Spring RTS Engine

Can I see the textures you used in lldt?

I'll assume by LLDT you mean L3DT...

the grass is just the default L3DT grass textures. i tried using some of my own grass textures before, but they are for a much larger scale terrain, as you can see individual blades of grass and what have you. That looks pretty silly in this game, where the scale of the terrain is much larger than, say, for an FPS. The L3DT default grass texture does the job...even though it's really low resolution and has all sorts of .jpg compression loss, it looks better just because it's meant for a larger scale terrain. You'd probably get away with just having a pure green texture with a bit of noise added.

I have used my own sand and rock textures, the rock texture being made by someone in the UT2004 community named Hipshot who I've credited in the readme.

So can you link me to where I can get the rock and sand textures?

http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/sh ... p?t=506748
there's the cliff

the sand is my homebrew

care to share the sand? Hipshots skyboxes are great.

sure, but you'll have to wait a bit, I don't have my mapping/gaming rig with me atm

after some rather extensive playtesting yesterday ( ), i've decided that this map has the potential to be awesome.

BUT!

i am very disappointed with how slow ground units are at walking through the water. this turns the map in to yet another porcfest, as land units are too slow to be very effective at rushing.

i really do not remember them moving this slow through shallow water in OTA. the only time that variable really matters is in this type of map, the ring atoll shallow-water type map. i think i'll go suggest something for the next version of BA....

for what it's worth, i still love the variety of the battles in middle, but ground units are designed to be balanced when they are moving at their regular speed, not when they are slowed to half of that as they are in this map.

alright dont laugh... whats 'porcy' mean?

bobthedinosaur wrote:alright dont laugh... whats 'porcy' mean?

To porc is to build little if any offensive units and just sit in your base behind your defences. It is generally seen as a mark of a poor(er) player, as offensive action (especially early on, when it counts) wins games, and just building defences is useless, unless it's done at a chokepoint.

hunterw wrote:after some rather extensive playtesting yesterday ( ), i've decided that this map has the potential to be awesome.

BUT!

i am very disappointed with how slow ground units are at walking through the water. this turns the map in to yet another porcfest, as land units are too slow to be very effective at rushing.

i really do not remember them moving this slow through shallow water in OTA. the only time that variable really matters is in this type of map, the ring atoll shallow-water type map. i think i'll go suggest something for the next version of BA....

for what it's worth, i still love the variety of the battles in middle, but ground units are designed to be balanced when they are moving at their regular speed, not when they are slowed to half of that as they are in this map.

You could change it with a type map... Hoever i don't think that is a good idea, as we might be able to define it in a future version of spring, and then your map will be borked.

it's not porcy like tangerine or ssb in the sense that there are easily covered land chokepoints, it's porcy in the sense that static defenses are unbalancingly effective against land units because land units are so damn slow driving through the shallow water.

a typemap would be a good band-aid type fix, but then the land units will haul ass when they aren't in the water which i definitely don't want, and like NOiZE mentioned if we do get the ability to change the underwater speed variable, and it is changed, the map will be broken again.

that will probably be ages from now IF it happens, so i probably will end up doing a typemap version of this map. it's not what i really wanted though

You know you can do typemaps that only apply to a specific section of terrain, don't you?

interesting, no i did not know that...i've not ever used typemaps, so i'm not familiar with them in the least.

NOiZE is currently looking in to changing land vehicles' speed in shallow water through BA (thanks so much!), which is optimal. if that falls through then i'll have to bust out the typemaps

Typemap is a black .bmp the same size as the heightmap for a given map, terrain types are defined using the red channel type 0 is 0 red, type 1 is red 1 and so on. The .smd would look something like this, usually at the end of the file.



[TEAM9]
{
StartPosX=15920;
StartPosZ=580;
}
[TERRAINTYPE0] //which terrain type goes where on the map is determined by the typemap
{
name=Seabed; //human visible identifier of the terrain type
hardness=1.0; //multiplier of the global maphardness value (default value=1)
tankmovespeed=0.5; //multiplier of tank units speed after slope mods etc has been applied (default value=1)
kbotmovespeed=0.7; //multiplier of kbot units speed after slope mods etc has been applied (default value=1)
hovermovespeed=1.0; //multiplier of hover units speed after slope mods etc has been applied (default value=1)
shipmovespeed=1.0; //multiplier of ship units speed after slope mods etc has been applied (default value=1)
}
[TERRAINTYPE1] //which terrain type goes where on the map is determined by the typemap
{
name=Snow; //human visible identifier of the terrain type
hardness=1.0; //multiplier of the global maphardness value (default value=1)
tankmovespeed=0.6; //multiplier of tank units speed after slope mods etc has been applied (default value=1)
kbotmovespeed=0.8; //multiplier of kbot units speed after slope mods etc has been applied (default value=1)
hovermovespeed=1.0; //multiplier of hover units speed after slope mods etc has been applied (default value=1)
shipmovespeed=0; //multiplier of ship units speed after slope mods etc has been applied (default value=1)
}

}




So you use the .bmp to define what terrain type is where, and the .smd has each terrain types properties like move speed for the different unit type groups, air - kbot - tank,, bla bla bla.
You can also specify a terrain hardness within a given terrain type area.

just played a game on this map. once it gets to middle it slows right down. it was okay until the 20 minute mark where defences got high tech enough to own all units. by the 80 minute mark it was nuke spam. attacking is impossible on this map if the opponents dont want to be attacked. need to change the metal proportions; 30% starting island, 70% middle and sea.

What mod were you playing? I've never encountered a situation where the middle isn't assaultable or important.

most games i've played (granted that's been ~5) have ended at 40-50 minutes by way of a flagship or vulcan.

more metal in the middle won't help that much, since the middle is so easily porcable, just like all coasts on this map. what will help this map is vehicles and kbots moving through water at a more reasonable speed. i'll shoot a pm off to NOiZE to see if that change is going in for the next BA, and if it's not, i'll make a typemapped version

NOiZE is discussing changing the speed with Day for the next version of BA, so I will wait on making a typemap version.

why don't people just use hovers...

As stated before, a typemap is a bad idea, but if Noize adn Day don't choose to use the script that smoth provided for making units go faster in water, then that will be about your only recourse.

Honestly, it looks to be a hover map to me, why not leave it that way? I fairly like the idea(of it being a hover map) myself...

Ok after looking at it I can tell you why this map sucks.

It sucks not because of the layout per se, it's because your metal distribution sucks.

Take all the metal out of the middle islands, leave about 18metal per sec per person on each large land mass, and put the rest of the metal in the water on the outer edges of the map.

It will play 500% better.