Very much a work in progress. The stream you see there actually flows, cool huh? I'm fiddling with some swish particles at the moment, there'll be a waterfall on the right soon. It's too early to say when to expect this, I'll keep this thread updated with pretty pictures in the meantime.
Attaching images is hard Lol, whereve you been? No hello im back thread? No scrim participation? 403 btw
Priorities changed for a while, currently having a quiet summer and figured I wanted to make a new map. Couldn't make the scrim. Is the image working now?
Omni! This looks fantastic, like an empires map set in Episode 2. I see you have railroad tracks on the bridge, if you're gonna have tracks as a significant part of the map then I have some track models for you that will work and look a lot better! Find me on steam sometime I'm a bit busy now but I'll be on more soon.
Updates will be slow for the next few days - just moved out of halls and I'm going to be climbing mountains in Wales for most of next week. Progress is happening offline though - I am currently building brushwork for a small town below the falls.
I went to Wales to climb its mountains for a week. When I got back, I made this: Lighting and shadows is rubbish due to fast compile. I'm planning on putting together a new detail.vbsp for the sake of variety as I've used those bushes in every map I've made so far. The aerial pic at the bottom should give you an idea of what this map will offer eventually - a medium sized map with two vehicle chokepoints and tonnes of cover for infantry. NF start at the entrance of a mine that is to the right of the image, BE start on the opposite side of the bridges in the distance. The concrete you see in the distance will eventually become the base of a town with NF themed architecture. As there's currently no examples of "NF" architecture in the game, I'm making it up as I go along - I'm currently using early 20th century America (with art-deco awesomeness) as inspiration. I should be able to maintain a fairly high level of detail throughout with judicious use of Propper to save on brush faces. Also, neon lights everywhere. Now I have made this slice of terrain I should be able to reproduce the workflow I used fairly fast, so expect more updates soon.
You might want to change the material for the grass from translucent to alphatest. That should stop the wrong sort order.
Uh um. Will you actually be able to hide in the grass even from long distance enemies? Looks nice and interesting. Are those trees custom?
Maybe. The grass is actually a few large static props - what you see there was borrowed from gamebanana however I've got Smithy working on a far larger prop to cut down on prop spam. This allows me to somewhat circumvent the issues with generating dense detail props on very large maps as well as letting me set my own fade distances. I'll make a point of recording the thinking behind the level design and the various methods and hacks I'm using to achieve results here so that other mappers might benefit. One of the greatest yet rarely appreciated problems with empires that deters new players is the poor visual quality of its maps. Level design is a huge part of any game, yet empires lacks any coherent direction in that regard nor any documented methods for achieving good results with the limitations of the engine. I'm aiming to get more terrain done today, should have pics of a first pass on the terrain for the NF main base by this evening or tomorrow depending on whether I go out later.
You could make it look more like Wales by dropping a few shopping trolley props across the map. That first screenshot reminded me of the 90s game Trespasser... (I don't mean that in a bad way) I'm not even entirely sure why....
small update I was dissatisfied with the terrain I had before, so I've begun remaking it using method inferred from the construction of the terrain in Dear Esther. The results so far are promising. However, this new method is pretty time consuming. I'm hoping that knowing how to do it now and some creative copy/pasting should speed things up somewhat. I'll fix the texture stretching and holes before release, but that image should give you a general idea. For mappers wondering what the brushes like, here's a picture: I'm currently working on a sketch of the layout in paint so that I don't waste my time making pretty displacements for a map that doesn't play well.