Spring RTS Engine

It looks like the toilet the time I took a dump after eating lego.

It looks like you just stretched a texture over the heightmap. If you are increasing the size of the texture at all, or the texture is blurry in the first place, that is B. A. D.

You know the scale tool? The trick is to never use it unless you want to make the texture a smaller size.

Why do you hate us Genblood? Why?!?!

You must be joking...

the textures seems to be a bit washed out.
try to use bigger and sharper textures.
bah sorry to say that, but I don't like it atm.

Thanks for your opinions ... will try to correct them.

I always have 3 or 4 types of map concepts in the works for
a single map. I didn't like this concept, but others might like
it. Here are some screenies of the map with old style cannons
on it.







Post your comments ...

The texture is blurry

I like that you finally moved away from re-using old TA texture. That makes it ok to use the default sky/water color: even if it's bad, it doesn't feel like a rape of old time memory anymore.

Your canons however are a joke. the way you glued a cylinder to a box (yes, I saw there is also a flattened pyramid and a tiny box) doesn't evoke anything even remotly linked to canons at all.

I suggest you look at canon elswhere, for instance at how canon are modelled in Cavedog's unit, maybe that you try to draw canon with a pencil and a paper, to get a good grasp of the shape canon should be, before running your 3D modelling program. It's very important that you know what shape you are trying to make, that you can visualise the result you're aiming at, before playing with the tool of your modeller. Just like hand drawing, if you starts without any clear idea you'll end up with a mess.

Because currently, it looks like you had absolutly no idea of what shape you were aiming at, and just thought: Ok, let's make a cube, everything start with a cube. Hmm, let's enlarge it, old school canon are longer than wider. Oh and because it's a canon, of course, let's add a cylinder. Damn, it doesn't joint well. Oh well, let's put a cube to mask the joint. Hmm what else could I do? Let's add a new cube and play with deformation.... oh I made a little roof, neat! K, let's cover each piece with a texture and call it done.

3D modelling is an art, it's exactly like hand drawing, you need talent to make a nice model, if you don't have that talent, you can try to compensate by learning the techniques and practising alot, or simply give up and ask more gifted people to make you model. Your model is the 3D equivalent of a baby scribbling.

The ground texture really looks like it has a very low definition. I know that Spring map color texture has much better resolution than that, so I guess you enlarged a tiny bitmap, completly obliviously of the fact that resizing small pictures mathematically simply can't lead to good looking textures.

Your ultra-bright-blue geo don't fit at all on the brownish background.

Sorry to be so harsh, but I can't say it's good when it's not. Especially with the high quality level of some new map makers.

Thanks for the comments zwzsg, I know my model skills aren't
that great. I'll like this concept, so I'll redone what needs to
be done.

http://www.savefile.com/files.php?fid=2717778

Theres five minutes of half assed modelling. Although something seems wrong with the wheels...

the mount needs to be at an angle and the front wheels should be larger then the back. Then again that is pretty damn good for 5 minutes.

Genblood,

I really thought that was some kind of odd wreckage. The new texture is nice but a bit too large. At about 1/8 it may look better.

Err...the texture looks kindof...uglyish. Really ugly. And those cannons need some work (they look more like refrigoraters right now).

the texture looks like poop covered in metal chips

http://www.savefile.com/files.php?fid=1483289

Theres two minutes of texturing. Now you have no excuse to use that bastardisation of a modelling attempt on your map.

Gen, from one New Hampshire guy to another, i'm gonna try to help you out here. Please try to heed my advice...


Okay, ur trying to make an OTA Remake, thats an awesome idea. But you have a serious problem with your textures. Everyone else has been rather brutally honest, not to hurt you feelings or anything, but to rather explain to you that you are going in the wrong direction.

Now then, if you want to create a spring map based off of OTA textures the first thing you need to do have a copy of OTA. From there you need TAE, (installable from the TA:CC cd).

Next you need Kinboat's Annihilator 1.6, and then a copy of HPI Viewer.

Alright, first off, i'm going to assume you have OTA and that you have installed OTA in the typical manner including all of the expansions along with all of the patches and the NOCD crack.

Now, first off, you will need to start up HPI Viewer...

Neat huh?

Next you will need to open the file that contains the original map...


You will note that the above image has "Open HPI File" highlighted, now, while that is the option we will be using, the file we will be opening will not actually be an HPI file, it will instead be a .ccx file. See below:


With the ccmaps.ccx archive opened we see that it contains all of the Multiplayer Cavedog maps from the Core Contingency Expansion. Below you will see the map we want in the archive viewer.


The next thing to do is select both "Metal Isles.ota" and "Metal Isles.tnt"
The .ota file contains all of the schema date (start positions, wind, metal). The .tnt file contains the texture data and height data, which is what we want.


Save both of the files in the OTA maps directory in "c:\cavedog\totala\maps\"


Make sure both files are saved, especially the .tnt file!


Alright, we are done with HPI Viewer, now you need to bring up Annihilator by Kinboat. The program fucking rocks, not just because of its ease of use and low system load, but also because of its shear power. You can do so much more with this program that what I am going to mention.


Alright, first you are going to select Open Map from the file menu...


From there you need to go to c:\cavedog\totala\maps and open the "Metal Isles.tnt" from that directory.


Behold! Its our map! Okay, now that its open, you need to bring the cursor to the "Map" menu. You will notice two options...

"Export Heightmap" ^

"Export Map as BMP..." ^

The first thing you need to do is export the Map as BMP, this is your entire texturemap, it is at the proper resolution for the map size and will be completely compatible with Mother's Mapconv.


And then of course you need to Export the Heightmap...


ZOMG! Its not at the right resolution!

Yes, thats right, the OTA heightmap is not at a Mapconv compatible resolution, actually its 1/16th of the OTA texturemap. With that said all you need to do is double the resolution and add one pixel. Of course i don't recommend doing this with anything but Photoshop, I suppose GIMP or PSP will be just as good, but Photoshop has stood by me for a long time now and i can't imagine using anything else.

Things to keep in mind:
Doubling the OTA Heightmap will cause some distortion, its recommended you correct that as you see fit. Also;
The OTA Texturemap and Heightmap will not line up perfectly when ported over to spring, why? Because the OTA texturemaps use a forced perspective to give the illusion of 3D, this was not laziness on cavedog's part as some have said. Cavedog did not design their textures with spring in mind, as a matter of fact I doubt they would have predicted an engine like spring would ever be created by the fanbase.

So with that in mind, how do we correct it? Well, the simplest way is to actually move the OTA Heightmap up or down a few pixels, some trial and error will be required for this. For metal maps it is also important to understand that the south faceing walls of the Metal world are longer than the north ones, what you can do there is squish those parts of the texture with a resizing tool and replacing the missing peices of floor texture with other flat parts of the map.

Oh and since you are not doing a straight port, I highly recommend that you add your extra isles within the Annihilator editor instead of drawing them out form scratch, it will look better and be easier.

That concludes my super awesome OTA Remake tutorial. I hope this helps more than just Genblood! ^_^

-[NR]Quanto
"I'm in ur base killin ur dudes!"

I think it needs to be said. You really can't learn to model by just screwing around with a modeling suite, you aslo really can't learn to texture by just screwing around with photoshop/gimp.

What you do is open up google and enter a nice search like "Blender modeling tutorials" or "photoshop texturing tutorials"

Go through as many tutorials as you can that you think is in any way relevent to what you are trying to do. And don't just browse them, do the steps and play with the results. Once you fully understand the mechanics of the tools THEN you have a platform from which you can start being creative and making good looking models and textures.

The second version has a better heightmap but the texture really really sucks :/

SwiftSpear wrote:I think it needs to be said. You really can't learn to model by just screwing around with a modeling suite, you aslo really can't learn to texture by just screwing around with photoshop/gimp.

What you do is open up google and enter a nice search like "Blender modeling tutorials" or "photoshop texturing tutorials"

Go through as many tutorials as you can that you think is in any way relevent to what you are trying to do. And don't just browse them, do the steps and play with the results. Once you fully understand the mechanics of the tools THEN you have a platform from which you can start being creative and making good looking models and textures.

I beg to differ on this point. Im not claiming im a brilliant modeler or anything, but everything I did learn i learnt from just screwing round. It definately is possible to learn this way.