Retexture emp_chain to make it easier to navigate.

Every time I play emp_chain I look at the minimap and just can't see where I am supposed to go on it.
This is confusing to new players and people who arn't familiar with the map.
I suggest texturing the top and bottom levels of the map with different textures to make it easier to see where to go.

I quickly painted on top of the minimap to show what I mean about different textures making it clearer:
Original:Easier to see?

As you can see texturing the top and bottom levels on the map differently make it easier to see where to go on the minimap.
Now I know my example looks ugly, furthur discussion should go into how to go about what textures to use even if it's just a slightly different shade of the other texture.

Pros:

• Would make the map easier to play because players can easily see the map layout.

Cons:

• Would probably require a lot of work to do.
• Careful selection of textures would be required to keep the map looking nice while maintaining the contrast on the minimap to make it easy to see the map layout.

An alternative would be just editing the minimap rather than retexturing the whole map.

 

Dude you nearly gave me a heart attack. You could've mentioned "minimap" in your title

And yeah for your suggestion, it wouldn't be much more difficult than what you just did yourself. Give it a more detailed go and present it here

 

Could we do this for pretty much all silk maps? They tend to be large, so navigation is paramount, however they often tend to look like a solid mass of color. I think you did a fucking excellent job of communicating elevation on chain.

 

I was talking about retexturing the whole map lol.
But if people are happy just for just the minimap to be altered then I could do that I guess.
Either I can recolour it slightly or I can try drawing an outline around the edges of the top level (recolouring it looks better in my quick tests).
I can recolour it a lot better than that example.
How do you think I should go about recolouring it?
Should I make the top level a bit greener and the bottom level a bit darker?
Or leave the top level as it is and make the bottom level a bit darker?

 

I use absolutely no custom content in my Empires except one thing, which is a self-made replacement minimap that I based off an alpha of Silk's.



Cyberkiller's is way better, but I'm just pointing out that even I can't navigate Chain without that.

 

It looks like you excellently contrast the lowest level with the higher level, but it's also useful to contrast the unavailable "grey" level in the center (airstrip) and the chunk at the bottom.

One of the things that pisses me off about bush is the absurd difficulty of figuring out what's crossable path and what's impassable cliffside. On bush, the paths are roughly the same thickness and color, so it's stupidly easy to mix them up.

 

Let's say I would redo all the textures, it would always end up looking similar on the minimap, as I want my textures to match. As long as they don't match, I keep changing them untill they do. Plus it would take me untill next spring to do so, and that's no joke.

So yeah, adding an overlay to the minimap would be the only thing that would solve your problem.

As to what would work ... coloring it might look a bit weird but I'm not sure untill I see it. What you did is pretty much what I would've done. Slightly darker and more saturated, but roughly the same colors.

Edit:
How is https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/234836/mapping/blind people/emp_bush.jpg less clear than https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/234836/mapping/blind people/emp_cyclopean.jpg or https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/234836/mapping/blind people/emp_slaughtered.jpg ?

I don't even see how it could possibly be more clear, unless with just 2 colors: black and white

 

Actually, I complained about the Slaughtered minimap at the time when the new version got done. That's an improvement over the original but I still think it's poor. I don't see a problem with Cyclopean though, nor Bush.

 

Standards for minimap clarity go up as map navigation complexity goes up.

Cyclopean is pitifully simple to navigate due to its simple layout and the giant body of water (i.e. a landmark).

Slaughtered could definitely have a better minimap, but its layout is relatively simple (again, bodies of water help tremendously), so minimap standards are lower.

Bush has a fine minimap, but Bush has almost no landmarks (only the bunkers) and is generally hell to navigate, so its minimap must be absolutely stellar.

Chain gets hit doubly hard with difficult navigation and a meh minimap.

I know you want maps that are more engaging to navigate, but that only means that you have to work harder to help people get engaged in navigation or else they will just wander.

 

You've completely lost me; as far as I can tell, there's no problem with Bush's minimap. You can walk on the green bits, you can't walk on the orangish-white blobs and the brown lines are cliffs. It's no more harder than Cyclopean, which is a map that has a good amount of elevation variation to it with next to no visual cues on the minimap.

 

If there's a single map that could probably go without a minimap entirely, it'd be cyclopean. It's almost completely open and has a shitfuck of landmarks. Even if you get lost, you can easily orient yourself by looking at the water and city, or the water and your main or the water and something else. And you can always see those landmarks because it's wide open.

Can't do that on bush because you're stuck in cliffs and shit. Even if there were landmarks, there's no line of sight to them like on Cyclo.

I know from his work on cod that Silk wants maps that have meaningful navigation choices and that's awesome, but that just means you have to work even harder to educate the player enough so he can make those choices. There's no free lunch, even if your maps are gorgeous.

Also, it's finals week. Go study.

 

Empires has the grid system for the minimap though. I don't have to say "Refinery at the middle in the left third of the map", I can say "Refinery at A3". Landmarks provide a convenient shorthand for navigation, like when talking about Duststorm's ruins or Cyclopean's city, but there's always the fall back of calling it E1 and D1.

And bro, it's like the fourth week of my 11 week term. Finals aren't for another 7 weeks. I got my first physics midterm this week, but that's about it.

 

Looking at slaughtered. That could probably be vastly improved by adding a 1-2px black line around the mountains