Me too, Now the problem becomes what to fill all that space with. You can have whole ecosystems in that amount of room. The bottom left quarter of the map can be an ocean with couple of islands the size of emp_isle. Then you'll have the shore changing into low hills and forest. Then 2 mountain range with a desert between could cut through the middle of the map. The top right would then be a plain. Of course dotted throughout the map would be cities, highways, towns.
Well the map itself is not getting larger, just everyone else is getting smaller. So like the island would have like the same footprint as an armory if there was no scaling
That may be true but you have to think about details. If you make a huge map it will will require very small details. At the current set up, details are how they are in game.
It's a tradeoff, more size (proportionally) <-> less detail. The problem isn't details themselves, you can place lot of details on a map like that because draw distance needed is much smaller too, but there is needed much more work to fill such gigantic territory. Then comes into play some time saving tricks to create content, but is not enough to get so many details like a 1:1 map. There is a mod in development which was using scaled maps, world in conflict or something like that. But those are only 1:8 I guess.
Multi-type environments ftw! So like thaile said, deserts leading into cities and such. Detail won't really be much of a problem, as most Empires maps are very low-detail anyway. Just about all that is neccessary is lots and lots of displacements, which could become a problem (the engine does have a hard-coded displacement limit). Just because the map isn't 16x bigger, that doesn't mean that the BSP would be.
Yes, detail isn't a real problem because most parts of the map shouldn't be accessed by ground troops anyway. I see 1:16 maps as an extended standard map where 3dskybox is in the main map. There should be a physical separation between infantry areas and "3dskybox like" terrain, like mountains, lakes, rivers, etc. Some kind of brush entity would be needed to prevent landing on the "3dskybox like" areas, and you got it. Most of the map would be accessible for aircrafts while only some spots where detail is higher are meant to be infantry combat areas.
Well I don't really expect to see many 1:16 scale maps. The amount of time to make would be huge and then there's the limitation of 1 unit minimum change. 1:16 maps would be more of a comunity project. Instead I expect to see more 1:2 - 1:4 scale maps. 1:4 would be plenty of room for aircrafts.
hmm.. if you consider 1unit = 1in and max map size at 30,000units at 1:4 scale.... yea you're right at max speed of 600knots it'll take the plane about 10sec to go from one side to the other... 1:16 would take 41sec. Of course I don't belive people would be flying that fast all the time. Off topic, how would you control how fast the plane is going?
I wonder if people would bother having slower speeds to avoid the sideffects, instead of racing ot the other end of the map and dropping off troops and bombs.
Don't those steer the plane? I was wondering about was like weather you press forward to speed up and backward to slow down or do you accelerate as long as you hold down the forward button, but decelerate once you let go. Well when kenzo said the fastest plane I figure he was talking about fighters planes and you kinda want to stay behind the plane you're shooting at.
I have absolutely no idea how to steer an airplane, those two things just came up first :p Krenzo said that the controls will be similar to Falcon 4.0's (I think) controls.
are you sure that for the sake of gameplay we couldn't... slow the planes down a little? i mean, you could go over an entire tank column in a second...
