Spring RTS Engine

**UPDATED THE MAP to Version 2**

When I first started playing Spring, one of the very first maps I played was Castles, and is still one of my favorite maps.

So I decided to make my own map in a similar style, but with a twist.
Players can actually reach the middle and if held can be a big boost to the economy.

4 Walled fortresses surrounded by water moats and 2 bridges exiting each, and a walled base in the center that has a high metal deposit and geothermal spots.
Each base has a fair ammount of metal, but not enough to support a fighting economy, you will have to spread outside to gain extra metal to fund your campaign, and with the middle being so rich it should play for some hard fought strikes to controll it.

Each fort including the center base has ramps going up to the top walls so that you can place defences and/or units on the walls.

I Kept the map fairly flat with some slight terrain deviance for easy travel to the other fortresses, and a few scattered trees on the paths between them for some fireworks as the first few waves of Kbots/vehicles start going at it.

**EDIT**
I remade the forts texture so its alot cleaner, with less noticable stretching.
Tweaked the metal a bit more, so that its harder to fund an army with starting resources inside each base, and fixed the Feature map so there are now only 5 Geothermal spots(1 in each corner and 1 in center)

Hope you guys enjoy this.

DOWNLOAD LINK
Desert_forts_V2.sd7
8 Mb
http://www.fileuniverse.com/?p=showitem&ID=2186

the texture looks *really* stretched on the walls. if the metal content is low this map could be fun :D (and theres more metal outside the castles than in)

The stretching is a problem that I can't really do anything about, look at any map that has high vertical walls, such as castles.

Texture is applied directly from top and doesn't compensate for the sides or angled walls, if the walls were actual 3d objects instead of being a pulled flat texture it wouldn't be an issue.

Only reason its noticiable in mine is because there is a transition from the wall to the floor texture just at the edge of the height map, castles has the same texture on the entire castle area.

If spring would allow for a higher quality heightmap, that would help as well to make the outlines of such walls much cleaner and precise.

I think it looks really nice.

From teh screeny id say thats not half bad on teh wall stretching front.

aGorm

thanks for the map perfect for the random games of seige by me and a few mates.

well it looks like castles2 to me! lol..

Use a texture where the walls rise that stretches well, like plain grey. Then even tho it's stretched, you don't notice it.

Doesn't spring apply a base dirt-texture anyway? Does that get streched?

Spring applies a semi-transparent detail map for zooming up close to the ground, to be honest.. I really don't know if that gets stretched too, but I'm assuming it will because that texture is applied from the top as well.

Targon wrote:Doesn't spring apply a base dirt-texture anyway? Does that get streched?

Spring applies this texture ingame, after the map is compiled, it doesnt get stretched unless the mapper makes a new texture and just happens to accidentally stretch that texture in photoshop/etc before packaging

I'd like to see a castles style map where players start outside the castles, and have to fight to gain hold of the various different castles. It would be cool if they were not massive castles, but rather small forts that offered a defensive player some advantage, but not an impenetrable fortress.

And as min3mat suggested, it would be cool if the forts offered you strategic advantages by taking them, but there were more resource advantages elsewhere.

I like the idea of haveing to fight for castles, rather then the overused hill!

Make ONE castle, and everyone starts outside it...needless to say, Choose location in game would ruin the point

Definitely a good idea to have limited resources in a castle, and geothermal / strong metal in the contested areas.

which there is..

I like the idea of a map with a lot of small castles. :)

I like the idea of a map that IS a castle, you know the big ones with the turrets and all the trappings? You'd ahve to use features but it'd look neato.

An entire map that is itself a castle, interesting idea but I'm claustrophobic
I like wide open areas so you can see your enemy and he can see you, and then toss in a few things to duck behind.

http://www.fileuniverse.com/?p=showitem&ID=1443
It doesn't have any features though...

Wasn't that the original design behind Azure Rampart, AF?