Travesty!

[Zoombie]

This may just be a personal preference, but who else here thinks that a lot (not all) of the maps for TA spring are wayyy wayyy to flat? Mini-spring no longer seems to exsist, and this whole problem of maps being kindof underwhelming from a hight standpoint was driven home by a map set on mars, Xanthus Terra.

I love mars, in every way you can think of. Its a great target, attainable target, red, and has aw inspiring terrain. Canyons that dwarf North america, volcanos that tower of Mt. Everast and a sweeping grandure that is harder to find on Earth (but its there). But i was playing the map and noticed that the aformentioned massive canyons and sweeping dry river beds where reduced to glorious looking potholes! Tanks would cross them in seconts, and solar collectos would dwarf landmarks that should be tiptoed around by entire armys!

Thats slightly exsagerated, but thats the feeling i got from playing this map, and i begain to notice that few maps in TA spring really gave me a feeling of "Big". I dont mean long or large, but just Big! No mountans, canyons or anything else of interest. The worst is the map where someone took a picture of Mars from space and plastered it on, made a few random changes to the hightmap and slapped on a the metal sections!

I dont know weather this should be solved by bringing back minispring, or having map creaters think more 3d dimensionaly. Some good maps that have hight involved thats proportinal to the units are

Castles
Mars (original)
Ashpan (Mainly the volcano)
And a few maps i have seen screenshots to but havent downloded.

[SwiftSpear]

A single land mark makes a far better marscape map... As it stands you make a map too crazy in the heightmap and the only thing that can navigate it is aircraft. Plus nukes don't fly at too high an altitude, they can acctually be blocked by inconvinient landscapes, and it's hard to tell that objects are even high in the heightmap from straight above, the prespective most players play in. Long story short, overly violent hight maps scare away large percentages of the player population because they just don't play well. Mappers are more inclined to appease then realisticly recreate, because they are mapping primarly to have thier maps played, otherwize they would just make terregen renders instead.

[hrmph]

Well feel free to do something creative about it http://fileuniverse.com/?p=showitem&ID=1234. If you have a view of what the perfect map should be, then go ahead and make it.

XantheTerra is one of my favorite spring maps. The landscape is perfect exactly like it is. If the valleys and mountains were too huge people would just build aircarft. The wide open expanses are perfect for tanks, and give them a boost, although the craters and ravines make nice obstacles. These smaller features improve the gameplay, I would say the map is perfect as it is.

The beauty of spring maps is that they can encompass a huge variety of landscapes. If you don't want to play a flat map, then go play mountain siege or another similar map... Personally I get sick of playing the same type of map over and over; thats why I constantly switch it up.

[SinbadEV]

This is gonna sound dumb... but could you typemap a violently craterouse/mountainouse map so that units would cross the mountains faster? make the ramps leading up to a plateau boost the speed to counteract the slope? you'd get the visual and high ground effects without things slowing down to people giving up and making planes

[SwiftSpear]

This is gonna sound dumb... but could you typemap a violently craterouse/mountainouse map so that units would cross the mountains faster? make the ramps leading up to a plateau boost the speed to counteract the slope? you'd get the visual and high ground effects without things slowing down to people giving up and making planes

Its quite possible, but also very work intensive and breaks realism, which is the whole point of making geographically diverse maps in the first place.

[zwzsg]

a) Units are easily blocked by slopes that wouldn't block them in TA, and buildings needs terrain much flatter than in TA.

b) Last time I tried the engine had weird graphical glitches on map with too strong reliefs.

[mongus]

a) Units are easily blocked by slopes that wouldn't block them in TA, and buildings needs terrain much flatter than in TA.

Only for ota mod i may add. xta has a different slope settings for every unit, thats works great (imho) in maps like Mountain Siege.

[Tangaroa]

If land units cant get through, you just make pathways for them in the map, when making maps you should be thinking of where players could build defenses, and where the opponent could attack from (to state the obvious).

Think like ramps in cliffs in tilesets for original TA, and do things like that.

[zwzsg]

When I was making the CPIA map, I extracted the heightmap from the original TA map, and use the mapconv parameter to have height from -75 to 180, that's 255 between max height and min height, just like in TA. In Spring the map relief looked as strong as in TA or as strong as in the 3D replayer since you could argue relief is hard to see in a 2D game. Yet, all ramps were unuseable, and I had to remake them all. I even had to remade them twice this after the first time I I halved thier slopes I was surprised to see this wasn't enough.

For the maxslopes, TA use something like MaxSlop being the maximum height difference while Spring use something like maxslopes being the maximum angle in degree.

This gives completly different results, and I prefer the TA method, as I explained in http://spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewtop ... c&start=40

[Warlord Zsinj]

I hope the height issues in spring are attended too; I would really like to see my tower of babel map be completed...