Spring RTS Engine

You may download here: http://fileuniverse.com/?p=showitem&ID=2254

Ok I retextured evergreenhaven with a very high detail texture. THe file size is only 500 kilobytes larger than the original.

The only thing is is that it has contour lines here and there, which aren't that noticeable, but with the way that some people like to complain, I figured I would poll for it.

Unfortunately, because I am using the original Heightmap from the ota evergreenhaven the contour lines can not be helped. I have rendered it 6 different ways using 6 different methods and the results are generally the same, however, it is absolutely beautiful regardless of the contour lines.

Here are some screenies.

Anyone who complains will have earned my officeal ire!

And i'll send some winged ninja's to your house.

Angle, you have done it again! Totaly awsome looking. ALso i cant notice the contour lines you mention...

I can see the contours, but I just don't care- that's purty Is it just me, or are is there practically zero distortion on the hillsides there? Was that the new spatter stuff in action that Zaphod mentioned, or just real, real careful work with the texture? Either way, it worked

Hey your right...those hillsides have no stretching that i can see.

Mabey its really easy, but if its not kudos!

Looks great, Release it.

Screw all that complain .

Dam fine map that one.

no stretching on hills

It is on a super high resolution render with l3dt using my custom evergreen climate


ok I'm uploading now. BTW deci is working on a new 28 x 28 map using this same climate that will blow your socks off. I put a lot of work into the climate and now it's starting to pay off.


Just wait till you see deci's map. It's gorgous

The only think that i'm not fond of as far as the texture goes is the conture lines. Beyond that the texture looks very good in my opinion.

... so, erm... why not just fix the OTA heightmap? Just use Curves to increase contrast, use a gentle Gaussian blur, and voila, no more jaggies.

And... erm... is this environment that you're using mainly a description of the light/fog, or is it responsible for the distortion-free hills, too? That's the part that really, immediately got me... I was like... woah, hills that don't look distorted... sorry for the nub questions, but I haven't really played with mapping yet (too busy re-learning TA stuff for NanoBlobs and getting a feel for how S3O works).

1 to 1 compression ratios and to answer your other deal

"I have rendered this 6 different ways using 6 different methods and they all turned out basically the same"

FYI

ota heightmaps come out of annihilator at 500 x 500 pixels

for a 1 to 1 rendering ratio it must be the same size as the terrain map, therfore...

for a 12 x 12 map you must resize a greyscale image from 500 to 6144.

I did guassian dude, but when it has been stretched/resampled that much you have to mega blur the heightmap which means your detailed hills turn into basically round blobs. I chose a high blur that I knew would not lose detail of the heightmap.

Try it, you'll see what I mean. Besides, who cares? If you don't like it then down download it. from any distance away you can't even see the contour lines except for on like 2 hills.

Light and fog have nothing to do with the texture on the hills. it's the 1 to 1 render. Most mappers use a 1 to 8 render scale which blurs the hell out of the textures. 1 to 1 rendering ratios take a lot of computer power so not everyone can do it and I don't fault someone for not wanting to spend 2 hors - 3 days on 1 render. Hell on a 1 to 1 render I can't even process water tables because it would take 50 gigs of memory, which as you can image is a little hard to come by.

I'm not flaming you dude, however, keep in mind that I spend more time mapping then I spent playing spring (and trust me that is a lot of time), and as far as heightmaps go, I am aware of the tricks, but sometimes you just can't use the tricks to full extent because you make detailed hills look like blobs, and that would be rather boring imo. ;P

I'll worry about details when I start mapping, I guess, right now I'm too nub to have an informed opinion on the technicalities. Thanks for your answers on how you avoided the stretching, it's interesting how much the rendering process influences the total results.

Very nice.

But about the contour lines, if your so worried about people not liking them, why not take a little extra time and manually edit the offending areas? You obviously spent a decent amount of time on this, so the little extra needed to do that would save you the problem of people complaning about them.

Forboding Angel wrote: I did guassian dude, but when it has been stretched/resampled that much you have to mega blur the heightmap which means your detailed hills turn into basically round blobs. I chose a high blur that I knew would not lose detail of the heightmap.

IIRC, I always found using gaussian blurs on the heightmap to create that type of artifact.

Looks great btw

Absolutely Fantastic! Nice Work!

Mother, ya ur right, but the flipside is that it looks horrible if you don't lol.

Mael, it wasn't that I was worried, I just didn't wanna get flamed for it like I have been in the past.

At any rate, thanks guys. I hope you enjoy it ;P

I've seen the guassian blur do that too and L3DT tends to emphasis it. It can be hidden with random or fractal noise mixed in at 1%.

ooo thanks for the tip weaver!

from these screenies id say this one looks a lot better than the old one!
the grass has much more realism into it.
I'll download it and play too see how good they are

The cliff faces look SOOO good, it's sad that the wierd circly things look so wrong on that one hill. Grass absolutly never does that.