Size limit for maps

Size limit for maps

Discuss maps & map creation - from concept to execution to the ever elusive release.

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gamer17
Posts: 235
Joined: 21 Feb 2007, 23:51

Size limit for maps

Post by gamer17 »

Is there a size limit for maps?
If there is, what is it?
Would it be cool to have a few Supcom style maps?
Daan

Post by Daan »

i think 63 x 63 is maximum well heard something about 128 what will probelly run on only a few computers what matters the most
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Foxomaniac
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Joined: 18 Jan 2006, 16:59

Post by Foxomaniac »

1. Spring's maps are in reality, bigger than supcoms.
2. Supcom's units are tiny, hence you think supcom's maps are "hueg liek xbox" when they're really not.
3. You can hit up to 64x64 IIRC in spring but the safe limit is 40x40.
Dead.Rabit
Posts: 264
Joined: 03 Sep 2005, 04:28

Post by Dead.Rabit »

u cant make odd preportioned maps i dont think... so 63x63
(i dunno from personal experience i ent dumb enough to try something thats deemed to fail)

there are several limits that mapconv crashes on

no#1 i think the limit is 60 something x 60 something
or so i hear

no#2 the biggest map ever made is apparently 50x50

no#3 no indevidual map (texture, height, typemap, etc...) can be mor then 600MB in size
however to combat this the texture can be a .jpg image, just remember to change it from
-t texture.bmp
to
-t texture.jpg
in the .bat file for mapconv.

no#4 this is why there are no huge maps. the amount of RAM you have and other system specs on your computer determin a maximum mapsize
im 3.8 GHZ dual core 2GB of RAM the largest i can make is 48x48 on my mid range computer
(i think its midrange now, i bought it at a good price as a mid-top range)

oh yeah scratchdisks/virtual ram dont count.


in basics. test it out. make a set of images. start out at 60x60 (30720x30720 Px tex map) just make them all black.
the compiler if its gonna crash. it normally does so right at the beggining so it wont take so long.
then just keep sizing down by 2x2 until it makes a map.

so in answer to your question
it depends on your computer.

but my 48x48 map wont run on half my friends machines unless they set settings to lowest possible, and even on mine it takes its sweet time to load. so custom features are a no-no

also after compiling if you dont set it to at least
-c 0.5
and compress it "ultra" in 7-zip then it will be >80MB and no-one will download it.

just remember to render your tex as a .jpg

well thats all my findings i think on large scale maps.
the following things may slow it down on computers

grass
features in general
large compression (loading / pathing)
water
very soft map (set in .smd file) wants to be >>100
custom skybox's
non-heavily tiled texture (mapconv, increases size (MB) and probably takes longer to load[pathing])



i cant confirm any of these, but these are the things that i assumed would slow it down when i was trying to make super-huge maps

anything bigger then 40x40 will be considered super-huge so no worries.

hope that helps. and if anyone has any corrections for me please reply =]
D.R
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LOrDo
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Joined: 27 Feb 2006, 00:21

Post by LOrDo »

Is the information that you can decrease your map size by having the texture as a JPG accurate? :shock:
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Neddie
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Post by Neddie »

LOrDo wrote:Is the information that you can decrease your map size by having the texture as a JPG accurate? :shock:
Logically, as JPEG files have loss.
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aGorm
Posts: 2928
Joined: 12 Jan 2005, 10:25

Post by aGorm »

No, you can creat a bigger map if you use jpg. Because Mapcon only acepts images under 600mb, but you can have a larger image (in terms of dimentions) if its jpg.

It actully will most often result in a larger file size as the lossyness of the jpg will break up repeting textures.

All textures are turned into dds (i think) by map con so jpg wont decrease the file size in teh way you might think.

aGorm
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Nemo
Spring 1944 Developer
Posts: 1376
Joined: 30 Jan 2005, 19:44

Post by Nemo »

Epic and The Trenches are the two largest maps I've ever seen.

Epic is 40x40, The Trenches is 63x16. Neither of them ever get playtime because of how incredibly massive they are. Epic could be really fun with the right mod though; the map is pretty neat. The issue is that both of them turn into air wars, since by the time anything land based gets anywhere on the map, the enemy already has massive defenses. The Trenches, like many of Picasso's maps, is amazingly artistic but not very playable.
Dead.Rabit
Posts: 264
Joined: 03 Sep 2005, 04:28

Post by Dead.Rabit »

i havnt read all posts. but yes saving your texture as texture.jpg works a treat under 2 conditions

1'st its a baseline jpg, not a progressive jpg.
in photoshop i can only say baseline "standard" works, ive never tried baseline optimized.

2nd is as mentioned above you change it to
-t texture.jpg
in the .bat file

one more thing its got to have the extention .jpg, .jpeg doesnt seem to work for some strange reason, i dont think theres any difference so if your art software spits out ".jpeg" instead of just ".jpg" you should just be able to rename it.

this is good because bmp is an uncompressed image format. .jpg is compressed, in my case a 1.5GB ".bmp" was compressed to under 10MB

i must stress though i think its only the texture map that can be saved as a jpg.
try it out experiment a little.

D.R
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AF
AI Developer
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Post by AF »

Note that this all applies to sm2 map format.

sm3 mapformat ahs different restrictions as it doesnt use a giant texture image or a compiler program at all.

sm3 maps cant be rectangular

sm3 maps must eb certain sizes, e.g. 8x8/16x16/32x32/64x64/128x128/ and so on doubling in size. Its perfectly possible to have a valid 1024x1024 map using sm3 but the main restriction is the end users amount of ram not the creation of the map itself.
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smoth
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Joined: 13 Jan 2005, 00:46

Post by smoth »

maps also start having visual clipping at a certain distance... it is UGLY... look at trenches as an example.
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AF
AI Developer
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Joined: 14 Sep 2004, 11:32

Post by AF »

viewradius is what causes that I believe. In previous versions of spring you could have a negative view radius and no ground was displayed. However this doesnt affect water.
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Neddie
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Post by Neddie »

AF wrote: sm3 maps cant be rectangular
I believe you can get around it, but I'll check.
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AF
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Post by AF »

No you cant, supcom maps are square also. RTS engines instead provide bounds and borders for the game area, which is how supcom does it, and spring should have it but they're currently set to the edges. This is so youc an have the map extend off the sides a little.
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Neddie
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Post by Neddie »

Non-square maps are just harder to write, getting it work without it was challenge enough already. The CE version will have support for non square maps.
It is rather unfortunate that he may be unwilling to develop for both.
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