Spring RTS Engine

Okay, so, following the various tutorials about the place I decided to make my first attempt and joining the great men and.. other men of the map making community, and make a map.

so, concept:

Spartan Isle



10x10 1v1 map
Players start top left and top right.

The top most landbridge is to be blocked by a wall of reclaimable rocks (that only give energy)

a majority of the metal is going to be on the bottom plain.

the white areas are water.

so, heightmap sketch:


and this is where the troubles begin.
I figured liberal use of the blurring tool would get rid of the sharp edges, which to an extent it did, whilst an outer blur on the entire island would create a gradient leading into the sea rather than a 90 degree drop off, but this still leaves the problem of blending two colour areas.


What photoshop tool is used to, for example, lasoo a black square and a white square and turn it into a grey ramp (moving from blackk to white)? my concept is based on flat areas connected by smooth ramps, so this is pretty much vital for any coninuation

use gradient tool for some lousy ramps, remember to erode them off after you're done adding them.

or you could just use springmapedit heightmap editing to add ramps yourself.

blur and feather are your friends

to make a ramp between two color levels, I lasso the area I want to make a ramp, feather it (~6-7px), then, to put it technically - blur the shit out of it.



make sure you feather your selection, so the edges blend smoothly (or it will end up like this)



obviously you can make it look nicer by spending more than 30 seconds on it

my suggestion :

1) make a box on a new layer roughly the size of the ramp you want
2) use the flood fill to fill the box with a linear gradient, using the eyedropper to select the greys from both the top of the ramp and the bottom of the ramp for the start and end of your gradient
3) select, scale and rotate the box layer into position.

i might note; i find ramps far easier in vector based drawing apps, in fireworks i sketch the outline of my ramp, eyedropper to get the start and end greys, then it allows you to cligdrag a gradient gadget and decide exactly what direction you want the gradient to run (not to mention it makes it a hell of a lot easier to shift everything about if you arent happy with what you've made)

i've also used ralphies method, but im too lazy to do it consistently... using a gradient ensures a consistent slope throughout the ramp as well.

good luck and happy mapping!

ok, progress:


does that look right/normal? will that work out alright ingame? if there are any obvious flaws please point them out to me.

ok- where does one get pre-made textures?
is it possible to extract them out of other maps?
is there a resource thread hidden somewhere?

hill 1 has a ramp, hill 2 does not.

maybe move the bottom mountains more to the center so ships can clear the canal mountain-mapedge easier.
i dont like if the mapedge restricts unitmovement like this.

www.world-machine.com can put textures on heightmap but i only messed around without a bit so no idea how good. also the mapsize is restricted in freeware version. tbh i was surprised how good maps can look in spring even if you just throw some very crude textures on it.

www.cgtextures.com try the stone/rock section.
www.inkscape.org cool vectorgraphics programm, can do color gradients and stuff.

What are you doing, using filters so early? Do it by hand, articulate each level of the heightfield! Each slope, each edge! You must learn to print before you learn cursive, you must learn the elements before you learn compounds!

I mean, uh, keep going.

doesnt seem like much flat land

lol, why does this remind me so much of that starcraft map I saw on one of those battle reports?

paranoid android?

Will you be calling this map "Why so serious?"

maackey wrote:lol, why does this remind me so much of that starcraft map I saw on one of those battle reports?

edit: that springmapedit tool sure makes things a hellofalot easier. adressed the lack of flat land and missing ramps.

reached texture stage
I have a few tileable textures, but I really need a better underwaterland texture and mountain texture...

Good gracious... this is madness! Nice one..!

weee springmapedit makes everything suuper easy

if you want texxtures, the free Genetica viewer will generate tileable versions of thousands of texes! Try it out.

lets get some textures up in this bitch



this sure is time consuming..

SME can autotexture, this is usually a good start.

Sweetness.

[rock1]
{
world=All Worlds;
description=Rock;
category=arm_corpses;
object=lgreyrock1.s3o;
footprintx=6;
footprintz=6;
height=8;
blocking=1;
hitdensity=1000;
metal=500;
energy=500;
damage=10000;
featurereclamate=smudge01;
seqnamereclamate=tree1reclamate;
}

what here defines how long the rock takes to reclaim by say, workertime=100; ?



its as easy as shake n bake!

Looking good, also looks like a human brains scan