Spring RTS Engine

I am i bit confused about how i am supposed to create a map for this game by just using a set of textures. My main problem is with creating vertical/near vertical faces, i have no idea how i am going to do this as in the textures they would just be a line and in the heightmap they would be a sharp fall. How would it work?

I want to create a core prime industrial area style map with some sort of barron wasteland surrounding the 'bases'. How could i achieve this with just a texture?

In the past i have used mainly half life editors, although i have used the original TA editor to make a few maps.

Its a differnt concept... basicly when you make a height map your drawing teh top down view of the map.

A White Pixle would be the highest point and a Black pixle would be the lowest point.

So say you drew littraly a white square in the middle of a patch of black. With a solid transitio from black to white. This would give you a near vertical square hill in the middle of a flat peice of terain.

If however you ran a blur tool over it so that there were shades of grey merging the two together, you would get a smoth square hill, with sloped sides.

Does that make more sence now?? Dont think of fps style map editing. Its totaly different.

aGorm

To add to aGorm's

Till now vertikel is imposible and near vertikel ends in the pixels of the "landmap" being stretched up the hill.
There is some map with real step slopes.

There is the posibility of making Objekts and puting them there (struktiors looking like cliffs, but nobody tried that till now.

Halflife maps are totaly different, but if you ever plaed with the mapeditor of UT2003, it comes out like the landscapes there.

ok that makes slightly more sence, so how do you go about creating realistic tarrain? The greyscale height map is used and all that white is the highest back the lowest etc, but what is the easiest way of creating that? What programs do you use and what techniques?

Terragen is usefull and makes cool terrain... I think theres a map tutorail to it, but it's for the ''real'' ota...

http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/

and heres a tutorial: http://fast.filespace.org/Kixxe/Tutorial.zip

(you better enjoy it, i had to upload it myself:/)

its old, for the OTA, but you will learn to use terragen. Just skip the annilator part in the end.

if you dont get terragen, i suggest just using something whit a brush or something, or just paint the map and blur it.

I'll post a detailed way of making the textures tonight or tommorow... So that there will be no problems! but not right now as im working...

aGorm

aGorm wrote:I'll post a detailed way of making the textures tonight or tommorow... So that there will be no problems! but not right now as im working...

aGorm

/me is waiting impatiently

my map is pretty much on hold until I learn this terragen thingie... its too big of file otherwise... and has issues on lower end machines

arrgggg... soz i been out geting pissed and cinema and concerts... you know how it is... (or maybe you dont...)

What did I put myself down to do? A Teregen tutorial?? I'll post one by the end of the weekend thats all I can promise.

aGorm

The one at http://www.planetta.com/terragen/ pretty much covers it. Just don't render in water at all for spring maps (don't do it his way, and don't let terragen render it normally, just let Spring handle water) and set the camera to be 90 degrees rather than the ~70 (TA's view angle) it comes out to, and also set the sun to 90 degrees so there are no shadows.

[edit] That is to say, don't let terragen render the shadows, let spring. Your sun angle can be whatever you want in the .smd.

And turn off all atmospheric effects.

Many people have graphic cards that don't handle ground shading in Spring, so having pre-shaded maps maybe isn't such a bad idea.

Ya it is, cause most people would and it'll make it look crappy for them.