Spring RTS Engine

Yeah I just finished a hellova map...

Its a 25x20 7 team (0-6) team/ffa/whatever battle amongst a twisted river through a large mountainous valley, Most of the resources are located within the twist of the river, and within the mountains... The mountains are hard to build it effectively, but this was intended, they are also very hard to navigate with armies... The intention is, that you can build and army in the valley, and smash your opponent, but his resources are gonna be behind him, in the mountains, built by air, and only effectively attacked by air... If you are the army to try to claim the large resource pile within the river, you are going to be the target of the community, and well, they will have the resources to fight you, and you shall have the resources to fight them back.

I'm gonna call it v0.9 right now because yes, I know it needs a little work on some spots of the water transition (some of the sandy shorelines are way off.. urgh)... that'll get done tomorrow hopefully...

I just wanted to start to get it out and see if there needs to be any MAJOR changes to balancing, design, etc.

Its a MONSTER of a file... (namely because I went into crazy detail on the map texture and heightmaps etc.) ~92MB unzipped

But before I can post it, I need Storm or Gnome to ok me to upload it. Zipped it is ~58MB... thats RAR'd on some crazy compression.... I could prolly knock it down to 56 or so... but that'll just take forever to unpack

Now I have one thing to ask of all of you... WHERE'S A GOOD PLACE TO HOST IMAGES!! lol.... I wanna get some screenies of this up on here... you guys are gonna drool everywhere... Tripod and geocities suck ass... any other good hosts? too bad I can't just add them direct from here... boo

I'll be taking some screens on my PC for now... (I would like you guys to take some FOR me... namely because my videocard won't render the clouds, shiny water, or shadows... but ah well.. these will do for now..)

Try using imageshack

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I lightened the fog quite a bit since these images....

Looks cool, but you might want to try scaling it y wise and using terragen or equivelant to make the texture.

[K.B.] Napalm Cobra wrote:Looks cool, but you might want to try scaling it y wise and using terragen or equivelant to make the texture.

I understand terragen will reduce the filesize... but I am clueless how to use it...

I could look into it though... might lead to some good results...

Terregen takes a heightmap and makes a pretty texture for it.

well I understand that... but the ridgelines have some VERY SERIOUS enchanced shadows with the bmp texture thats on it....

if terragen will make a GOOD bit of difference on filesize.. I'll prolly re-compile it with it... long as it dosen't end up looking TOO terrible

Have you taken into account the fact that a map is meant to be played on? Is there enough room to lay bases? Are hills size related to units?

Is it me or do those terrain colours look illuminous? Sorta like the green is a velvet carpet

Alantai Firestar wrote:Is it me or do those terrain colours look illuminous? Sorta like the green is a velvet carpet

No, I agree with you, it looks a bit to soft.
Little more gray tint maybe, as it is now it looks a bit to colorful.

Needs to look more rugged, maybe the grass density should be higher

Looks nice. The 5th imange is the most realistic picture in sprin i ever seen.

But the rest look artifiacial. Looks to perfect, more random textures here and there.

I think the forests look good, but the open landscape is the one whit artifaicail look. (omfg how did i spell that?)

5th image doesn't look realistic to me... manly because the ground is never any of those colours...

However im inlove with teh shading and with the heightmap (from what i can see of it)

If that was imported into teragen and a nice terain was rendered for it it would look swell.

BTW LathanStanley: Terregen wont make a smaller map size. Infact it may very well make the map bigger (although unlikly...)

I nfact use a mix of photoshop and terregen to do the textures...

As i said in another post, ill do a detailed write up of how it all works (or how i think it should... )

aGorm

well aGorm... I'm gonna take another swing at compiling it tonight...

I've made a few changes to the texture file, and a few changes to the resource file... me and ted tried playing it... needs a few changes pretty bad...

we'll see how it goes...

I can build models while it compiles YAY for LOTS of ram


if I can't get it to do what I want.... I "can" upload the files to you... maybe you can have better luck w/ it??? its about 350 megs unzipped...

I'm assuming I can winrar it down to somewhere around 250.. I have a 60k/sec upload soo.... thats a 70 min upload... if you wanna hang around for an hour and lemmie upload I can

Huummm, you could just send me over your height map and metal map and i could just render my own texture map with teragen to see how it comes out? Would save a hell of a lot of bandwidth...

However it may take a while as id have to split the height map in half... terregen wont let me render above a 16x16 map in one shot. However i can easyly glue two together...

Then i can post some pics and we can see what you think. Obviosly I dont want to hijake your map.

aGorm

dont you mean glue 4 together?32x32 = 16x16x16x16x16x16x16x16

Nahhh his map is 25 x 20... i can prob reneder it in 10 x 25 chunks (if not well you get what i mean)

(Did you know... king of the rock was just two reneders... the rock in the middle and 1 corner, rotated and fliped... And then a whole lot of photoshoping.)

aGorm

its getting better and closer on every pass... maybe I'll put some more screens up...

I reduced the filesize some too

92MB -> 79.5 MB (83,443,712 bytes)

dropped it about 15%

I'll try to put a new screen or two up soon.... the grass is alot less green, has more texture, there are a few less trees, and the shadows look a lil more realistic.. soooo yeah its getting there... oh and the metal is fun too.. =]

still a lil outta balance though... its hard to build in the top left (on the screens you see) corner of the map (ANY metal extractors at least....).... the map has be rotated 180 degrees since...

Looks nice this far, except for the slightly unnatural (to me) grass color.

Now I have one thing to ask of all of you... WHERE'S A GOOD PLACE TO HOST IMAGES!! lol.... I wanna get some screenies of this up on here... you guys are gonna drool everywhere... Tripod and geocities suck ass... any other good hosts? too bad I can't just add them direct from here... boo

http://www.fileuniverse.com

We accept all and every TA-related image, which you later can easily bundle with your map. No registration needed, no questions asked. :)

COOL!

lemmie rework a few last issues, and I'll compile and zip it for ya