TA3D

I can't get into the maps and mods sections of these forums so I dunno what's happening over there but, are you planning on a different map format from the normal TA one? It's too limited, not enough colours and TA can't get a good perspective on behind mountains so the textures look stretch and ugly on the back of them. Not saying to scrap the old map format, but a new one could be useful too. Something more up to date maybe?

Actually, i have some ideas of multi-player team maps, but i don't understand how to do a map. I know you can do a map with 'toshop & co (a layer for the graphic, a layer for eights, or something like that), but that's all.

Not yet. Xpoy wanted to create new map format for TA3D, but it is not published yet, so I don`t know how the progress is going.

so I'm still working in this, although long time no progresss going, but still work on, and format isn't point, point is clean format design and directly code. well I think I know what todo at now. /:^P
I will read code, and try to track where the crash are and collect info for map format's work.

I was wondering if it were possible just to make it as simple as in a .TGA file with the normal layer being the texture and the alpha channel being the height map? And then maybe some way of setting values such as starting positions in a .txt file like;
And on a map where the image is about 600x600 pixels, the starting positions would be in the middle. If you get me? maybe even make a special mode in TA3D where you can place features down, like maybe when you start the game up and go to main menu/single/feature builder/choose map, then it loads a map and you then have a side menu with all the features and you click what you want and click on the map where you want it to go, kinda just like normal buildings in TA. Then when done, there should be a 'save map' option that once saved, all the features are saved in place in a text file the same kind of way as shown above.

Personally I think this would be the most efficient way to work with maps, because then it could be as simple as these files going into a map folder;

Test map.tga
test map.txt

That said, normal TA maps work in a very similar way, only difference being the change in image file type

It's possable to make a way, or said in small tool to make a map from some spec picture file+ start pos. And when load game, this tool can make a TA3D map format from your files, and load it in game as normal map, and in seriouse, must make sure ppl used same map. /:^P

I think map format should be really extending, I will think in this basic.

The idea is to be basic, a format that anyone can make a map in, using gimp and notepad or notepad++ (or the TA3D engine to place features). Right now, you guys want more people modding this engine, so that even more people can be interested. I'm drunk right now so excuse me if I don't make sense, but Ta3D isn't popular but needs to be, map making is the easiest way of modding a game. Seriously anything more complicated than my idea needs to be suggested first to see if it's even needed.

I really like this idea . Features can already be added/removed dynamically and a standard image format would be easy to use outside the engine. We have mostly all the tools to do it but there is still something to think of: medium and big maps will require a huge texture, bigger than lots of video cards can support so we'll need an intelligent way of splitting the data and packing it all together into a few files when saving the map. Maybe one big texture file (RGB data) in any image format (you could select jpeg, png, tga, ... when saving) that would be split into several smaller textures to fit hardware constraints, one gray image to store the height map and a TDF file to store objects positions, game victory conditions, etc ... (we can already parse it and make it compatible with some OTA files - i am thinking of mission files).

I thought the idea was a little different:
- tga image is used for height map - so it don`t have to be big.
The terrain textures are should be generated automatically within map editor (for example you can chose - grass, snow, rock) and so on....

using Images as heightmaps wouldn't that not limit the terrain height?

Well, if we support HDR image formats it won't but it won't be as convenient as 8bits channels because software support for those formats is less developed.

Well, 24 bit height is more than enough as it seems to me. 16 millions of height values are quite precise )

If you encode a 24bits height into a RGB color with 8bits per channel, it won't be easy to edit with external tools.

zuzuf wrote:If you encode a 24bits height into a RGB color with 8bits per channel, it won't be easy to edit with external tools.

Yes, you are right... But you can do some tricks, like 8 bit the green channel corresponds all height that above sea level, and the blue channel - corresponds height levels that are below sea level ) that`ll give you already 512 height values that can be easilly modified through any image editor and are easy to understand.

Lol can't you make a map in annihilator and put it in ta3d directory?

.. The idea is to break from this shoddy way of making maps and create a way that looks good in 3D.

How about we use something like wings3d for heightmaps, the actual wings files, and in the map editor we use high-quality textures to texture the faces?
This might create problems though; i must think it over some more i guess. will try to edit post if necessary.

Flashbang232 wrote:How about we use something like wings3d for heightmaps, the actual wings files, and in the map editor we use high-quality textures to texture the faces?
This might create problems though; i must think it over some more i guess. will try to edit post if necessary.

Wings 3D is not suited for this kind of tasks.

alas, i have been foiled by the coding of ta3d.