Giving maps with concrete a visual update

We have decent textures in most of our maps, but there's still a lot stuff to be done if we're talking about concrete textures. Nearly all of Empires' maps use concrete in some way or form, and they're nearly all horrendously low-resolution and overused.

Silk and wealthysoup have made a set of new concrete textures that we should use to update our maps with. Here's a few quick tests I did:


original:


concrete texture updated + sides updated


crappy default side


yummy updated side


high-res white concrete walls


niiice


Emp_crossroads undergoes a massive transformation with a single texture change





So yeah it'd be cool if mappers that are currently working on maps could use the updated textures (can be found in "materials/silk")

 

Is this the clean up before the steampatch? The new textures look like we actually fucking cleaned the streets of empires ourselvs with god damn jeeps with cement pouring out from the back and a piece of flat wood behind the wheels.

All-in-all: Silk makes empires look good. D: WE CANT HAV DAT, THERE HAS TO BE BALANCE IN THE UNBALANCE. (No srsly, i luv dat concrete)

 

omg, jizz. just sayin'

+1

 

Fixed.

Also tell me about maps with other low res textures so that I can get silk sorted with pictures for them

 

Crossroads looks a lot easier on the eye

+1

 

Whoa I never noticed how ugly that part of crossroads was.

 

I got to say that I see tiling in the money pictures.

 

These were quick manual changes by me, if a mapper feels like stepping up to quickly update the maps themselves, they can PM me and I'll get the VMFs.

True, some of the textures may need to be modified to get rid of tiling issues. I've noticed some maps also have some odd seams on otherwise flat ground that cause excessive tiling

 

Hot!!!

 

Kudos to Wealthysoup and Silk. I actually looked at those pictures and swooned just a lil' bit

 

While they're great, can they be put in a folder where they're more "official" ?
Because right now, there's a lot of textures which I don't know if they are included in the installer, or will show up as purple textures for half of the people playing the map.

 

All textures in the SVN that have a green icon next to them are included in the installer.

 

hes talking about when its actually on steam. theres no way to tell which textures are packaged with the game, and which come from custom maps

 

Extract the GCF? Honestly, I get the problem before we went to steam, but now you pretty much always have a definitive answer as to what's official and what isn't.

 

1. Download newest version of SVN
2. ???
3. PROFIT Know which textures will be official

 

True, but it would be nice if all official textures would be in a "official" folder, so I can sit in hammer (along with new people who just start to map for Emp), but it's not a big issue.

 

It would be nice, indeed. If you feel like reorganizing the files from the SVN, you (or someone else who would like to do this) are free to do so and send me the changes. I'm afraid I don't have the time available to do this myself.

The biggest chunk of the work is in updating the VMTs in all the custom folders to refer to the textures' new locations. You can't delete the original VMTs and folders unless you are abslutely sure they are not used, or are able to update the VMF to refer to the new locatons and recompile the map correctly. The "official" folder would then have another VMT (perhaps add they keyword "official" in the VMT) available for use (Unless I'm incorrectly understanding how Hammer texture browsing works).

Finally, all the official + popular custom maps should be checked for purple-checkered textures to be sure there haven't been any errors in the new texture paths of the old VMTs.

 

holy shit we're not 3 feet tall on money anymore, nice.

 

Yeah, I think we're past the point of being able to re-organise the files, too many maps have dependencies now.