2c-Arena #22

[Rman Virgil]

Yea.... 90% of my stuff is crap... but it's the natural course, a journey I enjoy, on the way to
that 10% that ain't crap. One of my favorite Sci Fi authors, John Varley, called one of his story collections, "The Persistence of Vision" and that says it all for me (great lead story too.)

Well, even if that's true, the more you produce, the bigger is that 10%, isn't it?

That's exactly how I see it. Plus - it's the way you grow Myelin insulation on your brain neurons. The more insulation, the greater your mastery. The cognitive science is well established, at this point.

Hmm, I need some quality literature, to improve my own vocabulary and earn some citations

For me it's core brain food and "soul food" (& I ain't talkin southern fried chicken, chitlings, corn bread and collard greens - though those are mighty good too. ) (Music, theater and the graphic arts also provide this sustenance for me as much as good lit.)

Now.. straight ahead to my experience with 2c-Arena #22...

Well done on the map. Every bit as good as Pumpkin's 1 v 1 maps in the official distro.

Aesthetically, your attention to detail with the cliff crevasses, craters, rolling dunes, the 2 backed mud causeways across the river divide, varied textures and smooth, asymmetric, edge brush work... all finely executed and thus enjoyable immersive.

Also, these aesthetics serve interesting game play opportunity ends and thus follow the classic adage of "form serving function"... aka, synergistic design.

Btw, I played twice in Ski. Lost both in under 30 mins. Didn't use stock or DyDo....my modified BP because I like how it uses Repair Droids in the Van of combat groups as Decoys to draw fire while the combat units hang back pounding base fortifications.... among other things.

What I like about good 1 v 1 maps vs strong Ski a.i. is that you are pushed to higher efficiencies in your switch-tasking management skills which is key in MP, imho. (Btw, "multi-tasking" is a myth. "Switch-tasking" accurately expresses the actual cognitive processing. This dovetails deeply with fundamental game GPM-UI design, btw, imho.)

Ergo, I'll come back to this map to brush off the rust on my play skills.

That error usually occurs when you either place features from the wrong setting in your map or their bounding spheres conflict. (Turn on view bounding spheres in EditWorld and place a few features and you'll see what I mean.) You can't clump a bunch of trees or pylons together, for example.

I forgot to directly comment on that, accidentally.

I think that's the exact problem with Garond Valley: some misplaced trees. In this one, I didn't use features other than Oil resources, though.

That's why I think the problem could be with the rotated Derricks maybe (the oil resource itself wasn't rotated 45°, maybe that's a problem in trunk - but in 2.3 betas or 2.2 releases, it ain't).

You devs might want to (actually I'm pretty sure you already are) investigate what's causing the trunk to crash with this, not like the releases. Rotated features, small structures, scav buildings and this kind of thing are really nice, and I didn't notice any problem with those while playing on 2.3b10.

Thanks from this very moment,

~Olrox

Yea, should be investigated. If you had made any of the feature placement clumping-overlapping mistakes or miss-matched feature sets, for example, the map wouldn't have loaded in any of the binaries it did load in or you would have seen obvious gfx glitches in the case of miss-matching.

So it could very well be the feature "rotations" as you have suggested, with Trunk.

- RV
.

[Olrox]

I've tested v1.1 in trunk, and it works fine. Updated the attachment in the first post already.

[Alpha93]

Pretty interesting this aswell. Still took me 2 hours to get through. Started with a truck rush on my part of the river and researched immediately the Power Module. Afterwards, I built 2 defense lines, 1 ahead made of MG Towers and an inner one made of MG bunkers. As soon as I had hardpoints available I built as many Lancers(which became Tank Killers later) and Heavy MG (which later became HPV cannons) hardpoints, and in front of them I placed a whole line of Tank Killer emplacements (stupid Heavy Cannons 4HKOing them ). Reclaimed control over the oil resources the CPU took over on my river's side and slowly obliterated them with Light,Heavy Howitzers and Archangel missiles attached to a measely Sensor Tower Bug Tracks (to be extremely fast). The thing that got me surprised tho was that a truck ended up falling in one of the craters xD

[Olrox]

The thing that got me surprised tho was that a truck ended up falling in one of the craters xD

xD
Yeah, this was the main purpose of making craters with actual relief rather than only textures, hahahahaha! The terrain itself on Arena 22 was made to offer new interesting possibilities, like placing lower-range bunkers behind dunes to surprise enemies, or having lines of batteries protected behind them, with sensors on the top of the dunes.

Thanks for the input, I'm glad you've liked it!

~Olrox

[Alpha93]

Taking space for screenies :V

PS: as "fell in one of the craters" I mean one of the really DEEP ones surrounding your base.

[Alpha93]

Multipost

[Olrox]

Taking space for screenies :V

PS: as "fell in one of the craters" I mean one of the really DEEP ones surrounding your base.

Oh, I call 'em ditches
Well, but that's probably a generic bug with cliffs (already happened on other maps for me), as the "unpassable tiles" were carefully made there. But tell me if that ever happens again, I'll take a look at it.

BTW, nice screenshots - no problem with double-posting with those!

~Olrox

[Alpha93]

I still have the game save's file. I can attach it if requested.

[Mats]

Horrible map. It's completely open (hover tanks), very flat. Too much oil in base. Might be interesting with no oil in base.

[Olrox]

Horrible map. It's completely open (hover tanks), very flat. Too much oil in base. Might be interesting with no oil in base.

Very flat?
it's full of dunes!

Did you mean that there are no cliffs?
Did you try to play it with low power levels?

~Olrox

[Olrox]

Complementing - Arena 22 is meant to be an open map. My goal was to allow ambushes without relying on cliffs to hide your units, and explore a new kind of relief that I've never seen on any other map: dunes.

To fully explore those dunes, I've used every possible height difference to produce smooth, but large curves, and large height transitions with no abrupt changes.

Actually I've made 3 distinct maps with 3 specific goals, all of them 4-players:
Garond Valley, which is a mountainous valley with some cliffs and narrow crossings over the river, with cliff-surrounded bases, a lot of trees, and special oil placements.

Arena #14, which is a urban map unlike other geometric maps, because even though the bases are made symmetrically (on purpose), the mainland is asymmetric, with many buildings and cliffs, as well as barriers that makes direct attacks a little bit slower and makes it possible to detect incoming forces more effectively.

And finally, Arena #22, which is a sandy lanscape with rolling dunes, scattered oil outside the bases (no concentrations), a river crossing the middle of the map, making it harder to make direct assaults with massive armoured vehicles, and indirectly-protected bases.

I really think that you're referring to cliffs when you say that Arena #22 is flat.
Even if I wanted to make the dunes more dramatic, I wouldn't be able to make cliffs, and if I made cliffs, I wouldn't be able to try making dunes. Because there's a height limitation of 0~255, and that's not really great if you're making a map bigger than 64x64. I really mean that I've used every possible variation to make the dunes, from 0-255, using a decreasing factor as they get closer to the river (for obvious realistic geographic reasons):

a22topo.PNG

I'll surely be glad to make a map with more dramatic terrain and dunes when the savegame format is changed, but until now, I'm limited to 0-255 to try every possible topography I want to.
Here is also the height map, if you understand a thing or two about them, you'll know that flat maps are almost the same color everywhere:

Arena 22hm.png

~Olrox

[Michal]

I played the map today, and yes, it seems flat . Or maybe just 'looks flat'. Bases are 255 and river is 0 ?

How do you make these 3D heightmap ? (it is Editworld function ?) Maybe actual map in gameplay looks different...

[Olrox]

I played the map today, and yes, it seems flat . Or maybe just 'looks flat'. Bases are 255 and river is 0 ?

How do you make these 3D heightmap ? (it is Editworld function ?) Maybe actual map in gameplay looks different...

it's a trick with triangle edges turned on, on FlaME.
But hey, look at the actual heightmap. Yes, bases are 255 and the river is 0, and I've applied a descending pattern on the dunes so that the river is really the lowest level, and the terrain level drops out smoothly towards the river - using a distorted gradient blending technique I've developed in the 8 hours it took me to make this map. Yup, one can say that it was literally "concepted, planned & executed from day to night".

Anyway, when the height limits are changed from 2 hex digits to, for example, 3, you won't see "flat" maps from me.

Pah, I'll make the story public right now as I see it fit.

My main idea for Arena #22 was to create a large map for 2 players, 128x128 or larger. It would be desertic, rolling dunes covering the whole area but the center: In the center I'd make this HUGE crater, really magnific, with a whole different thing from the desert inside: grass and mud, a river, oil resources, this kind of thing. On 2 opposite sides of the crater, the players would set their bases, and wage war across the crater, or going around it trying to strike from behind. The crater would be truly gigantic, with a lot of plateaus and small cracks with resources, features... But I couldn't do that with our height limits. I've tried to reduce the crater and the map, but even on a 32x32 map the crater would look ridiculous considering what I wanted to make.
Then, I've started to think "sh*t, this height limit isn't even enough to make a single crater, I can only make those dunes... hmm, dunes!". I've started to think about a map with dunes, trying to make them big even with the height limitation. Arena #22 was born.

So, don't think that I've made those dunes close to the river small because I've wanted to. If I did them larger, when I finished making the dunes until the bases, the dunes closer to the bases would look small...

I've thought about making a map with levels, using cliffs, and making dunes on them, but again, the height limitations won't allow me to do it.

Finishing it all, you can be sure that the topographic demonstration in the 3d screenshot is exactly the relief you've got on the game. I've used flaME to show it, and the height multiplier in flaME is locked to fit the game's one.

I'm sorry that you demonize maps without cliffs, anyway: they really present a different kind of gameplay if designed correctly. Arena #22 was more about a test map than a real map, if you will: I've distributed it because I really thought that some people would appreciate it, and I'm sure that actually most people appreciated it. 77% of the users like it as it is, and 15% likes it but think it could be improved. No one thinks it is completely lost, ATM.
92% is a really good thing for me, especially because I've made that literally from night to day.

~Olrox

[Mats]

Sorry, flat was definately the wrong word and 'lack of cliffs' was what I meant. Dunes don't really make any difference than if the terrain was flat, in terms of gameplay, pretty much. That's what I meant.

Low power levels doesn't seem to make all that much difference. Anyways, I don't think the map is lost or anything, it just needs some changes. Maybe if the heights of dunes can be made more extreme in future, this will work out. As it is, it seems that the height problems in game/editor are the trouble.

[Alpha93]

Imo, the map is alright and doesn't need any change.
In fact, the height of the dunes allow you just to hide units behind (heh, new LOS system with 2.3 d('.'d) )which is a GREAT difference in gameplay,and so do low power levels, which get you to get different strategies than "mass units and throw them at the opponent".