Spring RTS Engine

Here are some screen shots of a new map I'm working on. Any
comments of it would be helpful.










Most your comments good or bad. Remember its still being
worked on.

Hm. The artefacts on the cliffs (seafloor texture way above the water level) makes me wonder:

As land can rise/fall, and cliffs & such are a problem because of the lower resolution highmap, would it be possible to use regular expression controlled texturing?

Like : if highlevel<0 use texture.seafloor else if highlevel <10 use texture.beach else use texture.grassland
or something to that effect?
That way, one could be sure to get the coastlines/ect without too much finetuning...

I think the artefact of the blue dribbling on the land is due to using old TA tiles, instead of texturing it all green and letting the engine add the blue of the water. Just by looking at the minimap I can recognize some TA coast tiles. Some people haven't realised that Annihilator isn't the right tool to make Spring maps.

Then what is the correct program?

From http://www.codersworkshop.com/viewpost.php?id=1297

I. Terrian/Envirment/world creation Tool:

I-1) Land Editors/renders:

...a) FLE (Free Land Editor):
http://www.hoverhavok.mmocrafter.com/fle_compiled.zip
...b) Terragen: http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/
...c) GenesisII and Landscape Explorer:
http://www.geomantics.com/demo.html

I-2) Terrian Shadow Mapper/Color Mapper/Hieght Map Editors:

...a) Terrian Media Generator:
http://www.zac-interactive.dk/freetools ... erator.htm
...b) TerrTexGen:
http://www.delphigl.de/projects/terrtex ... index.html
...c) Hme - Height Map Editor (includes source): http://hme.sourceforge.net/

I-3) Sky Box/Sky Textures and Sky Tools:

...a) Skybox Textures: http://www.scentednectar.com/skyboxes/

World Machine is very good for heightmap generation/modification, the only problem is that you haev to pay to do anything over 512x512

Well, OTOH, one can get sick of all those same-looking terragen (or terragenesque) maps, too.

I still remember that fad back when everybody had to make a 15MB OTA map...

(sometimes its just nice actally having level floor to build upon :D )

Don`t forget L3DT. and here is a new "presets .inf" with a usefull preset I came up with after a few weeks of getting nothing but crap.
Goes in "program files\l3dt\settings" chose and load "preffered" from the drop down list.
This app is not about random map renders with little or no imput, you still need to make changes, and can do whatever you like with a blank design map, you can add mountains hills valleys cliffs volcanoes, it makes a great looking crater\caldera, basically anything.
The maximum texture size it can output is 4096 x 4096 which I resize in photoshop to 8192 x 8192 or whatever the map idea requires.
You can also import a heightmap.bmp and let l3dt render a terrain texture to suit.
http://www.mufdvr.222clan.com/Presets.zip
http://users.tpg.com.au/blakest2/L3DT/

Looks like I got my answer .... The texture map needs MAJOR
OVER HAUL ..

I figure I can spent some time revamping the texture map
with Paint Shop Pro ... An if that doesn't work .... DELETE ...
an try again ....

Only time will tell....

hang on... why isn't your map coverde in trees? Am i missing a trick here? or is there a differnt map conv i dont have? please tell me!

aGorm

Perhaps add a bit of dirt manually to add variety, but it's looking good.

Here is some updated screen shots. I've made some changes with
Paint Shop Pro ... Also, I used a skybox from another map too.
With this skybox the map looks much better ...

Here are the new screen shots....








Any comments ....

Looks awesome...but how does it play?

I still think the artificial waterline from the tileset looks incredibly tacky. Try hue shifting the blue on the texture map to a sandy or muddy brown color, that'd make it look like it's supposed to be there, rather than looking like an exported-straight-out-of-annihilator map like it is. The sky looks good on the map, but the lighting is much too bright... Maybe you should take some clues from that "Alpine Erebos" map (I think that's how you spell its name) which someone made in the old map format--it had a very convincing nighttime lighting scheme. Here's a link: http://www.fileuniverse.com/?p=showitem&ID=952

Interesting summer night colouring, but yes, you need to remove the blue from the texture map.

Here's what I would advise to do:
- Open Annihilator
- Fill the map with flat green tile
- Export the bmp
- Use that bmp as your texture map

Don't add any water color or hill shading to the texture map, let the Spring engine handle that. You might have to tweak the water tags in the smd to make it more blue. Also, using a simple monotonous tiled map would greatly decrease the filesize.