Spring RTS Engine

I'm still thinking of various color settings and such.
And I know there's very profound contour lines visible, but I think I'm going to let them be because removing them would require sacrifices elsewhere.
A few possibilities follow:







What do you think? It's 24x24.

The heightmap looks kool, can't wait to see your "real" texture.

Those contourlines are caused by the ingame shadowing, do you have lowpass on? And could you show us your heightmap?

set the y location of the sun direction to a higher number and they should disappear, also, turn on lowpass.

Oh, I forgot to try the lowpass-option, althou I was going to.
Here's the heightmap.
[img][img]http://users.evtek.fi/~ilkkale/HF.jpg[/img][/img]

this map will have some awesome gameplay :D

What do you mean?
You can build stuff even on the steepest slopes(not counting the deformations). Althou not solar collectors, somehow. But wind power, kbot labs, etc.

I REALLY REALLY like the fact that it is not YET ANOTHER flat map with some hills standing up. That height difference i so sweet, really makes a more "realistic" feeling to the whole thing. Me like, cant wait to see the final version!

I like the ridges ehre.

From straight down the hills arent goign to be as noticeable and those coutnour lines are actually an aide and make ti look ncier.

contour liens arent always good but theres a time and a palce where they are an artistic asset and this is one of them......

The texture is a little to bland and it's saved by the contour lines. Remove the countour lines and it just wont look the same......


I'm also torn between the middle version and the top version....

Oh my... could it be... the holy 'Xanthe' has a rival? You could well have just stated a war that will decimate a million worlds!

Oh crap... 24x24? :\

There's actually not much texture right now. All there is is a kind of a lighting solution from 3ds max ..
But I like the desert feeling from the few first images. Maybe I could put some subtle sand texture to almost everywhere and some rocky stuff on the deformations.

Dont ruin this by sticking a sand texture on it. It doesnt look like a desert map Instead make it look stranger, think of something unusual.

Using a 16 bit heightmap will fix the contour lines. 16 bit on SMF is possible somehow, weaver did a test for it once.

This looks really really cool, cant wait mate ^^

16 bit can be done, but it's not very easy(the first time anyway).

You have to pull the heightmap into photoshop cs2, image>mode>16bit

Then filters>blur>guassian blur > 2.0 pixel strength.

Save as myheightmap.RAW

SOmetime it works, more often than not for me mapconv spits it right back out at me, but it can and does work, but generally it's more trouble than it's worth to me.

You can get contour lines with 16bit bit if the sun's too low.

I did a texture on it. I don't like it thou. The base texture is way too big in scale, and the colors are bland. Here's some shots anyways.

http://users.evtek.fi/~ilkkale/screen028.jpg
http://users.evtek.fi/~ilkkale/screen030.jpg
http://users.evtek.fi/~ilkkale/screen031.jpg
http://users.evtek.fi/~ilkkale/screen033.jpg

Leave it as sandy desurt!!! it was way cool like that, infact the second set of shots looked realy good...

the ocntors are a bit messy in some places... If you can ditch them it will add to it... them maybe do layers of sand on te hdifferent heights to help with identifying the height from above. Thant and a nice sand texture over it... and ummm.

Please dont do the weird grass... rocks would be much cooler.

Anyway thats just an opinion, good lucK!

aGorm

ok in your compiling string add -l

in the smd where it says sun direction, change the second number to 2.

like this:

sundir= 2 2 0;

these coordinates are

sundir= x y z;

Y is vertical in this way so setting it to 2 will most likely double the sun height and your contours will dissappear... and the map will look a lot better. I wouldn't ditch the last texture you made until you have removed the contours. It might very well look much better than you originally thought.