[Map] Rajantie (2km) [WIP]

[Hulabi]

photoshop and satellite image, yeah

[Deer]

Really realistic and inspiring, very cool layout too and awesome colors, good job! Tree limit problem can be avoided by transmuting overgrowth to objects i think.

You got the layout and skill and techniques to make the map, but now the question is how to make it fun for gameplay.. how to make the flags be fun to conquer / defend and how the battle goes through the map.

[Amok@ndy]

first of all he should focus on the map, gameplay can be done later

[Deer]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Amok@ndy

first of all he should focus on the map, gameplay can be done later

With term "gameplay" i meant alot more than just flags and vehicles. Gameplay is actually one the first things you should design when making the map imo, else you might end up spending 400hours working on something which was doomed to fail before you even started. Alot of new maps in PR recently have pretty much failed completely, alot of those new maps arent being played almost at all which is sad because mapper has spend countless of hours making em, i wouldnt want to see this map end up like that, its so promising start and realistic looking =)

[Amok@ndy]

yeah some Points of Interest should be worked out now
what i meant is that many Mappers waste a lot of time doing Asset layouts and so on in the beginning and then just dropping the map because they lost the interest

[splatters]

Originally Posted by sylent/shooter

I'd be interested in learning to trace the isolines to a heightmap:P Could be something you could make a great tutorial on. Anyways great job with the map, the colour map looks amazing

I did it basically by hand.. I suppose it wouldn't be too difficult to automate it with a little coding skills, especially if you had the contours already defined but that would be already half the work done. All I had was a bitmap image of the map, with a little help from the select tools I created vectors for each height (5 m intervals) most of it was done manually. After that just created layers for each height level and assigned the right grayscale colors etc. It was a tedious job, took about 3 hours of very boring work. Proper heightdata would have been great of course but there was none available for free.
Most of the smoothing was done in the editor instead of photoshop, thought it would give me more control over the shapes of the terrain and of course it did but in retrospect it would have been more efficient to do the blurring manually in photoshop. So nothing fancy here, quite brute actually

Originally Posted by Engineer

Nice looking map, hopefully I can see it ingame too

The map seems to be rather "straight forward" type of map. I can see a clear line from the SE corner to NW corner thus I'd imagine this purely a defensive map for the Finns.

Not really sure what is the Dev's thumb rule for flags that cannot be captured if lost, but that should truly put more effort on defending and fierce firefights.

I haven't put that much thought on the flags etc. yet but I've always considered the map a defensive one for the finns. My purpose is to implement aas_v4 on the map so it would have multiple routs like you suggested. All ideas are welcome!

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Outlawz

I'm curious how you did the colormap.

With photoshop respectively to the map shown in the first post. Groups and layers for each element (bogs, roads, grass, fields etc.) lots of grunge brushes and all that cute stuff. Grayscale aerial image overlayed 10% on the colormap, will probably be phased out completely when the lightmaps and low detail textures are done.
I'm creating overgrowth and detail texture maps from the colormaps layers too.

here's the latest:
http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/4...1903343495.png

I started working on detail textures for the finnish landscape, this is the first one I did, not at all in it's final form but pretty good for a first one. I wrestled with it quite a bit but finally got it working, with envmaps and everything!
The envmap that is reflecting from the puddles didn't look like the one from my map when I was testing it, which envmap do the puddles use and can I change it? Not a big deal though since you could barely see the difference.

http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/565...1903371406.png

I got a bunch of questions in addition to previous, maybe the old stagers can shed some light

• What is the purpose of the alpha channel in the editor folders detail maps?
  
• There are some normal maps in the detail color folder, is it possible to have normal maps show with terrain detail colors?
  
• The sprucetree objects have a good bark texture in the files, color is very much the same as on the trees here in Finland but in game the color of the trees is more of urine that of spruce bark. There are some weird gradient colormaps in the texture folder like
  objects/vegitation/asia/textures/nccolor.dds
  I suppose those have something to do with it. The question is how can I change the tint of the trees?
  
• How do I make the water transparent? Right now it only has the envmap reflection. I remember it might have something to do with lightmaps or something like that. Is there some file I could manually edit to make the water see through?
  
• The water on my map changes colors in the middle of the map like so:
  http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/1580/watercolorq.png
  What is causing it, how do I fix it?

That's all for now, thanks in advance if you even read through this

[Amok@ndy]

Originally Posted by splatters

I started working on detail textures for the finnish landscape, this is the first one I did, not at all in it's final form but pretty good for a first one. I wrestled with it quite a bit but finally got it working, with envmaps and everything!
The envmap that is reflecting from the puddles didn't look like the one from my map when I was testing it, which envmap do the puddles use and can I change it? Not a big deal though since you could barely see the difference.
You need to generate a EnvMap first (see the tutorial section for envmap tutorial or bfeditor.org)

I got a bunch of questions in addition to previous, maybe the old stagers can shed some light

• What is the purpose of the alpha channel in the editor folders detail maps?
  marking the areas that will show the envmap if [x]Envmap is enabled
• The sprucetree objects have a good bark texture in the files, color is very much the same as on the trees here in Finland but in game the color of the trees is more of urine that of spruce bark. There are some weird gradient colormaps in the texture folder like
  objects/vegitation/asia/textures/nccolor.dds
  I suppose those have something to do with it. The question is how can I change the tint of the trees?
  Tweakerbar -> (choose the [Yourmapname] tab) -> Lightsettings -> TreeAmbientColor
• How do I make the water transparent? Right now it only has the envmap reflection. I remember it might have something to do with lightmaps or something like that. Is there some file I could manually edit to make the water see through?
  Lightmap the terrain cant be done by hand
• The water on my map changes colors in the middle of the map like so:
  http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/1580/watercolorq.png
  What is causing it, how do I fix it?
  This is a issue with the editor it will be fine ingame (also generating envmaps and terrainlightmaps may be neccessary

responses

[splatters]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Amok@ndy

responses

You need to generate a EnvMap first (see the tutorial section for envmap tutorial or bfeditor.org)

I have generated EnvMaps as you can see from this picture (water reflections)
http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/4...1903343495.png

marking the areas that will show the envmap if [x]Envmap is enabled

That would be the actual detail textures, the ones I'm asking about are the detail texture maps found in
levels\my_level\Editor\Detailmaps

Tweakerbar -> (choose the [Yourmapname] tab) -> Lightsettings -> TreeAmbientColor

I'm aware of that setting, it only affects the foliage (and pines) color, not the trunk or bark of the tree.

Lightmap the terrain cant be done by hand

Surely any .dds file can be edited by hand and lightmaps even generated by hand to some extent, the end result probably won't be that good. All I want to know is which file(s) actually affects the water transparency and how.

[Outlawz7]

Water.con and Water/Envmap affect water, but not much else. You can't change the transparency, the only way to have clear water is to have the water depth at max of 2m since after that water fog kicks in.

Also not sure if you meant that, but actual detail textures are found in common_client.zip\Terrain\Textures\Detail

[splatters]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Outlawz

Water.con and Water/Envmap affect water, but not much else. You can't change the transparency, the only way to have clear water is to have the water depth at max of 2m since after that water fog kicks in.

Also not sure if you meant that, but actual detail textures are found in common_client.zip\Terrain\Textures\Detail

levels\my_level\Editor\Detailmaps folder has the detail maps that define which detail texture is shown on the map.

I'm not trying to achieve completely transparent water, but right now you can't see under the water even if the water is 10 cm deep.