{"id":3697,"date":"2015-08-25T22:30:22","date_gmt":"2015-08-25T12:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/?p=3697"},"modified":"2015-08-25T22:30:22","modified_gmt":"2015-08-25T12:30:22","slug":"more-map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2015\/08\/25\/more-map\/","title":{"rendered":"More map"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Screen<\/a>Here’s a bit of experimental map design that I’ve done.<\/p>\n

There are a few things to note.\u00a0 First is the new water.<\/p>\n

The new water is a more standard video game water, much less stylised that what I used back in the MS10 build.\u00a0 But I feel that it fits in much better with the terrain style I’m using;\u00a0 the old water was much too “flat”, while this new water maintains a similar light\/dark variation to that of the terrain itself, so they feel more like they fit together in the same game.<\/p>\n

For those who are interested in render tech, this water is (currently) composed of two layers of water ripples, each of which is composed of two taps from a single normal map, moving in different directions and at different speeds.\u00a0 There is a very small amount of specular highlight, as well as a gentle fresnel effect on top that’s so subtle even I would have trouble pointing it out.\u00a0 (And of course it’s entirely invisible from the vantage point of this shot).\u00a0 There still needs to be a few more effects on the water, most notably some surf or other interaction with the shoreline.\u00a0 I may eventually decide to switch to using a flow map to control the motion of the water, but I haven’t felt a big need to do that yet.\u00a0 The ocean, after all, isn’t a major part of this game;\u00a0 it’s really just there to frame the map.<\/p>\n

The other major difference (compared against the MS10 build) is the region borders.\u00a0 In previous builds, when a region was not owned (or was otherwise offline), I drew that region very dark.\u00a0 Now, I’m instead only drawing the borders dark; the rest of the region contents draw in their normal color and brightness.\u00a0 In this screenshot, I’m pointing at the only online region;\u00a0 you can tell because its borders are light, instead of dark.\u00a0 I’m not certain that this is quite visible enough, but I like that the map isn’t so overwhelmingly dark at the start of a game any more.\u00a0 Having such a dark map always made the water look like it was far too bright.\u00a0 Now the whole map is in much better balance.<\/p>\n

What’s more, now you can actually look in the various regions you might expand into next, and decide which you prefer visually, instead of having to guess about what color a region would turn out to be, once you’d activated it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a bit of experimental map design that I’ve done. There are a few things to note.\u00a0 First is the new water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3698,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[24,25],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/Screen-Shot-2015-08-25-at-10.00.39-pm.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-XD","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3697"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3697"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3700,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3697\/revisions\/3700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}