Spring RTS Engine

Hey mappers... I'd really like to have a map for the new format, designed for two to eight players, facing off across two big, detailed trench lines with a fairly thin no-man's land full of craters, broken barbed wire, etc.- a very WWI look. We're not talking huge, here- I'd say that No Man's Land should be just about the distance a BB / Tim can fire, to keep the map relevant to AA players, as well as... other things.

Anybody up for this? I'd be willing to make the Features... heck, I'd be willing to make a detailed mesh that people could turn into a heightmap, using the technique that PicassoCT was talking about... I figure that splattering could be used for the craters and to add random details...

The new map format wouldn't be ideal for this because we don't have decals yet which would make the internal craters and scars much more difficult to make look good, and we don't have a great slope map generator yet so making the trench walls a different texture then the floors and bottoms will be difficult unless they just happen to perfectly hit all at the same height.

The new map format is actually a bit boorish to work with at the moment because there aren't many easily to work tools for making natural looking landscapes with the splatting system that we know of.

Actually, after learning about the height map method that Picasso uses I'm a bit interested to see if it can be further abstracted to be used to generate slope maps and other terrain maps for use in SM3 mapping.

make your map in l3dt, foreboding tells us it's possible then to export the attributes map in such a way to generate blendmaps automatically.

barbed wire fences!?

crazy fun idea!



might look kinda outta place with hovertanks and mechs and stuff.. but who cares!!




might come up with some WW2 rubble for ya before TOOOO long...

I've got a V E R Y full plate..

AF wrote:make your map in l3dt, foreboding tells us it's possible then to export the attributes map in such a way to generate blendmaps automatically.

That is the best way to get a good set of blend maps, but it won`t solve the issue raised by SwiftSpear with regard to crater wall texturing and realistic texturing of hillsides.

120 tris... at RL work, interrupted many times... lol... lookie did in 45 mins



and on to top it off... I bet I can cram the tex map into 32x32 pixels

AF wrote:make your map in l3dt, foreboding tells us it's possible then to export the attributes map in such a way to generate blendmaps automatically.

Ya, but there is no way to import it other then taking screenshots and it takes a metric forever to do anything with L3DT

[edit] that isn't to say it doesn't work, it's just not ideal for several reasons.

go back to the TA mapping roots, creatign tiles in Bryce 3D :)

SwiftSpear wrote:

AF wrote:make your map in l3dt, foreboding tells us it's possible then to export the attributes map in such a way to generate blendmaps automatically.

Ya, but there is no way to import it other then taking screenshots and it takes a metric forever to do anything with L3DT

[edit] that isn't to say it doesn't work, it's just not ideal for several reasons.

Actually, you are quite incorrect. Reason being:

Since all you need is the attributes map for l3dt, you can import the heightmap at 1/2 the size that your texture map will be. This is much faster than before, because not so many calculations.

It shouldn't take more than 5 minutes really.

LathanStanley wrote:120 tris... at RL work, interrupted many times... lol... lookie did in 45 mins



and on to top it off... I bet I can cram the tex map into 32x32 pixels

That looks cool!

Taking screenshots? That isn't how it works... You can easily export the attributes maps as images. (Although stitching them together is definitely an annoyance.) By the way creating blendmaps using 3dsmax is definitely possible (using some interesting tricks of course). Although in my opinion it would be a waste of time since L3DT does a great job already.

hrmph wrote:Taking screenshots? That isn't how it works... You can easily export the attributes maps as images. (Although stitching them together is definitely an annoyance.) By the way creating blendmaps using 3dsmax is definitely possible (using some interesting tricks of course). Although in my opinion it would be a waste of time since L3DT does a great job already.

no so, export as png or bmp, pull into photoshop, eyedropper doop on one of the colors, color range selection on 0, copy, paste into a new image with a black background, guassian blur @ 2 - 5 pixels, save as. Rinse repeat for each land type.

It's really quite simple.

I've done it before FA Although I am forced to export the attributes maps as a mosaic. It says I don't have enough ram to export the whole thing(I have 1gig). Any ideas why I can't export it as a single file?

Forb has an ungodly huge HDD ram secondary cache set up so that he can never strictly run out of ram, it just moves to HD ram after a certain point. Not as fast but if you need 5 gigs worth of ram calculation space there isn't much else you can do.

SwiftSpear wrote:Forb has an ungodly huge HDD ram secondary cache set up so that he can never strictly run out of ram, it just moves to HD ram after a certain point. Not as fast but if you need 5 gigs worth of ram calculation space there isn't much else you can do.

quite true

I have 1 gig system ram, 8 gig cache (not to mention the fact that I have 2 Very nice/expensive WD hdd's) . When I'm rendering a HUGE map (like 32x32) l3dt taxes my ass like bubba, but otherwise I'm generally ok.

@ hrmph, what size image are we talking about here? As a general rule, your attributes map/the heightfild that you import, should only be half the size you would normally import (because it's faster, and since all you need is the attributes map, we aren't really losing anything here).

So if you're running attributes map on a 16x16 really the size of your HM needs to only be 4096 when you import it into l3dt. This speeds upo the process by 3/4.

FA - It was an 8192x8192 image. From now on I will use half the map size instead. Also I've bumped up the max size of my page file to 9gigs, so that should fix my virtual memory problems I hope.

Er... back to subject...

I don't really care if it's new format, old format, or the format-thats-still-on-the-drawing board. Mainly, it's the idea of getting together a map with a really specific feel.

Argh wrote:Er... back to subject...

I don't really care if it's new format, old format, or the format-thats-still-on-the-drawing board. Mainly, it's the idea of getting together a map with a really specific feel.

while the idea is really cool, it's a bit tough to put into practice. Picasso would probably be the best option for a map like this. He is quite talented and I imagine that he would be able to do it and make the textures line up quite perfectly.

I could prolly do it quite well myself, but a map such as this takes a sort of patience that I don't have.

Edit: I'm not trying to im[ply that no one else is capabvle of it, just stating my opinion as to who would be the best person to ask for something like this.

I could do the map, but it'll take me time... and yeah... just time... lots of it... I'll put it on a "to-do" list.. but I dunno if I'll ever get to it... might be fun to get REALLY carried away with it though.. and make it look REALLY good...

Thx for the flowers FA

and i will give it a try, but don`t expect to much to early, i still have a desert Map in the Works... but , ahem, Lathan, could you put in the Features ? I could send you the Map, and you put the finnishing touches over it ?