Brand spanking NEW map in MA!!!!!!

[AAIK]

You have amazing skills bustr, some that I don't have.

If I would of made a map for AH, I would of already: All I can do is comment on what little I know of it based on repeated experience philosophising/taking notes about the implementations that exist and have gone by.

Its like knowing the process of flying vs doing it. I am like a newbie who has read the instructions and watched other people fly and perform ACM despite never having pressed the spawn direction on the runway vs someone who has done it 100s or 1000s of times.

[Puma44]

Terrain masking option?

Yes, the use of terrain irregularities and or trees/bushes to hide from the opponent.  Bustr’s terrain provides some great opportunity to skulk about without being seen.  I took advantage of it several times in a gv and was able to sneak around a tank that was camping the spawn.

[bustr]

The terrain editor is about compromises and illusions.

Here I gave up and compromised which sped up finishing the topo feature. Steps are just too large once you make them with well defined treads and risers. But creating a base block with some stepped levels allowed for eroding into the current shape. Has an illusion of something you have seen in African nature documentaries. I still have to test deep cracks and some deep canyon features with rivers at the bottom. You can get halfway through a terrain and stumble on a simpler and faster way to achieve a feature leaving you having to revisit everything you created up to that point to even things out. I used the photos from the rift valley to help me create general shapes to go with the tree and clutter tiles. I swear a family of wart hogs ran past just before I did the screen shot.

This is a blending nightmare of requiring randomness with a biological purpose.

[bustr]

I wanted to prove this can be done with a dry canyon. There are limitations to land elevation so that "V" notch will have wall angles that steep to keep tanks at bay. I suppose I could create a shallow dry gulch with straight sides so a tank might drop off to the bottom but not be able to climb the straight side shoulders. This is just dramatic.....


I found I needed to be very careful at driving a tank around all of those "V" notches or my tank got flipped on it's side. This might really honk off some players if I duplicated it in the MA. Like I said just proof of concept and testing things to see what happens.









Terrains are one giant compromise with illusions. This ditch is the narrowest width you can make the top of a "V" notch, the bottom is the meeting line of two adjacent 1\8x1\8 polygon mesh bands pulled from 1000ft down to 300ft. On a production terrain I would ease the sharp edge down to give a weathered illusion. It's a lot of work cutting away everything that dosen't look like what you want.

[Joker]

Really nice map Bustr.
My new favorite.
Thank you for all the effort you put forth for us.
 

[BBQsam]

This is fantastic work you are doing here bustr.  You are the HiTech of AHIII mapmakers.

 



I expect a couple of these to saunter by in your pic below.....








I can even imagine some of these

[bustr]

I've got a Med test post going in the terrain editor forum that I'll update as I work on things I'm testing to create topo features for a rift valley. Once I finish my testing, it should be alot easier to drop in the land mass pre-setup in elevation blocks by creating a basic heightmap file. There are 3 key elevations I have to convert to gray scale values and I can convert that into a basic heightmap. Since it's created on a 4096x4096 workspace, it is 1x1 8pixel=1mile. Then sculpt, which the worst part of that is making it look random. Sometime because the smallest building block of the terrain editor is 1\8x1\8 mile, lego blocks come to mind.

[Vraciu]

Having lived in Africa for two years I can attest to the similarities.   Bustr has done a good job creating that look.   It's quite remarkable.