/spring-ma ... nfluence-1

look, no more nasty, jagged water edges:

Yea, it's looking good!

err, oops, one large problem: i screwed up the metal map. large spots produce 3 instead of 2, and small ones 0.67 instead of 1. bugfix forthcoming...

Beautifull!

can you please supply the l3dt attributes map in the sd7/sdz? Thanks!

Fixed!
http://springfiles.com/downloadmain/15688
http://springfiles.com/spring/spring-ma ... nfluence-2



Forb, I'll send you the attribute map soon.

I remembered Beherith made a really nice retexture of this map (with ssmf and lighting/atmosphere/water settings), and finally packaged it together. Took the opportunity to make the metal map configurable as well.

http://springfiles.com/spring/spring-ma ... confluence

thanks man, i always liked this map!

i forgot to change the atmosphere settings from default in v8. it did seem awfully thick. v9 fixes that, and a small issue of metal spot textures showing up just a little off from where they ought to.

http://springfiles.com/spring/spring-ma ... nfluence-0

This map cannot be loaded by spring.exe. I've opened up the archive and the map looks fine so I suspect this is due to being a solid archive. Could you make a new version with non-solid compression?

i think it is non-solid? 7z reports "Solid: -" (solid archives give "Solid: +"). also i just tested the map archive, to make sure i wasn't accidentally loading a .sdd. the map archive works fine in spring for me. what else could be causing it to break for you?

I'll just link the relevant discussion to avoid playing telephone.
http://zero-k.info/Maps/Detail/31572

Looks very nice, well done!

If you make improvements/contributions to lua metal spots, feel free to submit a pull request to https://github.com/jahwag/cheese-lua