Fetid Marsh

[Forboding Angel]

More Starcrafty style!









http://springfiles.com/spring/spring-maps/fetid-marsh

[PicassoCT]

Only in the hinterlands, do they grow the finest blue crystalls - when asked for there meth - odd ly enough, none of the RedNacks of the marshes will give you his secret recipe. Several species have build empires based upon harvesting these, with power drills .. and all these operations are controlled by Commander Jim Raynor Heisenberg.. fighting the evil insects coming crawling and the strange aliens with the psionic powers who get into your minds

Its the year 5021 and mankind knows only hillbilly.

[Orfelius]

While I am a fan of pretty much all of your past made maps Forb... I mean. These cliffs are so boxy ughh. At least the texture looks nice. Also the ramps by the center could be more smoothed because they unnecessarily narrow the already super narrow passage between hill and the center lake.

[bobthedinosaur]

Cliffs are fine. Map looks good. Did you use L3dT for this?

[Forboding Angel]

Umm ok well to answer orfelius, the cliffs are boxy because I'm using different methods to draw the heightmap than what I would usually use. My last map proved to be really good for evo, so this is a second. My goal is 10 maps, similar in design philosophy which will then supplant the current haphazard zk featured list for evo servers. It's a bit of a long term goal, but doing maps this way has managed to make mapping fun for me again. I no longer dread it, so this is a huge plus.

That's one reason I stopped using the splatting a normal maps, A because it takes forever to get it right, B because for me on a gtx 660 the performance hit is real, C doing all that made mapping more of a chore than something I actually had fun doing.

The passages between the main and the center lake are very intentional. In Evo, it is to encourage either expanding that direction with your overseer and putting a factory on that side, or using all terrains or air or amphibs (because the narrow pass will not obstruct amphibs in any meaningful way).

Remember that these are primarily made to be played with evo, but of course I always do my best to make them play good/decent with ba/zk too... IE I don't intentionally make them crappy for either of those games (remember, when I started mapping, they were all primarily for AA, so I have a lot of experience with *A based maps).

Picasso, your post is now the description on springfiles.

@bob, actually it's carrara. I spent a really long time on the texture for this. The fact that the terrain is multi-tiered makes it simultaneously more difficult and easier to wrangle the climate in carrara. I truly love L3DT, it is amazing software (I mean hell, I made like what, 70 some odd maps with it?), but at this point, carrara is simply easier to get the kind of texture generation that I want.

That said, if I dove deep into l3dt like I used to back in the day, I could still pull it off. The thing that carrara does that makes it better for me is... Carrara uses 2 source colors, then applies a blend to them. You can then control what altitude those colors are applied at, the min and max slope, and even how aggressive the blend is applied as well as the overall coverage. The amount of control actually in some ways makes it more difficult to use lol

L3dt, uses similar controls for application, but instead of colors and blends, it uses pregenerated textures. There are obvious advantages to this method. For example, l3dt textures are extremely realistic, whereas carrara is very surrealistic. Honestly I like both methods, but currently, carrara is easier for me to use (which is weird to say cause if you aren't familiar with carrara, using it is like looking at the back of someone's brain).

[Forboding Angel]

The interesting thing is that so far, these maps play exceptionally well.

[Orfelius]

By mentioning "chokepoints" I had Evo in mind not ZK or BA. It is giving all-terrain a huge advantage against hovers and amphibs in my opinion. The battle for Planet XVII (I hope I got this name right) is much better in this regard.

Cliffs could be easily tweaked in Scened to make them look a bit more rugged and uneaven (I am just saying not like forcing you to do it or anything like that).

Having map list for Evo is a splendid idea! (I didn't even know that Evo uses ZK map list)

Oh also I should mention that I appreciate some normal map name this time

[Anarchid]

What tech are you using if it can't do normals and splats inobtrusively?

[Forboding Angel]

What tech are you using if it can't do normals and splats inobtrusively?

I can, it's just boring and the performance hit is more than I'm willing to deal with. SSMF maps are nice to look at, but their performance is crap.

By mentioning "chokepoints" I had Evo in mind not ZK or BA. It is giving all-terrain a huge advantage against hovers and amphibs in my opinion. The battle for Planet XVII (I hope I got this name right) is much better in this regard.

This was supposed to skew towards all terrain, amphibs and air. I used amphibs last night to good success. The lake has the effect of forcing you to respond slowly on one side or the other, depending where you are. But there are plenty of defense options, turrets, kmars, mines, etc for the sides that you can't be on, and then there is the small wrinkle that artillery doesn't care which side you're on

Not every tech needs to have equal footing on every map imo.

[Anarchid]

I can, it's just boring and the performance hit is more than I'm willing to deal with. SSMF maps are nice to look at, but their performance is crap.

Sure, but what tech is it?

[Forboding Angel]

For the normals and the splats, I use l3dt. Super quick accurate generation that produces fantastic results in 5 minutes or less.

For example, here is an l3dt attributes map which I then pull into photoshop and use for the splat map:



Obviously a tiny bit of editing is done on the splat map, but it's not enough to bitch about.

I'm not sure I feel dedicated enough to generate a normals, but I'll generate a low res one for you so you can see.



Obviously this is without any editing whatsoever, I would do more with the normals, but you get the idea.

[qray]

Another nice one
Though in BA the metal distribution will probably lead to pork games... will test tonight.

SSMF maps are nice to look at, but their performance is crap.

..B because for me on a gtx 660 the performance hit is real..

A bit surprised. Is performance hit that bad on your system? I have the same card (with a core i5) and I mostly have 5-15% fps loss by SSMF. And since frame rates stay nearly always well above 50 even in busy situations (going up to 200, depending on map/game state), I never considered the loss in performance a problem...
Also on my old system (core2duo/gtx275) I didn't see a big performance hit with SSMF.
Would be interesting how much loss you experience(d).

[Forboding Angel]

Another nice one
Though in BA the metal distribution will probably lead to pork games... will test tonight.

Thanks

In Evo, the standard start is 7 mexes (which build in the span of time that it takes to make 2 mexes in BA) in order to be able to produce units and macro without stalling horribly.

FWIW... It's Porc, as in porcupine. Not Pork, as in porky the pig.
Related: https://youtu.be/fdcleUk-T4U

[qray]

Related: https://youtu.be/fdcleUk-T4U

ROFL

The game with BA was actually fun. Each side of a 2v2 (NW vs SE) succeeded to occupy one of the lower levels which made it even. I somehow managed to trap a commander there.
But you notice that it was not made for BA but for EVO; the ramps are a bit too narrow to not favor porcing in BA - and we somehow didn't get to all terrain units -or planes. Due to hard fighting and back and forth around the ramps, resources were tight and the switch to 2nd level came rather late short before the end.
Nevertheless, will definitely try it again

[Forboding Angel]

Some of you guys keep saying that the ramps are narrow, when in actuality, you can pretty much move a 150 supply evo army down them abreast of one another.

Then it just dawned on me... BA wreckage blocks units doesn't it? That explains a lot. Thanks for the feedback. It's nice to know how they work in other games.

[qray]

BA wreckage blocks units doesn't it?

Yes. On top you can defend quite effectively with stationary defences in BA.