Scenario Creation

[ClaytoniousRex]

On a related note, could you define in a brief point form, how you personally make a map, and what you use to do it. Nothing detailed, just 1, 2, 3...I have made over a dozen maps, and I'm not happy with any of them. Yours have a photorealistic quality I can't seem to capture on mine...

I always do several iterations on a "rough draft" first to get the gameplay right before moving on to the more time consuming look of the environment. For the rough draft I only work on a rough version of the heightfield - really just a sketch with the major features on it. I drive around on this heightfield, using the texture and skybox from some other scenario and tweak the heightfield until it's the right concept. This is important to get the relative sizes and placement of different terrain features right.

Then I throw that away and start on the "real" version. I usually begin with a low amplitude fractal across the entire terrain. This gives us a mostly, but not perfectly, flat plane to start working with.

Next, I add the major features. If the major features are hills then I simply plop in some big blobs in the right places (and with the right heights and shapes), then add one of several kinds of fractal noise to those blobs to make them actually look like geological features instead of perfect mounds. Then I do some blurring and blending to make those new hills blend into the original fractal ground plane.

The same idea goes for rivers or other features: first I hand-edit them into place, then go back over them by adding or multiplying the right kind of fractal noise and blending the result into the base terrain.

Sometimes I take advantage of the advanced tools that Leveller offers: it has features that place a random variety of craters, or procedurally grows cracks from seed points, or does nice erosion, etc.

I then use Leveller to create roads and improved ground using its "power line" tool, ramp tool, and whatever else is needed to get the job done.

Now the heightfield is complete, so I import it into Terragen for rendering. You can spend a lot of time playing with surface parameters and it's worth it to get a good look.

For good looking foliage, it's really important to make the foliage color match the ground color. Otherwise it looks terrible. You can just copy one of the existing foliage textures and colorize it in The Gimp or PSP to match the ground color.0

It's important not to saturate the ground with detail textures so the colors in your mask shouldn't be more than about 70 or so per component (out of 255).

It'a also important to really have some variety of color in your base texture rather than having a grayscale base texture and relying entirely on detail textures for color. Doing this gives the whole terrain an artificial look because the detail textures are always the same color. In reality, the color of ground features (whether they be dirt, grass, stone, etc.) varies across the landscape - all grass is not the *same* green and all rocks are not the *same* gray. Your base texture is the best way to modulate these variations of color. You can look at the base texture for Black Pearls to see what I mean.