Spring RTS Engine

Voila, here's my reinterpretion of the classic Azure Rampart: Link to Springfiles

Playable area and bases are a bit bigger, complete map area is a lot bigger to give room for aircraft movement. There's a map option to adjust metal income to your taste with 3 settings (BA values in description):
-Azure (as on azure rampart): radius 400, income max 2.4
-Violet (default setting): radius 250, income max 1.8
-Metal (pure metal map fun): radius 10, income 1.9

I tried to go for a spacey look using voidwater and voidground; this unfortunately lead to some not so nice cut-offs at some places of the map border (I choose to ignore this for now).



Credits: Skybox from Smoth. Scipts based on offical map blueprint container by jK.

So it means I made a classic enough that ppl feel like making remakes!

Nice job to both of you :p

Cool

Nice work!

I would suggest attempting to use /voidground on the transparent area to reduce the jagged edges at the bottom of the walls.

zwzsg wrote:So it means I made a classic enough that ppl feel like making remakes!

Sure! It's always been my favourite 5 FFA map (though I like playing Aum and Violence a lot, too)

The Yak wrote:I would suggest attempting to use /voidground on the transparent area to reduce the jagged edges at the bottom of the walls.

I don't get what you mean?
I used voidground to get this effect, which is pretty much what I was aiming for:


And this is a corner where it obviously fails:


But unfortunately, I haven't found a way to avoid this (or is there any hidden map compiler setting that may magically solve this?).
I was thinking that maybe the Geometry for sharp cliffs could somehow help, but this doesn't seem to be ready yet.
So I choose to ignore it for now and release a version of the map anyway.

make some rock cluster features using the texture, place them all around the side.

always visible and unreclaimable.

Add the fog widget and bam sexy.. heck you could even have a few rock features jutting out the fog.

the diffuse texture of the map supports alpha, you could use that to reduce those jagged edges.

smoth wrote:make some rock cluster features using the texture, place them all around the side.
always visible and unreclaimable.
Add the fog widget and bam sexy.. heck you could even have a few rock features jutting out the fog.

I'd rather would not use features. First since I never did 3D modelling and second it would probably be hard to archive the same texture look (it works heavily with ground specular and diffuse settings).
I never used the fog widget. Can it be easily[*] applied only to certain map areas? If fog is over the complete map area, it would take away that floating in space look. If I could just use it to cover the borders, it might give a nice effect (would have to try).
And second question: I think to remember reading some time ago that the fog killed framerate for many people? Is this till true?

[*] I used easily since I have no experience in the graphical stuff that can be done with Lua

Another solution could maybe be to make a jagged heightmap at the borders and only use voidwater and no voidground (without a jagged border, the clean straight cut-off looks too artificial).

enetheru wrote:the diffuse texture of the map supports alpha, you could use that to reduce those jagged edges.

I did. The edges look the same in the diffuse texture.

Maybe it gets clearer if I show the edge with voidground disabled:

In the green circled area it works as intended (or nearly). In the red circled area, somehow big parts (=tiles?), are very dark and finally marked as transparent with voidground. But if you look closely (higher res in attached file) you can see, that in principle there is a texture "underneath" as in the other places.
That's why I though it might have something to do with mapconv. I used springMapConvNG under Linux: I also tried to compile your mapconv just to see if this might make a difference. But the first try failed: my compiler didn't know -std=c++11 and other settings don't seem to work and I get many errors when trying to compile (maybe time to update my distribution ).

Or maybe I am on the wrong track here and it is a principle "problem" of the engine and voidground?!

This might give a hint to the problem. I used SpringMapEdit to decompile the diffuse texture:


So it seems that the the strange cutt-offs are in the compiled texture in the smt file.
Maybe I try to get hold of a windows machine and try the mapconv there, just to see if it makes a difference...

qray wrote:This might give a hint to the problem. I used SpringMapEdit to decompile the diffuse texture:


So it seems that the the strange cutt-offs are in the compiled texture in the smt file.
Maybe I try to get hold of a windows machine and try the mapconv there, just to see if it makes a difference...

It looks like the thing making tiles for compression is buggering up and assigning the wrong tiles to those edges...

I wonder if different compression options would help but I have not idea how springMapConvNG does compression.

OK, I was just able to test with mapconv under Windows: there the cut-offs don't appear.
BUT, the whole texture is shifted a bit to the left -or the height map to the right?- so height and texture don't match in the final map.
Anybody an idea where this could come from?

I also tried playing around with different compression settings in springMapConvNG under Linux, but there the result is always the same

EDIT:

If I move the heightmap by 4 pixels to the left, texture, metal and height fit also under windows mapconv. Still not sure why this is necessary?
But the result is convincing (same corner as shown above); v1.1 is on its way...:


Just as side notes:
SMT file size is about 4 times bigger than from linux mapconv, but after packing the sd7 file sizes are nearly the same.
Unfortunately mapconv from windows does only work nearly under wine: the minimap doesn't come out right. Everything else is fine; so for testing it is OK.

Strange. Good work though, you've already been much more successful with /voidground then I was.

Unfortunately mapconv from windows does only work nearly under wine: the minimap doesn't come out right.

Delete all mini.*** files before you run mapconv.

thanks for trying my code but its pretty messy for some time now.. I've been messing with it heaps and broke it a while ago.

mapconv is such a shit solution

Silentwings wrote:Delete all mini.*** files before you run mapconv.

Thanks for the tip! Unfortunately this doesn' help. It creates the minimap BMP alright as under Windows but then this error comes: and then the minimap in the final map is just black.

enetheru wrote:thanks for trying my code but its pretty messy for some time now.. I've been messing with it heaps and broke it a while ago.

It's a pity. Right now I would have loved to have a working alternative to mapConvNG


Still wondering a bit why mapConvNG fails. Until this map, it worked without problems for me. I don't know if size (number of tiles?) plays a role - with 24x24 this is the largest map area I tried so far.
Besides the problem described above, I remember having texture errors in an early version of this map, where there was a sand texture in the middle with not too much substructure. There it produced strange artifacts. They vanished when it was switched to a texture with more structure.
Seems that even with the "no compression" setting tiling still somehow screws up on this map...

Well, it stays true: there's still some small corners, where you need to revert to Windows... now I know again why I kept the installation on my old laptop

qray wrote:It's a pity. Right now I would have loved to have a working alternative to mapConvNG

And that's all that's needed to provide motivation, I'll start working on it again. see if I can fix it today.

enetheru wrote:And that's all that's needed to provide motivation, I'll start working on it again. see if I can fix it today.

Ups, I didn't mean to push work on your desk
Though it's a bit cumbersome, the windows solution with the 4px shift works for now...

But if you want to do it anyway, I am happy to test it

Seems I am not good at standing by my decision to ignore the spikes at the border :
V1.1 is now on springfiles. Besides the diffuse texture, also some splat detail textures and settings have been updated.

There are still a few places, where there's a visible edge between tiles (happens with both map compilers at the same places). But furtunately, they are only visisble, when going really close (I noticed them while working on detail textures).