[Maps] 8x8km ?

[Zeno]

I would like to know what you need to know when making a 8x8km map like Falklands.

do you need extra coding or is it just slapping the 4km terrain fix on a normal 4km map and placing stuff in the OOB area?

i tried the later but it wouldnt let me select the spawnpoint that was OOB

[Amok@ndy]

for 8km maps you need great knowledge of 3dsmax

[Rhino]

To make an 8km map, as Andy said you need very good knowledge and experience of 3DsMax, with also making BF2 staticobjects for it, as well as good knowladge and experience of the BF2Editors map editor and a good understanding of how heightmaps and other terrain systems work.

This is assuming we are talking about an 8km map that isn't 100% water or one with a tiny island in the middle.

It is possible to make an 8km, with a tiny island in the middle, using BF2's terrain but the terrain is seriously low quality, every grid square is 8m^2 (a 4km map like Kashan is 4m^2 and that's pretty low detail) and also the colour/detail textures are seriously low rez too (detail textures can be tiled up to keep them high rez, but there assigning area is much lower rez, although the low rez part is most notable on the colour maps). There are also some lightmap problems. The reason why it has to be on a tiny island in the centre as while you can scale up the heightmap via the code, so far no one has worked out a way of scaling up the terrain textures to cover the entire 8km area, instead its just limited to the 2km^2 or best, 4km^2 area in the centre of the map.

If your map is a 100% water map then its pretty easy to do, just need to edit the code

But if you want land all over the map, or most of the map like The Falklands, then you need to go into modelled terrain, which after doing the Falklands, I wouldn't advise anyone else to do it as its very complicated and got too many draw backs like no undergrowth etc.

[Zeno]

yes, the teory of the map is one island in the middle.

but wouldnt i be able to use a 4km map and place the carriers on the OOB area and remove/use a extremely long timer until death?

im thinking Amphibious assult an an island with a large area for aerial combat, not just the circlejerk that 4km tends to be unless i only place slow grounds attack jets

[Rhino]

The main problem with that is the minimap, with it only covering the 4km central area, and none of the outside. Although this is how it is on the Falklands as well, other than it has an 8km minimap where the map is more of a 16km area if you cover the Arg and Brit mains, it sucks a bit flying outside of the minimap area, with it being pretty hard to navigate, although I have sorted this a bit with navigation markers on the minimap, telling pilots what direction they need to fly in from that point, and for what distance. It works pretty well on the Falklands because the central area is so large, that pretty much all the air to air is in there anyways.

If you've not played the map this being more or less the minimap you see ingame, without the flag markers or the nav markers, in really low rez


and this is what the real map is, with the GB carrier in the top right, and Argentinian airbase in the middle of it, on the coast.


But your better off removing the combat zone, rather than making a massive counter or making it do no damage as I have on the Falklands, as the message telling you your OOB is annoying as f*ck and confuses players for a bit too, especially if they spawn in on foot, out of the combat zone.

[Zeno]

But your better off removing the combat zone, rather than making a massive counter or making it do no damage as I have on the Falklands, as the message telling you your OOB is annoying as f*ck and confuses players for a bit too, especially if they spawn in on foot, out of the combat zone.

sounds like the easiest way to do it, as it would give me the added airspace without loosing terrain quality

[J.F.Leusch69]

couldnt you resize the colortextures for the island by hand in a higher resolution and to counter that resize the colortextures for the rest of the terrain which is under water anyway?

[Rhino]

One thing to keep in mind is if you disable the combat zones, you can't have any DODs.

couldnt you resize the colortextures for the island by hand in a higher resolution and to counter that resize the colortextures for the rest of the terrain which is under water anyway?

If you paint the ground textures manually, outside of the BF2 editor, yes but the BF2 editor will only save them in iirc, 512x512 per patch, so yes you could do all the painting work in PS but not something that is very easy to do, since your working totally in 2D, without any object refs (unless you also render a minimap on top of it that you use for a ref, but not very detailed to work off and no 3D view as your working, like if your painting under an arch way etc of a building) and then you need to manually save it etc, also taking into account detail texture edits at the same time. Although you could try painting the terrain in some other terrain editor like the UDK one or something but not sure how workable that is, and still wouldn't be working with BF2s statics, just the basic terrain but it would be in 3D.

You also need to take into account the extra memory usage by doing this.

As for patches under the water, the BF2 editor removes any patches that are 100%, deep under water anyways when you compile the terrain. If you look at Muttrah's complied colourmaps, there are only 56 colourmaps, when there should be 72. Resizing any of the others would mean the part that is just out of the water of that patch, even if just a small corner will be really low detail as a result.

[Rhino]

well if the texture is low on 4x4 on kashan u can try make it like iron eagle becuase the terrain there looks very good there and its 4 km

Iron Eagle and Kashan have the same rez colour textures per meter. The only difference between the two is Iron Eagle uses its colour textures much more effectively, where Kashans is "blury" and might as well be a 256x256 or 128x128 texture per patch.

Kashan:


Iron Eagle:


Now here is one of Muttrah's colour textures, which is a 2km map, but still has the same sized colour texture per patch, with the same amount of patches, although the map is 1/4 the size (in area), meaning each colour texture has 4x the detail in it per meter than on a 4km map. Note the main road texture, although being the same width on all 3 maps, is twice as wide on Muttrah's colour texture than it is on Kashan's or IE's.

[Rhino]

I didn't respond to that because its not a map idea... And even if you did post a map idea with more than 10secs of thought put into it I still wouldn't respond unless you where serious about making it yourself.

I suggest you read this topic: https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f354-c ... w-map.html