Spring RTS Engine

Guys,

I'm playing catch up here as I've only d/l Spring today, but if I've understood right, all maps for d/l contain a single massive texture that covers the entire map, which is what makes the map files so big - is that right?

If so, can I suggest that there be two alternative map formats to download:

1. Just the game info (i.e. the terrain, metal spot locations, geothermal locations etc.)

2. same as 1 but with texture

Type 1 maps are of course compatible with type 2 when playing, they just don't look so nice.

That way, you can have really big maps that d/l fairly quick, and also people with slooooow internet connections (like me) can get a decent number of maps fairly quick - maybe updating them with the textures at some later point if needed.

I guess to make it work, the game would have to come with some basic rendering tools to convert the raw map data into something you could see on screen.

Cheers

Munch

PS Could you put into the FAQ that the maps are on FileUniverse? I had to trawl quite a whlie on here before I read between the lines that I should look on there? Ta =)

but if I've understood right, all maps for d/l contain a single massive texture that covers the entire map, which is what makes the map files so big - is that right?

In a word: No
They are made *from* a single huge texture file.

Maps are 5-20mb, not .5-20 GB, the textures are tiled and compressed.
(A 'big' map would contain a 1.5gb texture file + many other layers)

It will take you less time to download the largest map than it would to render and compile it.

Maps use compression and tiling.

If the map maker works poorly, then yes the map is made with "a single massive texture that covers the entire map", and that's why some maps are scaringly big filesize-wise.

But if the map maker takes advantage of the tiling system (tiles being 32x32) and the -c parameter, then maps can be large ingame and small filesize-wise.

Thanks for the replies. I just d/l the Crosspaths map and was amazed to see it was less than 1MB! I thought it would be tiny in area, but I can see that it

A) has a single (CORE Prime) texture tile and
B) is very compressible (large flat areas).

What I don't get is why Metal Heck (and MH2) aren't similarly small? (since they're also largely flat and have a small texture repeated over).

I guess they just weren't compiled efficiently?

Thanks for the help

Cheers

Munch