New map sizing for Planes/Infantries

You could put a central 'ruins'-style area in the center of the map, where vehicles have a hard time moving around and there are many infantry-only routes. Have the number of refs within these ruins and the number of refs in the surrounding wilderness be roughly even. Also, have a few chokepoints for specific areas of the map, good for an infantry ambush.

These will ensure that there is some use for infantry. The idea is that one team would take the center and the other team the rest of the map... then the center team could send out vehicle incursions into the various edge refs, while the outlands team tries to send in vehicles and infantry to take the city. Wilderness vs. urban, basically.

 

256 duststorms, I was contemplating this as I walked home.
I don't think the average mapper even MAKES 256 maps total, let alone 256 FULL SIZED ones.

 

It would be fairly easy to make a map this size using the heightmap techique i wrote a tutorial for. Optimised visibility would be controlled using max fog distance. A simple terrain map would be easy, you could add a few mountains and rivers in eaily to make it more interesting. You just have to adjust the way you think about mapping when working on this scale.

 

True, but a good map will have more than just a displacement field.

 

Extra detail could be added at the mappers discretion, you could add a military base or a city or a wrecked village or whatever but the best way to fill the grid without breaking the compiler limits would be to make a displacement field. Making a city the size of the hammer grid would be impossible as you would probably hit the brush limits before you get 5% done. The key would be to make a displacement field that directs movement with hills and valleys and has chokepoints, and then add structures and detail to these areas.

 

True, what limits are there on prop_statics? I'd suggest we get some structures designed as models if we can place prop_statics willynilly, after all a basic bunker model will save a mapper about, i dunno, 20 brushes? And let him place a LOT of them.

 

Prop satics are limited too, but you will more likely hit the total entity limit if you use a lot of props. This can be avoided by grouping models though, ie using tree clusters instead of individual trees. Modelling structures like bunkers would definitely help a lot, mainly because brushes don't scale with LOD the way models do, so you could make large structures that are easy on FPS and can still be seen from large distances without drawing loads of polies.

If I was gonna start modelling stuff for the introdution of aircraft, I would probably model aircraft related objects instead so they can actually be implemented sooner :/

 

Those 3 are actually different.

He wanted to know if the scale value implies dividing distance by that value, the surface or the volume. (1, 2 or 3 dimensional).

x16 for distance (1D) would mean x16 for x, y and z. This is how it works.
So while distance would be x16, surface would be x256 and volume would be x4096.

x16 for surface area (2D) like he mentioned would mean that the surface would be x16, therefor distances would only be x4 and volume would x64.

So he wanted to know what the value means. And like you said, it refers to one axis only.

 

It wouldn't be 256 times as complex, you'd just have more big terrain, so huge canyons and caves to fight in, basically like a lot of different variations on the duststorm theme, as in lots of different open arenas to fight in with interconnection between them.

I think either dizzy or solo said that the 16 times maps would be modelled entirely anyway.

 

Thats still close to what I was against. Vehicles driving, unloading troops. In a map like slaughtered, you use vehicles for firepower, not travel. You can also use apcs to move troops and spawnpoints, but it isn't essential to do that because the distance between the barracks' and the front line is short enough that infantry still have an importance. Outside of slaughtered and similar maps, to maps like Isle, Duststorm, Canyon, and Money the importance of infantry is stretched thin with the increase in size of open spaces.

But a map even 4 times the size of Duststorm would totally remove the importance of infantry if they aren't tied to a vehicle in some way or are completely defensive.

I just hate the idea of giant plains, where players are searching for enemies, having duels, repairing and moving on. I rather like the idea of front lines, armies, spearheads, and slow crawling behemoths. Something like a high-tech world war II, where armies clash instead of small highly trained/armed groups always moving around. And for that you need a reasonably sized map. If you want big maps for plains, make a giant plateau above the regular map for them, where ground units cant go.

 

You can make both neccesary.

In kutm I have the main fighting be between two bases, tanks and infantry can both be involved, but there is also a second area which is almost entirely infantry based, and that controls a big resource area, so you should be wanting to use infantry there, of course you can use vehicles in some of that area as well, but the area heavily favours infantry.

Infantry are always secondary to vehicles anyway, they are only really useful in heavily structure filled areas, this is true even on the current maps, so I don't see why putting in more wide open plains for tanks to fight over and also include critical, infantry heavy areas, which will bring the tanks to the infantry and promote infantry-versus-infantry fighting.

Infantry would be critical to success, using them to capture the critical areas would give you a huge advantage over the enemy who doesn't, at the same time you have the wide open mechanic that people who play duststorm really like.

You can't have infantry and tanks equally effective in all areas all the time and still have the variety of infantry-dominance and tank-dominance.

 

Remember that these large maps are meant for when aircraft are introduced. You could expand on the use of different classes even further, for example by having a mountain range with an area behind it that only aircraft can get to, and in this area have an infantry-only structure like some kind of fortress. This would mean that both teams would have to airflift troops into the area and then take the fortress on foot while tryng to shoot down enemy aircraft or make a base to defend the fortress with tanks. You could have an area where there are caves for tanks to roll through and aircraft can fly over the caves, then have infantry only areas inside the caves, so aircraft, tanks and infantry are all required in the same area.

 

You could for example make a heavily forested area, which aircraft can't penetrate, but with raised landing pads for you to drop infantry onto and capture, which makes them work like spawn points, or you could drop barracks on them.

You'd need trees like redwoods or something for that though, but I don't think that's a bad thing, I'd love more static tree props with bare trunks and wide leaves at the top.

 

Its not whether infantry are USED or not, you cant get away from that, even if you have the huge maps and all that mess. What I mean by keeping the infantry important is being able to use them to gain ground. In a small enough map, infantry can respawn and get back to the front line quickly enough to repel vehicles attacks (unless they're HE heavies or something).

If you drive an afv into a base, and grenadiers spawn/engies make turrets/rifleman threaten stickies, you'll have to retreat even if you killed 8 guys. On a giant map, if you find a group of 8 infantry running across the desert, you'll waste them and that'll be the end, because they won't respawn to hurt you. Or worse, a plane will fly over and smear them.

I think Ive said this 3 times but no one bites. If you want a giant map for planes, place plains over the regular map for them to fly. Above the map you cant land or build, and there is no way up without planes. If you want a giant maps for tanks however, gtfo.


Scale drawing btw.

 

What the hell do you mean 'gain ground'?

You ship infantry around in dropships and AFVs, when they get to the place, they fight over it.

So your AFV gets blown up and you can't respawn there, so what? You're no worse off than if you walked there, you can still drop a barracks as close to the area as you would if it was a small map, there is no possible reason for saying that infantry will be useless in a bigger map, or that their use will fundamentally be different. The only difference will be that they need ways to traverse large distances, once they have done so their function will be exactly as it is now, fighting from base to base or over bases. Bases can be just as close or distant as they are on current maps, the bases will still be as close as possible and in resource-heavy areas, which there can be plenty of in the map.

There would be no point putting a giant area around the edge of a map. There's no point in using it, there's nothing to fight over so why would you go there? You wouldn't, it's pointless, it removes any reason for having a larger map, why do you think nobody supports it?

 

/second Chris0132

Aircraft-sized maps won't change much except the initial distance infantry have to run. After the first 5 min of the game, you should have some type of forward spawn/vehicle. It doesn't matter if the map is 1x, 8x, or 16x. Empires is not an infantry-dependent mod. The maps are huge which makes them more realistic battlefields and requires the usage of vehicles.

 

Personally I'd have each team start with vehicles, certainly a vehicle factory, and give them some immediate things to capture.

I'd also make jeeps more useful, I know they have guns proposed for them, but that and perhaps better speed and much better maneouverability would make them much more useful in the early game, infantry go out in jeeps and skirmish and capture things, the jeep for me should have the role of a super infantry unit, highly mobile and best for hit and run tactics, and cheap too.

 

Another thing I'll bring up is collisions, source isn't exactly the best physics engine in the small scale, and I don't doubt that tiny collisions will herald in a new era of bugs.

 

Actually for that I think you can control the precision of collisions with variables.

I would expect the developers to be able to devote more time to collisions as needed, which I don't think would actually be that much anyway, because the really big maps are aircraft only to my knowledge.

 

Collisions on aircraft crash the game last i heard, so the coders would have to spend time on it anyway. And 16X maps are aircraft maps, with some usage of vehicles. Play an 8X maps if you want infantry with it, you can't have both a large map and infantry usage.