Hard to navigate with ambigious looking maps.

Guerra · Post by **Guerra** » 2007-03-23 00:55

Ehh, well I just want stuff like water and roads more visible. So my idiot driver doesn't drive into the little river in Basrah with a tank. Or one of those ditches in Greasy Mullet.

Smash-Crunch · Post by **Smash-Crunch** » 2007-03-23 01:03

Guerra norte wrote:Uhh yes they are, what do you mean by measurements? Like a line that shows distances? Well there is one and it's dynamic too, it's just not showing on the screenshot I took.

You mean like markers? Of course there's is none, I haven't put out any.

I might also add that the map is very dynamic when zooming in and out so you get a different level of detail avoiding getting lots of clutter when zooming far out.

Measurements, as in you don't know how far the land drops or rises at each contour line, which is what contour lines are used for. Without some number for reference, you don't know if that spot is full of cliffs or as flat as an anvil.

Legend, as in you don't know what the hell the black triangles mean, is that a road or river, what the black boxes are, and what the green stuff is.

ubiquitous · Post by **ubiquitous** » 2007-03-23 15:36

I have converted inishail forrest to a contour plot at two different levels of detail using photoshop:

The forrest areas, buildings, roads and water etc can be painted in by hand by tracing over the existing minimap image (probably best done in illustrator rather than photoshop).

At the moment, the contour lines look horrible on account of the fact that they aren't anti-aliased and the texture file for the map is quite low resolution (512x512). I think the way forward is to either work on a larger immage and downsample using a bicubic algorithm or similar or else to try and get the lines into illustrator in vector form. Will investigate furthur tonight.

EDIT: On inspection, it should be possible to get vector contours into illustrator so that the whole process can be vecotr based. Should work out nicely.

Bugger, been messing with this for an hour—should be working. Arrggh

El_Vikingo · Post by **El_Vikingo** » 2007-03-23 16:44

I think higher resolution minimaps woud work better, cause right now, when you zoom in it's practically pixels.!
(my screen resolution is 1280x1024 btw)

jackal22 · Post by **jackal22** » 2007-03-23 16:54

I would have to disagree, they could be touched up a little but a total over haul including heights of ridges etc. isnt needed and will just confuse 90% of players.

all the lines and stuff just take away from the important objectives. they dont tell you much that would be an advantage in return imo.

ubiquitous · Post by **ubiquitous** » 2007-03-23 17:45

Here's a quick proof of concept image I that made for inishail forrest

Some notes:

The contour lines are generated automatically from the original heightmap. The forrest areas are generated in a similar way using the overgrowth.raw file. Both could use a little touching-up.

The roads and paths are hand drawn as vector bezier curves. The buildings (which aren't especially accurate in the above image) are hand drawn as vector shapes. Since everything is vector based I could make this image as big as the moon with no quality loss, but I fear that there may be a resolution limit imposed by the engine for the maps. With the original vector file and everything on its own layer it's easy to change colours and stuff too.

Guerra · Post by **Guerra** » 2007-03-23 18:00

Thats a good map, but make the roads and paths more pronounced.

General_J0k3r · Post by **General_J0k3r** » 2007-03-23 18:03

Guerra wrote:Thats a good map, but make the roads and paths more pronounced.

that should be a minor problem. i understand it right, that the maps in bf2 are just textures? in this case, it shouldn't be a major problem to make these maps. i'd also do one, though i'd need a month or so since im gonna move from barcelona back to berlin and won't have internet as well as a little holiday in between

.

Guerra norte · Post by **Guerra norte** » 2007-03-23 18:33

ubiquitous wrote:Here's a quick proof of concept image I that made for inishail forrest

Yes yes yes!! This is really starting to look good, keep it up!

ubiquitous · Post by **ubiquitous** » 2007-03-23 19:11

Guerra norte · Post by **Guerra norte** » 2007-03-23 19:16

Hmm interesting, but the road color seems a bit distracting, how about if make the roads light yello, gray or white and add some black contour to them?

k30dxedle · Post by **k30dxedle** » 2007-03-23 19:18

Nice. How about the control points?

[T]Terranova7 · Post by **[T]Terranova7** » 2007-03-23 19:19

Interesting discussion. At best I would like to see key roads, objects and areas indicated with an appropiate name. Things like "Charlie Road", "Devil's Ridge" or "Jo Shung's Temple" would help alot if you ask me. It would make it alot more conveinant to glance at your mini-map and say "Hostiles sighted around Hill 747" rather than "Hostiles sighted at that...hill to the north".

Guerra norte · Post by **Guerra norte** » 2007-03-23 19:23

Terranova wrote:Interesting discussion. At best I would like to see key roads, objects and areas indicated with an appropiate name. Things like "Charlie Road", "Devil's Ridge" or "Jo Shung's Temple" would help alot if you ask me. It would make it alot more conveinant to glance at your mini-map and say "Hostiles sighted around Hill 747" rather than "Hostiles sighted at that...hill to the north".

Yeah I agree on that, would help a lot on verbal comms, but isn't "Hill(insert number)" reffering to height? Or are they just randomly named? That would make Hill 747 more like a mountain hehe.

k30dxedle · Post by **k30dxedle** » 2007-03-23 19:30

Yes, hills are named according to height in meters.

bobfish · Post by **bobfish** » 2007-03-23 22:06

You know a gradient would work better than just contours.

Not sure about anyone else, but I think with the steeper gradients used in BF2 map design that a quick glance reveals a lot less information than you would get from a map of a real location (cause BF2 maps are compressed to make it more exciting).

Would that be possible? Just a like grey to white (low to high) gradient colouring of the map?

El_Vikingo · Post by **El_Vikingo** » 2007-03-23 23:17

Grid lines?

[-=IDSF=-]SykloAG · Post by **[-=IDSF=-]SykloAG** » 2007-03-25 01:05

It's been more complicated than I expected, but here is what I have so far.
I'm probably going to have to create my own program though - I need to be able to reduce the bandwidth of the 16-bit signed RAW files more precisely in order to control the relative heights better.

Also, I need at the very least to create vector data now and right now the contour program is producing some very weird format files.

Anyone recognize the map? And yeah I know it looks like **** so far, but at least the contours are about right.

causticbeat · Post by **causticbeat** » 2007-03-25 01:09

Smash-Crunch wrote:The contour lines on that top map are useless without any measurements, plus theres no legend.

uhm. its been a few years out since my time in boy scouts, but arent contour lines standardized? Like 20m of elevation or something>

causticbeat · Post by **causticbeat** » 2007-03-25 01:11

ubiquitous wrote:

make one of those badboys for every map then talk to devs

Hard to navigate with ambigious looking maps.

Work in progress