Spring RTS Engine

It's like the Core Contingency metal map, just a little smaller (80% of original dimension) because spring has some limitation on map size, and a bit more symetric. The pyramid center are also give a bit more metal, and the pyramid faces even more. Units can climb anywhere, but that's a spring issue. The steeper the slope the slower the units climb, but units always manage to climb anywhere, in spring. But otherwise it's the same as the TA map.

The shading is handled by Spring, so it perfectly follow the heightmap. I just changed tint of plateau so flat high part stand out more to flat low part. And I reduced contrast of pyramid faces so the core insigna are clearly seen.

Black sky and fog, and contrasted lighting to show it's an atmosphereless planet.


Download Core Prime Industrial Area from FileUniverse, only 2.5MB

:D

very nice... :) :D

Remove the -l (thats a lower case L) from the command to make the edges sharper, else it blurs them and rounds the corners.

But other than that, looks good.

Oh, I see, all those times I believed RedFish was saying -I while he was saying -l.

Was this screen shoots of the game I was in ....

Looks like I didn't have a chance at winning ....

Need more practice ... in think ....

Smashing good work there.

Judging by the deformation in the last pic, I'd assume that theres no way to change the "hardness" of the terrain (yet ). Nice work again zwzsg!
The water looks good, have you experimented with an even darker (read: more black) color?

In spring units can climb anything, they're just slowed by slopes. So units can always go out of a crater. Considering the insane amout of starburt missiles that was constantly pourring on some parts of the map, I'd say terrain deformation is pretty low in fact. And bumpy ground never got in the way of my units in that game. In fact I had two adv kbot lab exit point set to the area that had been pounded by Rangers and Conquerors (which, I remind you, are level 2 ships) for hours, and it didn't even feel like they were slowed down by the craterised ground. Only the cliffs seemed to slow them notably.

No, I haven't experienced with darker water. But yes, that green on the shore is a bit too bright. I'll leave as it is for this map for compatibility reason, but if I do another metal map with water I'll probably try darker tones.

Zwz, how did you

1. Manage to get the heightmap aligned perfectly? I spent endless hours to fix stupid Metal Heck.

2. Get the area outside the map to be black too? Mine is hopelessly blue.

zwzsg U the man!

And i know the difference between L and I. Thank you. Never used -l anyway.

Yes, I meant it's me who got confused between I and l.

I haven't used -L either. But, when enlarging the heightmap, in my image editor, I ticked the thing to interpolate the color of the pixels, so as to have smooth cliff, instead of awful crenels every x step. It's possible that this procedure also round the edges. I'll have yet to devise a way to smooth constant slopes but not the edges at the end of slopes. I think redoing the map entirely may be the best option. Since I already don't use the "texture" map, I'd just have to redo a clean heightmap.

Storm:

1) is easy. The heightmap is perfectly aligned because there is nothing it has to align to! That's true, for the texture map, I simply told to annihilator: fill the whole map with the same bland flat metal section. The Spring engine does the shading for me. Just use strongly contrasted values in the appropriate values of the .smd. It's the same way I used to get the green near-perfectly aligned to shoreline.

2) I can't get rid of the blue too. I just tweaked the sun, sky, cloud, fog, map ligthening, .bmp texture contrast/brightness etc.. until I felt I couldn't get anything better. Feel free to use my .smd or variants of my .smd for any metal map.


a 8192x8912

Nice shot, zwz. I was contemplating the same. I'll go rip off your fog (mine is too light) and remake the map.

* Storm dances away in the sunset.

In truth the texture.bmp isn't a straight tiled metal flat:

- The lighting on units didn't fit the lighting of the map. So I changed the contrast and brightness of the texture .bmp.

- The flat area up on the plateau looked exactly the same as the flat area down on the plain. If was difficult to see edges from behind. So, I roughly located the up flat area with a mask made of an enlarged heightmap, and tinted the area of the texture.bmp corresponding to up flat plateau a bit differently.

- I changed the contrast of pyramids so the textures on it look more bland and the core logos stand out better.

New smd has a hardness variable. No more wobbly steel.

I played that map online for a long game, and liked the terrain deformation. It never went in the way of gameplay. It always stayed reasonable. It made the game prettier looking, and better playing. Maybe at first it looks strange to have metal so soft, but I like the terrain deformation as it is. Since the TA manual states that projectile are made of plasma and anti-matter, it makes sense they are able to make metal melt. Anyway I don't feel like sharpening all the edges, and the smooth edges looks weirder than craters.

Other map makers may disable the terrain deformation for their new maps. I won't for this one.

Maybe decreasing the deformation ratio, z? That'd both make the map look harder than the other maps and still provide some of the demolition sense.

Yeah, increase the "hardness" of the terrain, and as Storm said, you'll still be able to smash it up, but it'll be tougher and more like, well, metal. :)

I'm gonna agree that it needs the hardness upped. I had a little accident involving 9 nukes going off in my base at once when I tried to launch, and I dug down REALLY deep. It took me 15 minutes to freaking put it back.

9 nukes?? That's something not supposed to happen in a proper OTA game. Though it's a metal map. Games can quickly escalate to mass high level on those map, even with good players. But 9 nukes! I thought 2 were enough to kill anything (or was it only the comm that dies from 2?). Must have been some pretty fireworks. I gotta see that.

What is strange is that I've blown up a few commanders on that map and the height change was hardly noticeable.

Also, the default hardness is harder with new spring version.

And I really don't want to issue a new version and have two versions floating around. I'll think about harder terrain if I do a new metal map. Maybe (one can dream) if it gets included in the package of a new spring version it could use one with harder terrain and darker water (but the fluo green I grew to like too).

Edit: You may be right after all, the walls at the top just don't look straight after the commander explosion: