Thanks.
PicassoCT wrote: ↑27 Jul 2020, 22:48
If i made some lava map features, would you add them ? Also, we need those pulsating self-ilumination maps, starcraft had.. great for energy strips, and little cracks with lava glowing pulsating below..
Maybe. I don't like the idea of lava cracks very much. It's been attempted on various iterations of the
incandescence map map and looks weird. I think that map would be better without them.
There's an iteration of the
Ravaged map which has a dark lava layer with glowing cracks (I'm considering switching to it on my recommended map pool). It looks ok, but I prefer my lava type (and mechanics associated with it).
I value consistency more than raw asset quality: a 60 elmos wide greyish rock would be fitting, a three headed monkey would not regardless of how polished it is. Another thing is performance cost and file size (my maps are generally < 30 MB).
You could make generic sets of features for different map types and with standardized names to avoid collisions, then people could unzip them into their maps and cherry pick the ones they want to use. There's probably stuff like that already.
Beherith wrote: ↑28 Jul 2020, 10:12
Sweet! What is your toolchain for heightmap/texture editing?
I use paint.net to make layered images for the heightmap at a higher than required resolution, and them use them as a base to build the layered diffuse (one at about half resolution and the other with fewer layers at full resolution - for a 14x14 map, full resolution would be 7168x7168px).
The textures are done manually by stacking blurred countours and overlays with builtin effects included in paint.net (clouds, noise, blurs, dents, etc.). I often use a higher contrast version of the heightmap image itself as an overlay to the map texture.
Then I use Gimp to convert a flattened version of the heightmap to 16 bit greyscale and add some extra blur or smoother ramps if necessary and use a command line application to convert it to raw format.
Then I use a batch file that calls your mapconv application (thanks for it, btw :)) and uses the given diffuse, heightmap etc, and generates the .smf and .smt files, which i then move to the maps directory.
