Emp_glacial: A steep slaughtered-like map, with many areas for bases and 9 ref nodes, with a total of 12 res/sec on the map. Steep slopes and mountain trails make some paths inaccessible to vehicles. In fact, standard engine jeeps and APCs will have trouble getting anywhere at all. Anything better than an std engine LT will be able to climb any slope though, including the CVs. Hasn't been tested with more than 2 people yet, please DL and tell me of any problems. If i fucked up the download somehow please don't hesitate to yell at me http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/2644783/emp_glacial_b1.7z B1 version. The models and textures are packed into the .bsp and everything else is in the .res. Thanks to Zenarion for the nice textures and Omneh for the trees
This looks awesome. Some bad texture stretching though. It'd be awesome if infantry could get everywhere though.
Looks interesting. A bit barren, hopefully the twisty paths are enough cover. The 9 nodes look fine as do the base locations to me. No real super chokepoints. May need minor tweaks once a couple playtests are through. Loving the steep paths and asymmetric details.
Can we lose the radioactive water and the horrible orange sunlight? Sunlight should be off-white and the ambient should be pale blue, and the water should be darker than the surrounding environment. Orange sun plays hell with the textures and makes everything washed out, if you want to tint a scene, use colour correction and ensure you keep good contrast both of colour and luminosity. If your map is set in boreal regions you should be able to have a low but bright and light coloured sun and still look realistic. Winter sunlight tends to be yellow tinted but the intensity makes it white in most instances, so tinting the shadows with yellow using CC should produce the effect better. AND NO SOLID FOG, FOG SHOULD NOT BE SOLID, YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO SEE THE ENTIRE MAP BECAUSE IT DOESN'T HELP RENDERING WITHOUT A CLIP PLANE AND IT LOOKS FUCKING HORRIBLE.
There is a clip plane but I copied the basic map terrain into the skybox, so past the z clip plane only basic terrain is rendered. This is the technique used on cyclopean apparently and I just wanted to try it. As for the lights, they were just arbitrary colors tbh, i had it at practically pure white, and it made the snow blindingly bright. The water is just a nice looking water texture. I guess I will change it but I put it in cause its pretty :cute:
I would suggest a func_precipitation set to snow, since we don't have enough precipitation in empires maps and it would look good. Also, that light blue water may look ok, but I bet dark blue water would look much better. The texture stretching really doesn't look nice, but i'm pretty sure its fixable since a recent SDK update. I'm pretty sure i've seen some nice snowy pine trees in use in several gmod maps, and I have the models myself, but I have no idea where I got them from. I'll dropbox them if you want. Everything chris said is pretty viable as well. Even so, this looks like it could be really a rather good map. Nice job.
I use this technique in most my maps, its quite useful for only keeping basic geometry showing, you can still have the z-clipping plane before the fog ends, it will simply prevent any rendering of model(trees, brushwork if you want, etc) leaving just terrain which is quite easily rendered. Also this effect will decrease water rendering, no reflections or see through and the like which is nice since generally if water is that far away in your map you dont really give a fuck if its reflecting or not :p . The distance that empires models and such disappear is around 10240 units, so I put my z-clipping plane at that distance. A technique I use to prevent massive texture stretching is to start the cliff side at a gentle slope on the z-axis(face normal) and use the x and y axis to move it around to being more strait up and down. This distributes the overall stretching of the displacement over many of the triangles rather than a couple(puts some of the stretching on the top on the cliff and some on the ground below the cliff). having 8 1xres refs and 1 2xres refs will be a pretty low res map(10 total res in map, it will be equivalent to canyon res). Maybe I read the thread wrong, but having 14 or so total res in a map is a good balance I've found in my experience, I use 1.5xres refs alot in some of my maps. 1x always seems to low and 2x just too high.
Changes lighting and changed water to keef's water_pure. Added skybox extension (btw, anyone ever get that weird glitch when sewing displacements, where one vertex goes a million units higher than it should? That happened on about 50 vertices when i was making the skybox :eek: ) Added a func_precipitation, and my experience from mapping for DOD:S told me to make it white colored ash. When it compiled I had a million little pink and black checkers floating down from the sky , so I only took an overhead screenshot. The stretching on the displacement was because I didn't use the displacement un-stretching function of Dispgen. I will probably not be able to fix it without redoing terrain. Edit: recompiled with the "snow" option on the func_precipitation but now that one looks just like rain. Guess Snowfall is the right one. Also people who have never driven in the mountains before will have trouble here Also, still don't have a name. emp_glycenmountain doesn't sound right and personally I don't really like the glycen maps. Emp_winterassault might work. Emp_Alpine would be nice but that sounds a bit like a map already out
lol anyway, ya I get that spike problem fairly often on brushes you have copied so have never actually been adjusted(technically), one preventitive option you have is to use a giant spatial(spherical) tool and select all but your real map copy and its seaming to skybox displacement layer then make the adjustment value like .1 and its radius big enough to cover everything and just click it once, it will move everything up .1 a rather unimportant value. also if the problem your having this with is your skybox to real map displacement layer you can just do a similar effect on its outer edge, sew and call it a day. just make sure you DONT adjust your real map 3Dskybox copy .1 units, just never select it again(seam too). Also plz use 210 instead of 200 for your sector height/width values for you minimap in your resource/maps/emp_mymap.txt I hate when the grid doesnt line up
It's also an unspeakably stupid technique used by unspeakably stupid mappers because you are rendering all the terrain twice, once for the world, and once for the skybox, you are almost certainly making it far worse by using that technique, the only possible benefit of it is that it allows you to cull players and buildings using the clip plane but empires does that anyway and you can specify fade distances for any map props you use, there is no reason to use clip planes in empires unless you are going to actually clip something, rather than clipping something but copying a second instance of it into where you clipped it. You can fix displacement stretching using seamless scaling but you are going to have to render off your own ssbump maps using h2ssbump if you want to use seamless scale. If the snow is too bright that's what tonemap controllers, colour correction, and light intensities are for, learn how to use them. Don't copy existing empires maps becuase all empires mappers apart from me are terminally retarded and use ridiculously stupid methods of doing things which lead to bad optimisation, visuals, gameplay, and child labour in africa. It is about 80% because of stupid mappers that you can't use HDR, that empires looks so ugly, and that the gameplay sucks ass so often. Oh and cyber kun, because shadows uses visleaf optimisation and has varied building and lighting styles, so that puts cyber kun ahead of everyone else in both aesthetic and technical aspects, but everyone else is an idiot.
When it comes to looking like an idiot, his map does nothing compared to his attitude. And the worst thing is he's not american.
Marginally, but mine was extremely attractive and very well optimised while having at least as good gameplay as any empires map, and as I know exactly what was wrong with it and can avoid doing it in future, I am even further ahead. Unfortunately I released it before I figured out exactly what was wrong with empires gameplay and how to fix it. I wrote an extensive description of it in some of the gameplay threads and I suggest everyone read it. As a summary, avoid putting any resources in centralised locations, ensure the map is linear enough to allow for battle lines but not linear enough to turn it into the shitfest which is slaughtered, consider preplacing forward barracks in the beginning to remove the need to run for five minutes, and try and ensure you vary the terrain and don't just make it another canyonfest or another frigging plain with hills, they're boring, levels should be a series (or network) of interlinked arenas, not a series of corridors or one giant flat surface. Connect one arena to the next directly, rather than having long corridors or make the corridor wide enough to ensure it can be broken into arenas. Mapping is about doing the technical side perfectly and most importantly, learning from your mistakes or hell, even learning at all, empires mappers don't, and they suck balls at the technical side to boot, entirely inferior creatures.
As I remember you saying a long time ago, I map because I enjoy it. I don't map for money. I don't map because anyone else wants me to. I'm not an artist. I don't care if I make perfection or not. I have gigabytes of old VMFs that I have accumulated over the years, probably about 30 complete or near complete maps. My first map was a bunch of boxes with the trigger texture, and I was left wondering why the compile log said ***LEAKED*** every time. Every map I've made since then has been a learning experience and not much else, but this is one of the few maps that I actually want to follow up on not because I think it's perfect but because I think it's a fun map. Seeing how often maps like slaughtered, money, canyon, and Xroads are played, and how rarely maps that look good like midbridge, kutm, bush, and SoF are played, I don't think Empires is concerned with the intricacies of visual appeal or good mapping techniques. That being said, I've added the snow properly, added an animated cloud texture to the sky, and added soundscapes and wind. Two of the ref points are not working for some reason, and I don't know why, because I made them all from the same template and just changed the names and outputs. Does the emp_res_node entity have to be exactly on the ground? Possible names: emp_winterassault emp_snowstrike emp_glacial :confused:
Yes? If the others are and the ones that aren't working aren't then you make the ones that aren't working match the ones that do, and that means touching ground. I have never mapped so I'm just going off common sense
