Spring RTS Engine

hey dudes

firstly, let it be known, i am a fan of SSMF. it makes just about every map look better, and is a huge improvement over standard detail texturing. so please don't take this as criticism, i just wanted to mention a few points i've come across while attempting to use it with some of my maps, and a few ways in which i think it could be improved

these are based mostly around trying to get my city maps to look as good as possible

a) would it be possible to use a non-square splat distribution? i had a lot of trouble a while ago, trying to get a nice effect on "frozen fortress" due to its rectangular nature... the uneven nature of the SSMF splat distribution texture stretches a detail texture unevenly on a square surface, so areas i'd have liked to define as squares end up looking a bit like wonky, unevenly blurred rectangles

b) can we get a bigger splat distribution texture? the larger a map becomes, the tougher it is to give a nice "hard line" edge to an area... i realize this isn't important for natural maps, but makes it really tough when i'm working with details of less than 10 or so pixels... it ends up obliterating my details sometimes rather than enhancing them simply because i need the details to apply to smaller areas

c) would it be possible to have (instead of a combined image of four textures saved by channel) individual detail textures saved as greyscale and perhaps referred to in the SMD file? not only would this make it a heck of a lot easier to see what i'm doing when im making the splat texture, but it would perhaps open the door to using more than 4 textures overall...

thanks for your time

C) would add a lot of overhead.

KaiserJ wrote:so please don't take this as criticism,

You say that like there'd be something wrong with criticism.

its critical that you stop criticizing my lack of criticism

b) would massively balloon the size of the map if it was done 1:1

Two hints regarding a and b:

1) the disttex is assumed to have the same dimensions as the spectex
2) the spectex can be non-square (any size and aspect ratio are allowed)

Note: 1) just means they are indexed by the same coordinates. It's perfectly possibly for a map to specify a 1x1 spectex and an MxN disttex, but the alignment between them won't be 1:1 in that case.