Thanks I was able to get the Mapping Tag now. It wont let me reply to your post so I'm editing this one. @penguin_ said in How do I add armies?: Where did you look that led to you this conclusion? I was looking in the roles channel instead of role selection channel.

@magge The point is I literally can close this subsection and make it point to the Discord instead. I don't insist having a subforum here.

If you're going to put vehicles in, they should be capturable so you can drive them around Imagine if the battle took place in a recently-evacuated city full of civilian buildings, cars, buses, trucks and you could capture or reclaim them. Buildings would give some vision if you captured them and vehicles would be mobile and give vision. Maybe there's even civilian engineering vehicles that have 1 bp and can capture or reclaim things. And perhaps civilian cop/security vehicles that have more firepower than a snoop. And some civilian aircraft that aren't particularly good (like a scout plane, but slower) but if they're close to the player's spawn, you could skip going into air as early by capturing them to scout with. It would be pretty cool if fighting in the city meant your units had to drive around buildings unless you destroyed them, and buildings took collateral damage from the fighting around them (absorbing direct fire shots or just being in the radius of AOE weapons). As the match goes on, the buildings get destroyed/reclaimed. you could intentionally send engineers to make a path through the buildings so your units can move easier through them. And if possible, don't give radar signatures to civilian structures/vehicles as long as they belong to the civilian team. That way, the other team can't see the buildings being reclaimed just by seeing radar signatures change on the map.

Thank you! I will ask over there.

Great Map. Relatively slow start but it gets really insane towards the end. I only have one slight improvement suggestion: Give the main defense building more life. It can really easy die later on if planes crash on it. Thanks for building this map

@longhead You can make a map with custom lobby options that can do what you described that you want, but you'd have to code the functionality to make it happen. You can look at what some adaptive maps do for some examples of how custom lobby options can be set up.

@rowey Thank you! Will check them out

Looks great

Oh ok, thx and thx for your work

@speed2 Yes transparent textures do work, Jip has done a lot of work on the shaders and Its even possible to do terrain culling, but this has the same issues as the console command, ie range rings etc. dont render, it may be possible to create an entity shader that does render range rings and decals on it, I dont know

@emperor_penguin hell yes!!!!!!!!!! Thank you, both!

@thomashiatt Thank you very much!

If it does get made Github. Expecially as a backup to prevent loss of content due to arbitary removal.

I've tried using your program to export heightmaps but I can't get any other program to read what is exported, be it the .RAW file or .R16 container. Claims it is corrupted. Edit: I have managed to get the .RAW to open in photoshop now. Also, the link for the wiki article has changed. https://wiki.faforever.com/en/FA-Forever-Map-Editor

god i imagine the cybrans would love to see some of their units rendered in this hardtoon style

I don't think I'll stop placing small rocks. I place big rocks and wrecks for early game reclaim targets, and small rocks for aesthetics and late game attack move engineers. They serve different purposes. Admittedly on maps of mine like Stickleback I could replace some of the rock bundles with geothermal style rock groups but then I have to worry about the aesthetics and the disproportionately large reclaim the geo rocks provide. Edit: one of the maps that I think gets the balance pretty perfect is Twin Rivers.

tldr; I'm not too fond of having two versions where one is low-res and one is hi-res. This is a hi-res re-work of Two Step Shuffle. I used it to experiment with. You can view it in the video in the previous post or just enjoy these screenshots: [image: preview-revamped-1.png] [image: preview-revamped-3.png] [image: preview-revamped-4.png] This is some of the work that needs to be done in order to make two versions of a map. World Machine Miss match World machine itself can render at a lower resolution without a problem. But, we do not want to introduce features that are present in a higher resolution, but look odd in a lower resolution. For example: a cliff that is slightly offset in the lower resolution, causing the according map-wide assets to miss-match the heightmap. As an example in Kaali: [image: 1626462004357-93215a47-9978-4f6e-8e84-d38d5d6b88b2-image.png] High-res version based on a low-res heightmap from the top [image: 1626462049733-76720a10-0736-47bc-ae7c-c537bd8bfe01-image.png] High-res version based on a low-res heightmap from the side They no longer match. Typically this isn't an issue because you're not viewing the map from such an angle. But I suspect cinematic shots will be more common because you installed the high-res versions of the textures. scaling One solution would be to just use the high-res version and resize it. [image: 1626462624744-3942582e-4166-489b-ae09-71cd2ada24de-image.png] original 16k (340mb) version [image: 1626462739873-4bffb205-f001-4e01-9540-1c40810187ea-image.png] 4k (22mb) version of 16k albedo texture The high-contrast you'd expect / want is gone. The erosion was processed at a resolution of 16k, creating small pathways that can not be captured in 4k. Therefore they get 'merged together', reducing the overall contrast / sharpness even further than just being in 4k. To mitigate this you can create a version with more contrast by default, but at that resolution it just takes a lot more time (RAM). Detail Another issue is that there are just less pixels in a 4k (or 2k) version of a texture. A solution is to make the texture more transparent to use the stratum layers to compensate for the loss of detail. Luckily, this can be tuned in World Machine using a parameter in the automation script. Sadly, this adds more complexity and it hurts the maintenance and flexibility of the template as adding or removing parts requires not just changing the template, but also the automation script. Automation pipeline I made an (extensive) automation pipeline so that I do not need to touch Gimp or Photoshop for anything. The idea is that I do as much in World Machine as is reasonable. This would need to be refactored / adjusted to make two maps instead of one. Once that is set in place I do not expect it to be much more effort, but it makes the entire workflow more complex and that is typically not something good. Decals I anticipate over 95% of the players to be playing on the low-res version. This version should still look decent. In order to compensate for that there would need to be more-than-required number of manually placed decals. Even though they can look brilliant, it is very time consuming (Archsimkats Valley took roughly 40 hours to make - majority of the time clicking decals) but more importantly: it is uninteresting work. At some point you cap and don't learn anything from doing it. There's more than just these points, but for the sake of time I'm leaving it at this. Point being is that the overall pipeline gets significantly more complicated and the time investment increases by a lot and I'm just not sure if it is worth it. Just 'dumping' a 4k version is not an option, as I have an intended experience that I want people to feel when they play a map. And last - where could I host the hi-res versions of the decals? We're quickly talking about gigabytes of data.