Since we all know that I like maps that are pretty (possibly at the expense of framerate or gamplay) :eek2: I just had a bunch of artistic comments regarding the terrain. Since a lot of work at this stage needs to be flexible, I didn’t want to be an ass in public making comments on things they may not be finished.
Instead, I just sent you a pm regarding most of it.
However, one issue that I did want to address in public, are the texture choices for the terrain. I went into more detail in the pm, but essentially, I think the textures are way too dark against the bright sky and that they don’t work well with one another.
Since I think other mappers could benefit from this, Here is an image that I made using all of d3coy’s terrain textures. The textures on the left are the original ones. As you can see, his mud and rock textures are so dark, they look like they are made for a nighttime map.
The textures on the right are the same textures modified to give them all a similar brightness, saturation, and color tone. I also sharpend one of the softer grass textures to match them up a little more. In my opinion the modified textures look like they belong together in the same geography. It also helps ease the contrast between the sky and the ground while ingame.
I sent d3coy a link to a pk3 file to try them out. But their is so much of the Mud texture in his map, the alphmod brushes in his dotmatrix2 terrain will need to be more detailed.
d3coy, looking at all this textures lined up, consider making texture blends between the grass textures using the dead grass as your primary texture.
I would set up my shaders like this:
Primary/Secondary
Rock/Mud
Road/Mud
Grass1/Mud
Grass2/Mud
Grass3/Mud
Grass1/Rock
Grass1/Grass2
Grass2/Grass3
You can get more variety in your blends. With enough brushwork detail in the terrain, you can easily make a complex blend like this:
Rock/Mud/Grass1/Grass2/Grass3/Mud/Road/Mud/Grass1/Rock
Use the greener grass textures for the terrain under your trees and near the river.
