Spring RTS Engine

im sorry, but i just dont quite understand.

sm3 is basically instead of designing 4-5 maps, you design a heightmap produce some seemless tiles and make blendmaps and a text file to specify how these are spread accross the map.

but i can do this much better with photoshop, and ontop of that i can add all kinds of other cool features/ designs to my map, also i have more blending options.

advantages
-feature placement may be easier

but disadvantages
-metal spots much harder to make (visual metal spots)

-seems much harder to learn for novices (i mean not everyone has coding experience, but almost everyone has played around in ms-paint.)

-much harder to make nice looking maps.
i mean your gonna have to do everything in photoshop to see how it looks then put it into the editor, like, its harder to visualise what your map looks like before its finished

-square maps only.
# if you want a very rectangular map (half of spring maps are rectangles remember) then you have to make a big square map and then block off the sides with mountains/ditches, thats alot of wasted rendering power.

also alot of maps are better off rectangular, your far away from your enamies but close to your allies, it makes for longer games as early rushes are less effective if your allies help can make it to your base faster then enamy reinforcements can come.

questions
1 - is there some BIG feature im missing out on?
2 - one thing that might win me over is if you can define how a specific
3 - layer should be rendered, like a layer with metal patches on you could make it very shiney.?
4 - will sm2 maps still work in later versions of spring?

it just seems to me that everyone is making a rave about something that is worse then the original...
(Sorry to be rude i know alot of people are putting alot of hard work and effort into this for free)

but maybe someone can enlighten me about what excites them about sm3
D.R[/b]

photoshop isnt the only tool for making maps.

The best maps for spring are rendered using texture splattering, the same process used to render sm3 maps. Use L3DT. All of forbs maps where made using it.

Hehehe, parched mesa was a mix of bryce and l3dt (I prefer l3dt's style of texturing more than bryce).

Rabbit. To answer your questions....

First of all, yes most of the mapping process take place in photoshop, not all, but the majority of it.

Your are correct that maps will not look as detailed/nice compared to what I produce in l3dt (That respect alone makes me not want to use it, but I digress).

The big thing that sm3 improves is performance and smaller filesize.

SM2 will always work in spring according to JC. If support for sm2 is removed I will probably quit mapping for spring as sm3 can't hold a candle to what I can accomplish with sm2 (remember that the latest version of SM2 was done in photoshop, only the base texture was made using l3dt and very little of that is still showing after me shopping it so compating the sm2 vs sm3 of whakamatunga Riri is not viable).

In the end, sm3 has about as many advantages as sm2 has disadvantages, ans sm2 has about as many advantages as sm3 has disadvantages.

Everything between mapping formats has a tradeoff. The most notable for me is the visual tradeoff of sm2->sm3. I will show you what I mean somewhat shortly, if I can ever find a rock texture that doesn't look like fail in sm3...

BTW, I don't know who put it in anyone's head that sm3 does not have texture stretching... It does, and it looks worse in sm3 than it did in sm2.

SM2


SM3


Hopefully I can make the sm3 more pretty, but I'm having a lot of trouble with it.

Some progress...

sm3 is going to EAT LESS video memory.

texture stretching occurs on any terrain where the only application of the texture is using X and Y coordinates and there is a steep hill. unreal engine 2 and up have a neat feature - they allow you to apply textures to the terrain using X Z and Y Z alignment.

i'll try to explain better...in sm2, the entire texture is just one big, non-repeating X Y aligned image applied to the terrain. it doesn't matter what you do really; the steeper a poly is, the more the texture is stretched. likewise, in unreal, applying an X Z or Y Z aligned texture to a perfectly flat surface yields the same result - stretched texture that looks like ass.

techincally sm3 could have the same flags that the unreal engine has for different layers to be applied using X Z and Y Z, but it does not and probably won't ever. it's loads of code to write for something that really isn't that important, and additionally, extremely steep surfaces are somewhat rare in spring maps.

i thought of another advantage to sm3 that it would be easier to make maps on lower end PC's

im curious though, what happened to sm1 (or just sm as it was probably called)

D.R

sm was an old format we no longer support, I forget why. we had an older format I think it was sm.

It would be easier to make a SM3 on a lower end machine but it seems that a 6600 like mine is struggling to run sm3. so I am not sure what is the minimum to run sm3 esp with jc working on it.. odds are it may become more effecient in the next version, that guy can write some great code when he is interested.

sm1 was innefficient and had an upper size limit of 16x16. Filesizes where unnecesarily large and there was no custom features support IIRC in the sm1 mapconv.

The format was totally rewritten into sm2, which proved to be a much better format at doing what sm1 did.