Worth it, or unnecessary ?

I was taking screenshots from all empires maps so they could be used as some sort of showcase. But i couldn't get any good shot of canyon. To my personal taste that map is ugly. The grass looks too blue, the rock texture too repetitive, and the cliff surfaces are often not aligned properly and even more often stretched for no reason at all.

So i decompiled it to test some of my own textures on it. I changed them so they are equally dark as the current canyon textures, but i didn't make my grass texture as blue as the current one.

Would this be a welcome change, or am i once again the only one who constantly notices stretched textures and repetitive patterns?

Official version:


My textures (very quick unpolished test):


Edit:
It does use about 50% more surfaces (but this barely impacts performance) and the cliff texture has bump maps (which on my 4,5 year old pc lowers fps from an average of 42 to 40). If you're standing close to the cliffs, the rock texture with the bump maps do look awesome when the lightning strikes

 

You might want to use the Canyon from SVN. It's sunny now, the weather has been changed. If you can find textures more appropriate for that version then by all means go for it.

 

Hmm, very interesting ...

 

Make it less grayish and remove the rain. I always thought those two things make the map dull.

 

abuse of power

 

No-one wants your depressing as fuck rain.

 

I did search for a way to have neat graphical effects like reflections from the water on the grass and cliffs, and more bumpmaps for the lightning strike effects. But the reflections (or some fake lookalike effect) are too difficult for me.

Also lights look good in a foggy/rainy atmosphere, but i couldn't think of a realistic reason why there'd be lights scattered around the map.

I did spend some time trying to find a way to keep it dark and rainy and yet beautifull to look at (in it's wet way), but it would've become one of those projects that take 2 years before i decide i can't get it like i envision it.

 

I thought the rain was cool. There aren't enough depressing maps in video games these days.

 

Worth it.

 

I love the depressing as fuck rain. Now we need to have variable weather on a map! go from sunny to rainy to snowy!!!

 

That would be really cool, but I believe a few mappers said that it would be really difficult/impossible to do.

 

Somewhere in the forums here, someone found out how to do it. I duno if I can find it... but it wasn't that long ago... maybe 3 - 4 months ago?

 

+1

6char

 

Found it...

http://gamebanana.com/css/prefabs/5660

 

Can we have sunbeams coming trough the cloud?

And what about events on map end? Like big Explosion breaking a map border in half? (TF2 cart go boom, ratatatat)

 

Someone told me the best way to create something new, is to go completely mental ...

...so



Also, somehow (and only on some places) the ssbumps on the rocks truly give a 3d effect:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/234836/mapping/canyon/emp_canyon_relight0008.jpg

 

pretty good.

 

I wonder if i can leave the rock models as they are. They're still using the old texture, but since my texture has about the same color, i think it doesn't look that odd, or does it ?

 

Silk, I'd like to throw outs my 2 cents.
If you want to fix this map, and kudos to you for trying, please do something about the trees. Seriously, they just look fugly and obscure vision way too much. They should still be there to allow making ninja raxes and all that good stuff possible, but not making hmg whores invisible, which kills the map for me.

I don't mind a texture overhaul, but the way you did it, its just another isle/coast type of deal. It's basically somewhat unoriginal.
You can pave it with bedrock for example. The sand+grass combo is as old as half life 2.

 

Thanks for the feedback!

However i can't do anything about the trees, unless a modeller either wants to make new ones, or seperates the trees so i can manually place each and every tree instead of an entire group at once. I agree the turret thing kills the map though, but ... i can't help it.

Also i never made a texture combination like this ever before, i can't even think of any empires map that has fresh green grass combined with a rough rocky sand texture. Usually it's simple dark dirt+grass ... like the normal version of canyon has actually, and crossroads. So as a hole the range of empires maps should become more original than they are now.
Besides sand+grass combo isn't as old as HL2 ... it's almost as old as the universe. There's no area on this earth that isn't either sand or grass, unless you include rock.
But rock for the ground doesn't work since it can't be repeated a thousand times like sand and grass can, without looking either extremely repetitive or so undetailed that it once again looks like sand anyway.
Any texture with things like pebbles or other eyecatching details wouldn't work on huge flat surfaces like you find in empires maps.

There's just one combo of colors and textures that i can think of that would work that i can't remember seeing in HL2, but that would remove most if not all the green from canyon. With about one week to finish this map and no people on this forum to be able to get a reliable poll i won't change a popular map that much.

Also i may have time to make maybe one more texture, but i spent about 6 hours on one grass texture today and that's a lot of time lost for the actual mapping itself. I'd much rather tweak colors etc from existing textures.

I'll try some things tomorrow, but don't get your hopes up. In the end it has to remain green to avoid complaints, it has to be sunny for the same reason, and regular dirt is imo overdone.