biass' map thread: 2020

[biass]

"Hello and welcome back to my blog"

I'm dumping some pictures of a 5km for posterities sake.
I'm about to mess with the layout right after this, so I won't bother posting a full map thumb. You'll get that when i release it.






The current working name is Nehtotka Twinmaidens or something like that. (Neh ~ tot ~ ka)
It's not part of the 5km mapping tourney, unfortunately.
The unique avatar for that is done and waiting on Giebmasse to wake up, so stay tuned.

[biass]

Layout changes went pretty well so I'm releasing Nehtotka's Twin Maidens now.

I'm going to start adding actual lore based descriptions to my content too, here is the description for NTM:

"An Earth Empire colonist and a wizardry fanatic, Nehtotka Arcanis sacrificed hundreds of lives in an attempt to gain supernatural powers he believed lie within the two volcanic entites on this planet. While he eventually succeeded; the Empire did not hesitate to destroy the whole region, citing they chose to halt the spread of alien mutation."

The map is 5km and allows 1v1 and 2v2.
And here are some more pictures I took (including the thumbnail)








Enjoy, hopefully it's in the next pool but the backlog of "new" maps to be entered is so high and the team can only put so many in before people start complaining.
(It's at v2 now because i forgot to test BPB)

[biass]

Crashing Waves is now at V7: made the following changes after watching some nice pro games :imfine:

Moved one mex away from the starfish-like underwater formation to inbetween the core and natural expansions.
Spaced out the underwater mexes in the middle

Moved a large number of mexes closer to their respective cliff faces.
While terrain constraints still make frigate raiding a hit or a miss in some spots, Destroyers (minus seraphim, maybe) no longer have any issues.

Hopefully that makes my old garbage map a bit less of a mess.
(i'll bug petric to update the pool now)

[biass]

Hymn and Bone is now at V4: A boomer told me to add some rocks, so I did.

Here is a rock:


Here is another rock:


Thank you.

[Little Miss Murder]

Wow, that texturing work looks great.

Needs moar rawks.

[biass]

Nehtotka's Twin Maidens is no longer at V3:
- Removed the radar wrecks and the centre crystal mass prop in the hopes that people will not just walk ACU middle and draw every game.
- Updated the description.
- Got annoyed by the reviews.

Nehtotka's Twin Maidens is now at at V4:
- Removed the centre mex in a further attempt to stop the aformentioned.
- Moved the off-centre natural mex down the ramp to next to the hydrocarbon plant, moved the hydrocarbon plant down a bit to compensate.
- Moved the mexes in the biddle pits to their respective bridges.

[biass]

My current project - that was hinted at in the image above - contains a host of custom assets that I've created/modified.
While I have indeed been keeping quiet about it, I wanted to finally show off some WIP screenshots from it.







8 of the 9 Texture layers in the project are using modified assets.
The pink trees are a modified asset.
The gate is a custom made asset, cheers to the people in the MnM discord who were able to help me sort bugs.
You can drive under the gates, but you will also be able to drive through it so far.
This is a demonstration, the release screenshots will likely have the gates properly etched into the landscape with decals and what have you.

Enjoy.

[Little Miss Murder]

Lovely!

[Franck83]

Nice to see custom assets

Good Project !

[biass]

So, some very sad news for me and then some good news for you:

Despite being led to believe that custom props and the like would work ingame, I got to the end of the project only to learn they can not be used.
This includes the trees and the custom gate model that I spent a rather large amount of time on, so i'm actually pretty bummed out about that, lost all my motivation to work on the map and all that stuff.



That's a screenshot of the FAF editor, with the custom assets.
Here is the same area, but with the "standard" solution.



As you can see, the textures still work fine though.

The good news is that i'm uploading this map now because it is done, and I don't have a reason to keep it from you any longer.
The map name is Gateway and Rose and supports 1v1 through 4v4.
The name is a take on the Torii gates, and the overall map image looking a bit like a flower, as well as the pink trees that were also present.

I already did a large amount of tests to check if the mexes can be raided by frigates, so they can. There is also a civ AA on the top level that discourages dropping the other side of the map.

Here is a strategic view of the map.


It's really annoying to update this map because of the texture file paths, but i'll be watching replays and pushing and changes if I need to do that.
(The release version is v2 because of the above reason)
If the option to add custom props ever comes available in the future, I have the version with the assets on my machine, so maybe some day...

I want to make a teamgame map next, but hopefully you'll understand that my will to do so is rather shot after all of this.