emp_tropicvendetta

you do not understand it

read vess post, i failed to put it in a better way

 

Keef and I use artistic license to do whatever we want - we don't use it as an excuse. I don't think Mayama uses it as an excuse either - take a look at his maps. They're unnatural and don't necessarily follow the nature imitation regime, yet still look pretty good (save for so much orange on blah).

For all you know I may have intended for my island to be a cookie in blue-dyed milk with green frosting and mint chocolate chips for mountains and tiny plastic trees/rocks, where miniature NF & BE humanoids have flown to in miniature blimps to use miniature SAM sites on the giant cookie to shoot the enemy blimp and make the CV fall into the sea of blue-dyed milk.

There's a famous art piece that's just a plain black canvas with nothing on it. The artist wasn't lazy - he envisioned a plain black canvas, whatever meaning it may have held for him. If I were to make a map that was a flat, plain, black terrain with nothing else in it, as I envision it, you or someone else (likely many people) would have nothing to say other than "rtv" or "wow this map looks like a flat piece of dry excrement."

Neither you nor anyone else can tell me what I envision for the map. That right rests with me (and my good friend Keef).

In fact, people should appreciate that it's an island at all. My original idea for the map was going to be emp_defendtheswitch, a plain map with not much of anything short of resource nodes, with two boxes in the sky above water that would hold the CVs, with a teleport to your team's CV, and two switches (rather than capture points). It was going to be very plain and simple. Knowing what I now know, that probably wasn't such a bad idea - I bet more people would appreciate a map like that than an attempt at something original.

If for all intents and purposes, my map were to officially be an island from another universe that nobody besides Keef or myself knows anything about, then as far as anyone else is concerned, the island would look exactly like it would in the mysterious universe, unless otherwise noted by Keef or myself. Nobody would know the difference.

 

Back on the topic of gameplay, tonight I saw the worst round of Tropic Vendetta yet.

Basically, it ended up that NF got the entirety of the map, and was at BE's blimp. Instead of actually capping the flag right off, they decided instead to fire every weapon they had right into the blimp spawn zone, over and over and over.

This was ok at first, I was assuming after a couple minutes someone would go and cap the SAM site. Instead, NF decided to farm the blimp for as long as they could, I mean literally, they did not stop for a second and ended up getting nukes and just sitting there.

Eventually, I joined NF from spectator and was able to round up a couple other people to help capture the SAM site, which finally ended the round.

Now, I understand that this was overall just poor sportsmanship on NF's part, but as you can see the potential to grief like this is there. It would also be an extremely difficult thing to fix as there wouldn't really be a way to automatically capture the flag. Still, if you could find an interesting way to prevent an issue like this from occurring again, it would be nice, like allowing tanks to do damage to the func_breakable after a certain duration is met/a certain condition is met.

In a way, this is really just me venting at the sheer lack of sportsmanship of this players, but it would still be nice if this could be prevented from happening ever again.

I also have a couple demos of the farming, I'll upload them later.

 

Zan, that was SO FUCKING FUNNY. You have to admit.

 

I discussed a possible slow & minimal ticket bleed with Keef, but ultimately we've come to the conclusion that... people who are going to be dicks, will be dicks on any map.

We'll stand by and see how often this sportsmanship phenomenon occurs... if it gets to a point where it's extremely frequent and incredibly intolerable, we'll give it further consideration.

 

What is the scale of the textures you used on your "cliffs"?
The things on it seem a little big, ie those leafy formations, I think they are supposed to be small leafy plants, but they look the size of a house.

 

its a 1024x1024 texture and I have them at a scale of 1. I think they are suppose to be ferns too, they're not really that big. Of the pics I posted the one where you can really see one of those plants is one of the small 'mountains'. If you saw it in game I'm not sure it would be a big deal, I was temped to bring the scale down to .75 but painting up with alpha texture becomes difficult with the size and scale of displacements.

 

Great map, I like how putting the comm in a blimp removes 8 mine ninja and replaces it with a fun, teamwork oriented ninja tactic.

As for camping the enemy spawn, maybe you could set it so if either team has 0 refineries for more then a few minutes they start massively hemorrhaging tickets until they loose.

Also I think there needs to be just a little more stuff in the areas near the bases. Rocks, trees, hills, boxes, or whatever to break it up a little.

 

My 2 cents worth for what its worth, an no one cares but anyways.



Awsome Map, Freakin Awsome , its about time someone broke the mold of 2 bases some refs and occasional tank battles. this is the way forward and helps make Empires even more unique , get away from all the Css clone shit out there and introduce maps that require tactice and teamplay...

I have no interest in those who moan about asthetics, the map will gett better as time goes by, when i play eye candy comes 3rd after gameplay and lag, at the mo my crap comp struggles with all that water but its still fun to play.

John you have a great map and concept , congrats bud on this map.

my only concern after playing for a few times, Other than the teams being stacked which ruins any map, if its a fair game having one flag that can be overun by the first team that mas rushes with apcs etc , this can be annoying. What about 2 sam sites or 1 sam site and a switch in a bunker making it even more of a team effort ????????
just my 2 penneth but cant wait for the next map....

 

What if the SAM sites acted as lvl 3 missile turrets? It would help stop early game rushes by being an indestructible missile turret which can only be disabled by capping the flag, ensuring that it is always there. It would also help curb the type of greifing Zanarias was complaining about as it would chip away at their vehicles and buildings.

 

that looks really nice, very impressive. you should add vegitation to help blend where the rock meets the surrounding terrain

reminds me of this: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir1ffPYmAH8

if you want to end that by the way you just have to switch to their team (which may require a bit of time) with another guy and cap it yourself.

btw, this map looks amazing.

comment on the map:

this looks amazing. not just to play, but just the whole look of it. i am a MASSIVE fan of small maps with lots of action, and i love the fact that maps don't always go to heavies. that keeps the game fresh. this is exactly why i'm generally against 16x maps with too much walking and not enough fighting.

now comes the inevitable process of improving all areas of the map.

I know that the map is multiplayer, but details will go a long long way.

here's the current detail state http://empires.martinpace.com/images/johnshandy/emp_tropicvendetta/emp_tropicvendetta_a20073.jpg and here's what, in my mind, would be beautiful to attain: http://img.hexus.net/v2/gaming/gc_2007/ea/hl2e2_large_1.jpg

both in source, and although you'll be using a tropical theme instead of coniferous forest, you can have a lot that's the same. what's needed?
-Undulating terrain. just small undulations, as you can see from the top picture, would certainly help create parallax to make the map more attractive. empires buildings are surprisingly resistant to such bumps.

getting small grass like sprites hooked up to the grass texture you use would improve the map no end.

normally i'd suggest increasing play with the Z direction, but i don't think that this map needs that, the gameplay and map design is fairly solid.

an optional thing which would be great would be a lot of some infantry sized natural features for players to play with and fight around.
-shallow trench, or a shallow stream leading to a pool.
-long crouch height rock (width of BE barracks)
-mini half cliff sections. mini meaning that it can be jumped up onto and that the entire feature would only take up the ground plan size of a barracks, half cliff meaning a feature where you can walk up one side and the other side has a steep cliff. the "cliff" section of it need only be as high as an infantry man, or less to allow people to "jump" up onto it from the steep end.

the main objection you would have to such features is that it prevents base building. i would reply that such small features would barely get in the way of a team which has control of the area, but might make the map more fun for infantry.

awesome map though, even if you did none of the above it still looks brilliant.

 

@Face, We'll see what we can do to enrich the areas between the blimps and their respective SAM sites. Glad you like the map.

@Melee, Thanks, I'm glad you like the map. More than likely the SAM site system will stay in place as it is, but we've done some modifications thus far, and will be making them a bit more defendable & challenging.

@Melarion, What you describe would require the Empires developers to do some special coding and is otherwise impossible. I'll see about adding some starting MLs near the SAMs. No guarantees, but thank you for the input.

@Vess, I do like that - we'll see what we can do with them. However, as for the center mountain's reflections in the water - that's a failure of the Source engine. I don't have a way of getting it to reflect in the water as you've shown, else I would gladly do so. The gray blurs you put on the rocks are also something I can't change - the rocks come as-is from The Lost Coast.

@Sandbag, Thanks for all the suggestions. As for the grass sprites, we already planned on implementing them - we just haven't quite done it yet. I'd actually like to add more (and better-looking) bush/fern/grass vegetation, especially in certain areas. The cosmetics and aesthetics will be something we continue to improve and enrich in every future version of the map. I'm very pleased that you enjoy the map.

 

actually we purposefully didnt put in ML turrets and put in MG only because the idea is to defend your switch while capping the enemys, not hope you got enough turrets up to hold off the horde while you ransack to the enemy SAM site yourself. Anything past early game no armor and engine(killed by 1 gren rpg and mortar) we expect the teams to be implaced enough that starting turrets in general shouldnt mean anything in the defense of the SAM site, so If you dont defend it dont expect it to stay uncapped.

I mean the original idea (and name) of shandy's for this map was emp_defendtheswitch and the whole plan was to protect your switch(now 38 sec flag cap points) and cap the enemy's. So the whole idea of removing the defend part of the equation out of it doesn't ring to solid to our ears.

In response to the drawn reflections this wont render reflections in the water past a distance of 10240 units (z-clipping plane) and nothin gena be done about that but I'm not particularly worried about it since the points people will see this is few and far between and they are prolly over there worring about enemies not cliffs half the map away.

I can try make some ridges on the large center mountain, MAYBE to 2 larger next to it, but its out of the question on all the rest of them.

 

first run ribbed effect





cliff with no alpha painting, to show why there is just so much of the lower res 512x512 alpha used


Alpha'd up


showing the displacements, aka what I have to work with to make the ribbed effects.





the kind of ugly stretching I try to avoid, as you can see they are the same size displacements but one is rather hideous


dont generally want to leave obvious ugly seams around, why I have my current cliffs the way they are( I dontz like dis shit)

 

if you lower the total hight it would be easyer to make those ridges but you could also increase the base size. If you guys can bump map then you only have to sculpt the ridges at the bottem.

 

You need a prop to make the hills like you want them to be VESS.
The maximal displacement resolution is to small.

You cant bumpmap ridges on the displacements cause its not "one
big texture" you have a small texture that repeats itself all over the
hill. That means you would have small and very repetitive ridges.

 

That displacement is awful if you have a desire to increase its value (not really needed besides for esthetics's and for this shape it would require some work) i would suggest taking some displacement tutorials.