New Map: Altored Earth

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 16 Jan 2006, 06:52

Finally a geographically accurate Earth map! The first one in the history of TA, this map is set in the chill of a nuclear winter. I've tried to be creative and fair with resource distribution. Player start locations might remind you a bit of the board game Risk, plus a few ocean start locations for seafaring players.

The map's resource distribution is opposite to land distribution. In other words, start locations with little flat land available have lots of energy and maybe even are close to a geothermal vent. Ocean starts get the most metal overall.

This map was only possible thanks to my combination of the latest techniques in satellite topography and bathymetry measurement, courtesy of Nasa.

Altored Earth should be ideal for massive naval and land battles. Despite how it might look on the minimap, there's enough room for even the largest AA battleships to maneuver around the edges of the map. I recommend 3v3 as a minimum player count, with 5v5 being ideal. This is no map for those with slow connections of the faint of heart.

All land has a hardness of 500 to make sure that the continents aren't sunk... too quickly ^^

The map is a positively massive 38x18. There is a compromise though... unfortunately it seems that Spring currently can't handle maps of this size with shadows turned on. So while playing this map you'd be best to turn shadows off. And also the map is 30 mb. Moving right along.....

I will probably post some more screenshots later, but for now here's the minimap and a sample of how accurate this map is to real-world shorelines:

(this picture is a little washed out, sorry about that. ingame it's a fair bit clearer)

Download:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ta-a ... 7?download

Maelstrom · Post by **Maelstrom** » 16 Jan 2006, 07:55

30mb for this?!?! You gotta be joking...

Gnomre · Post by **Gnomre** » 16 Jan 2006, 08:33

Does it suffer from "Solar collector the size of Ireland" syndrome like every other earth map ever? Also, are the mountains actually mountains or just slightly elevated hills?

Das Bruce · Post by **Das Bruce** » 16 Jan 2006, 09:09

Well it doesn't seem like you have stuffed it up as much as I feared, I'll have to see in game.

Forboding Angel · Post by **Forboding Angel** » 16 Jan 2006, 10:25

it looks a lot different ingame. It's a really nice map :D

Warlord Zsinj · Post by **Warlord Zsinj** » 16 Jan 2006, 11:07

Mmm, from that screenshot, it seems Gnomes fears are correct; it looks remarkably flat.

How big is this map? Can we see a unit for scale?
If you are making an Earth map, you really need to make it as big as you can get it (especially if you expect us to download a 30mb map).

Personally, I'd rather have someone do a *country* really well, and in good detail/scale/heights, as opposed to another flat earth map.

Das Bruce · Post by **Das Bruce** » 16 Jan 2006, 12:10

Terrible map. To work it would have needed to be atleast 5 times as big and hundreds of megabytes.

Your better off using a higher detail heightmap and doing specific regions like Zsinj said. Plus having such a repetitive texture and not tiling is just lazy.

mufdvr222 · Post by **mufdvr222** » 16 Jan 2006, 12:54

You could try just taking a slice of a continent "east west" with interesting and usefull terrain features like across the middle of the US or Pakistan anything that has a mix of flat ground hills and mountains, the Malaysian archipelago would make a great archipelago style map with the right scaling,, just a thought,
all things aside a map of that size takes a fair amount of patience to get textured and compiled.

Maelstrom · Post by **Maelstrom** » 16 Jan 2006, 13:56

Tasmania would also be good. Has a nice mountain in the middle of it, triangular for a 3 way battle, plenty of water for naval maps, and is where I live. If your wondering, its the island off the bottom of Australia, you can see it in the screenshot.

NOiZE · Post by **NOiZE** » 16 Jan 2006, 14:26

and this screams for some tiling... the whole ocean @ least!

Forboding Angel · Post by **Forboding Angel** » 16 Jan 2006, 16:00

good god lol have any of you even loaded it up?

Would you prefer atlantic over this? If so, well theres nothing I can do for you lol.

the map is 38 x 18 for those of you who can't read.

It is the biggest map in spring to date, and you all expect it to be 8 mbs? Get real.

Also this is the earth in nuclear winter for those of you have trouble reading...

Get cable or dsl ffs. You guys have no problem with dling 4 gigs worth of pr0n...

NOiZE · Post by **NOiZE** » 16 Jan 2006, 17:28

it is possible i got a map ready for next spring version

20x 30 which is under 10 MB and has features and looks good!

Forboding Angel · Post by **Forboding Angel** » 16 Jan 2006, 17:42

Well features don't take up hardly any space at all so that can be discounted.

I'm not saying it's impossible ;P But it's not always practical <-- When I say that I'm not necessarily referring to this map

aGorm · Post by **aGorm** » 16 Jan 2006, 18:18

28 x 28 = 784
18 x 30 = 540

even 20 x 30 = 600

Hence this is not the biggest map by a long shot, all 28 x 28 maps are bigger. Just thought I'd point that out. Seeing as im teh one that actully told him maps that size were feasible cause its based on Max area not Max dimentions...

anyway, I'll have a look at it at some point, looks promising. Glad you got it sorted Caydr!

(Also file size is relative to area Forboding ...)

aGorm

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 16 Jan 2006, 19:30

The scale certainly isn't anywhere near perfect... I *could* make a map of more realistic proportions and elevations, but whether or not it would be playable is a bigger matter, no?

38x18, IMO, is pretty much as close to realistic scale as is possible with the size limit. I could go to JPG I suppose, that would allow much bigger probably, but I'm not sure I want to suffer through that compression.

The problem is, as I was told by a couple of mappers, maps with odd-numbered sizes are impossible. I dunno, maybe this was bunk, but it's what I was told. So in other words, a 19xsomething isn't possible. That's what I was told.

So, to make it any larger, I'd have to go to 20 for the map height. And since I want things to remain in proportion, what would mean a much larger corresponding size increase width-wise. Say, maybe 44x20. AFAIK that's not possible with mapconv due to size restrictions. So what I've made really is the largest possible earth render. If you look at the texture close-up, even now it looks pretty bad... I had to render it at less than half size because Terragen can't handle anything much larger.

So there's the size limitation and the terragen rendering limitation that are both holding me back from making anything larger. Not to mention that Spring bugs up when shadows are turned on with anything of this size.

There's a new version of terragen coming out later this month AFAIK, which evidently is much more efficient and would probably support larger renders. And then maybe I could compress to JPG and come out with a map a bit larger. Fortunately I kept all my original high-res heightmap data so in the event these technical limitations are removed I'll be able to create an enhanced and somewhat more realistically-sized version.

There is a problem though. First, playability - Spring supports only 10 players per game. I'd want at least 16 before I'd call anything much larger than the current Altored Earth playable. Second, even if the map was dramatically larger, it's still a helluva lot smaller than the source data (I'm talking about a HEIGHTMAP that's over 40,000 pixels wide). This means terrain would have to be either artificially flattened in most areas to make it playable, or else do what I've done now and only have relatively small elevation. Third... well I've forgotten what it is and it won't likely come back to me. But it was a pretty big thing... In any case the first two limitations will take a good long time to overcome...

Don't put my lack of tiling down to laziness. I just don't want to tile and let's face it, odds are maps of this size couldn't possibly be playable on anything but a high speed connection. That's just all there is to it. So if there's a choice between 1) quality and 2) convenience to people who can't even play the map, which should I choose?

Min3mat · Post by **Min3mat** » 16 Jan 2006, 19:35

u CAN host for 16. doubt it will work tho.

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 16 Jan 2006, 19:46

Only 10 teams/commanders can be spawned though. any other players have to share a comm or spec.

Forboding Angel · Post by **Forboding Angel** » 16 Jan 2006, 20:03

Caydr wrote: Don't put my lack of tiling down to laziness. I just don't want to tile and let's face it, odds are maps of this size couldn't possibly be playable on anything but a high speed connection. That's just all there is to it. So if there's a choice between 1) quality and 2) convenience to people who can't even play the map, which should I choose?

Quoted for truth.

BTW remind me to show you how to tile without any extra work on your part and still come out with high quality renders :D

I've picked up a few tricks ;P

Zoombie · Post by **Zoombie** » 16 Jan 2006, 20:34

Its too flat! TOO FLAAAAAAAAAAAT!

If you can't fix the problem then we need a super minispring!

Torrasque · Post by **Torrasque** » 16 Jan 2006, 20:55

Or wait on Zaphod

Spring RTS Engine

New Map: Altored Earth

New Map: Altored Earth