Spring RTS Engine

Shore to Shore is my favorite TA two player map... and I'm sad to see that this masterpiece hasn't yet been ported to Spring!

Anyone care to give it a shot?

I have it half done,, I want to finish and upload Painted Desert first.
Rest assured it will be completed soon

Now I must have my video card. I love that map!

Please make the mountains in Painted desert higher than they are in the heightmap. That central point should be a mountain, not a bump in the road...

I have been trying to get them higher than they where in TA, there`s not a lot of room to move though, the low terrain is only a few points above 0 in the heightmap, resulting in a lake forming whenever I blew something up, I had to jack up the entire heightmap until a commy blowing up won`t leave water visible. at the moment the highest point is the hill in the centre,, err 217 is the height I think, but I stil have some room to play with.

Finally, a port of painted desert.

Heighmap loocks a bit odd in the second picture, might just be the perspective thou.

You don't have to touch the heightmap to change waterlevel. Just change the two parameters -x and -n.

Yeah, those are definitely too small. They look like minor undulations, not mountains.

Don't be constrained by a TA map - they were meant to be viewed from the top down, not from all perspectives, so you could never really gauge terrain height very well; it always looked tall, but could have a smaller heightmap for gameplay reasons.
If you have too, completely redo the map (I know, much easier said then done - but PD was a TA favourite, so I think it deserves the attention) so that it makes more sense heightwise.

Consider how much more active terrain here is than on your map (map by reddragon):

zwzsg wrote:You don't have to touch the heightmap to change waterlevel. Just change the two parameters -x and -n.

Its currently set at 0 but in the original heightmap the low land areas are about five or so, very close hence the pools of water appearing in explosion craters so I had to raise the entire heightmap to give me some depth between the water and the lowest terrain, but if I go too high I won`t have room for a decent looking set of mesas.
Also agree with Worlord, its gotta look right which is why I sort of kept quiet about it but I want to raise the mesas about halfe again in height.

What I'm trying to say is that it's simpler to add 200 to both the -x and the -n parameter than to raise the entire heightmap image.

I just find that a little confusing,, I thought the max was 255, if I give the h/m a min of 200 and a max of 200 thats 400,, I know I have missed something along the line
Look its like this,, I have never worked with anything 3d in my life,, I mean creating maps or whatever, mine has been a 2d world with TA so I have to confess I just don`t fully understand what to do here.
One thing that does complicate things with this map is I need to keep the water plane separated by about 40 from the level of the low lying terrain to prevent pools of water showing up every time something blows up, not something I would expect to see in desert warfare.

Thats were my map making guild would have come in handy... why don't you go give it a read, you don't know there may be some things you havent picked up on. Its in the Wiki...

aGorm

Felix the Cat wrote:Shore to Shore is my favorite TA two player map... and I'm sad to see that this masterpiece hasn't yet been ported to Spring!

Anyone care to give it a shot?

We have the map "Africa Coast" which is very similar but, as far as i can tell, it is buggy (or is it the Spring engine?) and games always crash after a while...

aGorm wrote:Thats were my map making guild would have come in handy... why don't you go give it a read, you don't know there may be some things you havent picked up on. Its in the Wiki...

aGorm

Will do, thanks,
this looks a little better but the downside is all but the large hill in the middle are impassable to everything except the commander

Yeah that is definitely a problem. Could be changed simply by the programmers, however as soon as someone makes a nother remake of a map with very high mountains or anything, they will have to readjust the values again.

I think porting maps like this one will have to be a compromise, an important gameplay feature will be lost from this map if some units can`t get up onto the hills for defence, this is a classic TA map and if things like correct metal output, sky colour and the like are being considered important/essential by the community this should also include issues like map accesability to units.
What I will most likely do is raise the height of the mountains to the point where some ground units "mainly L1 con" can get up the hills and leave it there.
The map port is also around 10% smaller than the original, which makes it even harder to get decent size mountains and still have them look ok, the only other option was to go 16384 on the terrain .bmb which would have enlarged the map to a rediculous size.