Spring RTS Engine

I've been working on a map based on the contours of a site with lots of vernal pools where I did some biological field work recently. Now that it's in a relatively functional form--complete with blurry texture scaled-up from the 2048x2048 limit that the free version of L3DT can output, and shitty home made metal spot stamps--I thought perhaps you all could tear it apart. :-)

http://springfiles.com/download/20094/2







The potential strategic problems posed by this map:
1) vehicles move at half speed in the swampy bits, and kbots 3/4 speed
2) flat real estate for buildings is somewhat (and I hope not too ridiculously) limited and not in the places that might be convenient, which brings us to
3) metal spots are only in the boggy vernal pools

As for the balance between the three players, I'm not convinced that I've acheived it despite some area and distance calculations and a tiresome level of rotational symmetry.

You probably recognize them, but the trees are SirAtturi's, and the rocks are LathanStanley's.

I haven't had any luck getting the water to respond to changing its colors within the SMD (a greener shade would be nice). Maybe this has something to do with my old and crappy graphics hardware, who knows. I've also had a befuddling time with SpringMapConvNG ( http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=26669 ), but you probably know that and are sick of hearing about it if you read this forum.

Making units move slower is a bad idea. They will do that already due to this hills and general pathing nightmare that this map represents. L3DT is well worth the money. I highly recommend buying it.

Now, SSMF it!

Doesn't look too bad.
Things I noticed:
-very hard to place factories (xta)
Try to make the middles of the islands more flat and only rounded at the edges.
-There are some "mossy rocks" features somewhere, might look better?

pathing nightmare that this map represents

pathing doesn't seem too bad (but didnt play a real game yet, only test) because units can cross the water everywhere
(vehicles too, even though F2 tells otherwise)

Hiya, neat first go at a map.

Thoughts: vegitation is needed, this map can acutally use spring's grass to do the tall marsh grass(depending on what sort of marsh you are representing, in louisiana we have some tall marsh grass


so maybe some of that along the edge of some of the islands?

definitely needs a few flat areas for bases, might be tricky to do in l3dt, I am not sure about how flexible it is.

the metal spots possibly might have issues with teraforming slowing down the players from building on them, perhaps you can make the area around them a bit more flat.

FWIW this map has me re-interested in doing a swamp map :)

nice concept! layout needs work- I would approach this with the mindset of a sea map - flat islands to build on, swamp that is contested. for each player have a main base flat area and a foward island (and make the center flat as well) = *A compatability

Actually you dont have to have awesome texture anymore. You can do magic with ssmf settings, as forb suggested. I think that the texture you have here isnt really that bad, if you just tune it up with nice detailtextures and specular map.

Strange that you couldn't get water colors working. Could you paste your smd settings here?

what is SSMF

just saying you guys might want to show him wtf you are talking about.

About the terraintype movement modifiers being a bad idea, do you say that because of how the terraintype changes unitbalance? With the hills being fairly gentle, and the water never being high enough to block a (BA) vehicle, everything gets around just fine. Which is why I thought I ought to make things slower. The pathfinding engine seems to handle the terraintype movement modifiers well. But yeah, it seems like a bad way to do it, as it changes gameplay in ways that players wouldn't expect from visual cues.

Yeah, there definitely needs to be more flat space for buildings. Actually I'm only using l3dt for the texture map, so making the hills have a different height gradient should be easy (I made the height map in GIMP). My only issue with flatness is that I'm trying to avoid making the hills look completely unnatural. But as long as the edges are rounded, I think it'll be fine.

Haha, that is some tall grass. A photo of the place I modelled this on in spring (ba-dum-ching):

The grass isn't that tall, but there should certainly be some.

I did fiddle with water depth and terrain height to get all the metal spots usable. Extractors seem to have high slope tolerances.

I'm not sure I want to put a flat area dead center where all the metal is. I specifically want the middle not to be easily holdable. I am thinking about making a map with much larger islands for starting locations, and a metal-rich contested swamp between them.

Here's the water section of the SMD: Ahh... so that's what those images with "specular" and "splat" in their names are in some of the map archives. Of course, SSMFing this map would be nicer for everyone else than it would be for me, as I'm going to see it either on a Radeon 7500 or an Intel GMA 950. Shadows = LOL.

I appreciate all the feedback :-)

Also: has anyone made any flower features?

zoggop wrote:within the SMD

SMD are old and sorta deprecated. Use mapinfo.lua, as in the Official Map Blueprint/Container.

typemaps:
I think in this case they are ok, especially if the water would look "more swampy." Without them this would be basically a flat, empty map.

flowers:
Dont remember flowers but there are mushrooms that might work too?
Should be in this pack:
http://springfiles.com/spring/tools/spring-features

Also these never get used enough!

zwzsg wrote:SMD are old and sorta deprecated. Use mapinfo.lua, as in the Official Map Blueprint/Container.

Yet Spring 0.84 fails to load the map if an SMD isn't present. Should I just leave an SMD with team positions in there for springlobby to parse? Which options take precedence (since it's possible to have a mapinfo.lua and an SMD in the same map with entirely conflicting options)?

edit: ...fails to load if SMD isn't present and mapinfo.lua is.

None of my evo maps have smds and they load fine O_o

ooh, examples! *downloads an evorts map*

Well I'm not using blueprint yet. So technically while mine are up to date, I'm using old methods.

You can use this as a guide. it's by smoth and plays nicely with featureplacer: http://www.smoth.net/files/Grts_desertValley_15.sd7

Also you might want to consider using spring features v1: http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=25752

Thanks, now I just have to coax mapconv-ng to compile it somehow.

(And to put that, err, thing, in the center of the map, obviously.)

If you're on windows use regular mapconv: http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=21458

That mapconv ng thing is strictly for *nix.

Just compile it the way you did before. No sense re-inventing the wheel for 0 gain.

Actually the way I compiled it before was with mapconv-ng. I began using it because mapconv crashed. Of course, now I can't remember what the error was, and mapconv-ng crashes most of the time anyway. So I'll give mapconv another go (and convert the metal/features to its format).

I appear not to have the hardware to support SSMF, so maybe one of you can tell me if the specular and splat maps I made (well, okay, the splats are half-stolen from Moor v3) work and if so, provide screenshots. (please? i have been alienated from my labor--eeks.)

http://springfiles.com/spring/spring-maps/vernal-3way-0


^ how it looks on my 2006 macbook



The hills provide more building space now (they are more like plateaus) although there are fewer of them toward the center. Terrain relief has been increased somewhat, the swamp unit slowdown has been reduced, and the water area has been reduced (although the remaining pools are just as deep). Finally, Bundysoft gave me a pro trial license, so the base map texture has been much improved.

edit: oh yeah, and the metal layout has been changed

It seems texture is only chosen based on terrain height?
Could try to also take terrain slope into account so that high "cliffs" and high, flat buildable areas get a different texture.