2 replies to this topic

[Sasuga]

I play other games (yeah, yeah, I do) and something I've noticed other online games doing, is having seasons, and in those seasons, having new maps (and other things).

Another game, I won't name, just got out of the Lunar New Year celebrations, and their maps were Asian themed. Now they're doing a Northern Viking-Wolf theme, and their maps are completely different and on theme for that.

My point? They come out with new maps every few months, to keep the game fresh.

A certain very popular RTS game has been coming out with new maps seasonally for ages now, and while that popular RTS game has lost some of its popularity, it's still extremely popular.

Many, many people, (including me) have been begging for new maps. Personally, I'd love to see new maps come in, and the old ones remaining in rotation.

=-=-=-=

What if each season was a different star system? So, we can have different maps that represent different planets and moons in the system? So we can have more moon maps, aside from just HPG, or more lava maps, aside from Terra Therma, or more forest maps besides the Forest Colony...

New assets are nice, different trees and things, but what I'm really craving is a change in map layouts. I'm tired of having the maps memorized.. and memorized for years. And people basically playing them out the same way over and over. - I try to shake things up, I try to change thing ups, but even then, there's only so many options on a given map... and only so many good options. And once you know them, you just go throw the motions, and that gets boring.

Canyon network is great... Another map like it would be nice, with different features.. different paths, different options to think out as you're looking at it.

Learning new maps and using that knowledge is handy, but having a map completely memorized for years, it's just old.

[LordNothing]

i used to make og starcraft maps, and honestly you could do a map layout in a couple days, then spend a week on map logic. multiplier maps were significantly easier and could be done in a day. there was a popular sc2 custom game (fleet wars or something) that me and my sister's now ex husband used to play. they lived out in the boonies without things like plumbing, 24 hour electricity (they ran a genny for four hours a day to charge the house batteries), and internet access. so while visiting, i kind of did the best approximation of the custom game for sc1 that i could manage. that might have taken 2 days to hammer out the bugs. easy without the distraction of the internet. especially with the inverter screaming at you because the batteries powering the house are about to die. every time you heard the toilet flush you would scramble for the save button because you knew there was going to be a brownout when the pumps kicked on.

ive also done quake and quake 2 mapping to various levels of success (success = looks nice in a modern open source quake engine without running all the map compilers that take forever). those might take a week tops. and compiling those then was like mining crypto today, your machine is just unusable for days. i was always terrible at architecture so i never managed to make anything except one unreleased dm map that wont compile and has player clipping issues everywhere.

today there are a large numbers of procedural terrain generation tools to create geometry for games and renders and the like. so many devs are willing to constrain themselves by using the limited tools their engines come with. but at the end of the day its all verts and polies. so everything should be importable, right? or better yet just steal planetary science topo maps from nasa. they are usually open source. i actually did that with a certain space sim that wont be named when i tried to buff its physics model and needed to import many square kilometers of terrain and in some cases entire planets small moons.

pgi chose to do things the pgi way, quarter million dollar maps and just make cheap dirty shortcuts that modders usually do, and with more success. maybe its a quirk of cryengine that it eats a ton of man hours to slap down some terrain and decorative elements. maybe its got to have some expensive data center time to crunch things. who knows.

Edited by LordNothing, 20 March 2021 - 03:40 AM.

[MW Waldorf Statler]

The Cry SDK is a good Tool , like each Engines his has his own problems, for a Good Looking small Maps you work a Month when not big installations and most pure Landscape, for Vegetation its give good Brushes ,its more the Detailwork with Textures and layers .For a Big City Map ,you have a lot work and the best you have own saved Building/Lamp/Street-Group Elements for using in it.