Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Terrain Editor => Topic started by: rogerdee on August 25, 2007, 06:52:55 AM
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i was wondering with all the work you guys are doing on tiles and trees ect will HTC consider incopurating them in to the terrain editor as a standard tile if they were submitted to HTC.
It would be nice it your hard work could be put into good use in the future for new maps for the main arenas.
we have had desert tiles and winter tiles, pacific tiles it would be nice if HTC would put these into the game for every one to see the guys great work.
Also this would make for some very nice different maps for every one to use
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I agree that they should be put into some standard format so they can be chosen when building a terrain and/or in the arena setup.
But, I have yet to see anybody do a complete set of 40 (including the new rivers) different terrain textures. It's 24 without the rivers. Not including the ovly textures.
The closest I've see are Croduh's snow textures which still fall short. He duplicates 0101 and 0102 with 0103 and 0104. Or at least they look to be duplicates to me.
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i would have thought that with everyones effort we could get groupes of tiles to submit to htc.The thing is its a lot of work for people to do and if they wasnt accepted it would be a waste of time.
Skuzzy is there any HTC view on this for new tiles?is it worth the guys doing.
Id like to give it a try but i dont actually understand at the moment how the tiles are done or how they are textured
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As I recall, and this may have been a players post instead of htc, I think it was posted that htc wanted complete sets of tiles for the seasons. NHawk pointed out, that’s a lot of work for one person and the chances of doing it less then right are high. It really needs a team effort because tiles that look good are easy to produce but if you don’t discipline yourself to use low poly counts and the smallest possible textures, your efforts will be wasted at best and hated at worst.
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I doubt though that htc will accept textures from anyone, they can make much better ones anytime.
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yes they can make better ones but they dont really want to i think.
it seems that a lot of the things are having to be done by members to further the game.
Pity we cant have some different terrains
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It sounds like Rogerdee wants the Main arenas to have variation. We already have played supplied tiles in SEA and AvA terrains. The reason we cannot have variation in the main arenas is because main arena terrains need to maintain a relatively small download size. Japan had tile textures and was roughly 12mb. Because the default object tiles were ETO oriented, I had to make new object tiles for Japan. That increased the terrain size to 31mb. MA terrains tend to be less than 1mb.
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I still think the best way to allow variation on the maps is my idea of 5 res files containing nothing but terrain textures.
It's a one time download, it would not have to be updated with each release unless there was a good reason to, and allows for setting the terrain type in arena setup and/or in the TE.
This way every map can rotate through the seasons and/or ET and PT terrain features.
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Agreed, everytime we do the textures just for the tiles, no trees etc, it's around 18 meg. Toss in some objects and our terrain downloads are in the neighborhood of 40 meg. so anything that would reduce that is a good thing in my book.
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Originally posted by NHawk
I still think the best way to allow variation on the maps is my idea of 5 res files containing nothing but terrain textures.
It's a one time download, it would not have to be updated with each release unless there was a good reason to, and allows for setting the terrain type in arena setup and/or in the TE.
This way every map can rotate through the seasons and/or ET and PT terrain features.
That would be a good idea...
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Also, it would be nice that seasons textures would change according to real seasons.
That way the textures will be changing constantly and won't get boring.
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yes it would be god if the terrain changed with the seasons and were not so boring .Also thinking of the skinners we could have skins done for each terrain or season.
Some nice desert skins some nice pacific ones if we ever hae that terrain and of course some nice winter or autum ones
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Seasonal tiles sets would require more than just replacing the tiles. You have trees. How goofy does it look for all green trees full of leaves to be on a snow/ice terrain?
How about all the buildings? Shouldn't they have some snow on the tops?
What about all the fields? They have their own base tile.
Practically every 3D object on a terrain would need to be reworked.
Doing a seasonal terrain would require massive amounts of art work. Not that it cannot be done. It can! But it is a pretty daunting thing to try and accomplish.
Would they be used in anu of the main arenas? I do not have an answer, but will try to find out.
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Skuzzy,
While you're checking can you find out about PTO objects/textures?
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Saxman, the 5 res files I speak of include PTO
Winter
Spring
Summer
Fall
PTO
Fall would probably be the easiest to implement first since there's little to change except trees and maybe some terrain textures.
PTO would be the second easiest since I do belive much of the PTO work may already be done.
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Ah, cc.
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You really don't need any snow on the roofs, building insulation wasn't nearly that good 60 years ago but you do need a few more generic buildings in the default and it could be a pretty sparse set. It's the trees and clutter, particularly on a jungle tile, that eat up the resources. With the addition of two tile sets, a small resource desert and large resource jungle, (keep snow, just retexture it) you can create almost anything by avoiding the tiles that don’t match the setup and change only the ground textures. No, you won’t have the fiery tree colors of fall but a lot could still be accomplished without requiring multiple 40 meg downloads.
As you say, green trees in snow, or desert, look terrible.:(
edit for sp/gram.
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I think what NHawk was saying is that this would be a RES file installed with the rest of AH and not part of the map itself.
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I also like the idea of toggling the seasons but wouldn't that mean the basic game download would grow by 3 x 40 =120 additional megs? Ouch.
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I made a snow map with almost every object covered in snow, trees, buildings, tiles, base tiles etc...
I don't see the problem even in that, only what Easycor pointed out, that files would be big too.
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I've been thinking about it again, if the objects remained the same and only the textures were paged in and out, the additional DL required could be reduced to 3 x ~20 = ~60 meg, still a pretty big hit on top the current 107 MB.
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Originally posted by Easyscor
I also like the idea of toggling the seasons but wouldn't that mean the basic game download would grow by 3 x 40 =120 additional megs? Ouch.
I don't think that would be the case. I don't know for sure, but I do believe the stdshape.res file contains all of the objects in addition to the textures.
Just give the terrain and ground object textures their own res files and leave the shapes and all other textures in stdshape.res. I might be oversimplifying things though.
Plus in theory it would be a one time download. The only time terrain textures would need to be downloaded is if there was a major change in them. Which, we don't see that often. We see object locations moved around, but rarely see the textures for those objects change.
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Originally posted by Easyscor
I've been thinking about it again, if the objects remained the same and only the textures were paged in and out, the additional DL required could be reduced to 3 x ~20 = ~60 meg, still a pretty big hit on top the current 107 MB.
Remember that certain textures wouldn't change for all seasons. Fall being the obvious one since only trees and maybe a few of the terrain textures would change.
So, you'd have your standard "Summer" textures with some substituted by "Fall" textures. Same with Spring, you'd have standard "Winter" textures with some substituted by "Spring" textures.
The biggest hits would be Winter and PTO.
And actually Spring could be skipped entirely. Anywhere I've lived we go from Winter to Summer. Spring just kind of passes by without notice.
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Problem with just re-texturing trees is this:
(http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z144/croduh/treeprobsnow.jpg)
Re-texturing house tops, hangars, paths etc etc was no problem.
Pines and most of the shrubs don't even need anything, they are evergreen:)
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I've done them a long time ago.
Which tree is that? I'll see what I can do tomorrow.
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Ok, trees are more complicated than they use to be.
It looks like one or more of the textures is laid horizontally to give GVs some protection from sight.
I just need to figure out which part that is.