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This is the map. I'm not telling you the name. The user saved it as v56 and handed it to me to open in the GPG editor.
I started off with the lighting as it is often the dealbreaker with a lot of already bad content.
The lighting on this map is bland and dull, and bland and dull lighting can do anything from hiding passable terrain like ramps to totally obscuring the fact that a mountain exists in a place if the lighting is bad enough. This isn't default, but I can tell if your lighting is the default.
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Close up lighting, the rocks hardly cast a shadow and that lack of contrast makes them harder to spot, something else you cannot spot is the terrible texture maps, more on that later.
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This is a basic lighting job, it's quick and not stylised. (and I change it constantly as this guide progresses) notice how the extra shadow and direction brings the mountains out of the ground. Look at the rocky circle in the top left, didn't you think it was flat? go back to the top image and compare, it's actually a rocky hill that the lighting had hidden entirely. I'm not giving you settings or telling you how to achieve this, figure that out on your own.
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The second point of interest are the textures, they're weird and unnatural. I thought early on that the sand here was a texture to help indicate that a mountain was beginning, but not only does this provide an unnaturally insane level of contrast between the two, it is also painted over areas that are perfectly passable, like for example the areas in the green arrows above.
Obscuring your playable areas and your impassable terrain is how you get people raging at your map, that's bad for buisness.
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notice in that close up pic before that the textures looks a bit blurry? they're overscaled. This means they're made to appear bigger than they are supposed to be, and in this particular paradise sand texture, that's around 4 or 6. Many newer textures can only be sized up to around 12 without being over scaled, and if you're reading this gude in earnest, you probably don't have the creative eye to get away with breaking the rules.
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I'm not going to tell you how to pick textures but they should all fit the theme and fit eachother and look nice and natural and good. This area is the same spot as the second image above. See the black line-like texture over this image? it was there in that second image, but the lighting hid it.
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Lots of textures have matching normal maps, and you should probably use them when they're available. This is the same area with the correct normal map, they're also set at the same scale.
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Players who have been around for a while can spot out lazy texture and terrain painting from a mile away, and being lazy here will ensure your map is washed away in the garbage with the hundreds of astro clones and the... far worse.
I think this is an example of lazy. and I spent a little under 10 minutes doing a quick edit on the map to prove the point. I'm not going to tell you how to create terrain, you need to find out how you do it on your own. the terrain should be natural and fit the theme (like everything else.)
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This is the same method I used on maps such as Nehtotka's Twin Maidens and Hymn and Bone, but it clearly doesnt look as good. That's because bad textures can hide good terrain if not painted properly, so you should make sure not to neglect this area also.
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I got this far into that when I ran into enormous fustration because the user's organization of his texture layers was sporadic and mindless. For example, the dirt inbetween the grass and the rock was the bottom-most layer (of 10), the actual mountain rock was on layer six. The user had also used the exact same grass texture on three different layers. Organize your layers upon creation, you can decide how but they should make rational sense, try putting stuff like sand on the bottom - go up to the grass layers - and then go further up to the mountain tops.
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I changed all but a couple of layers and varied how they were painted quickly to achieve this appearance. (bottom left only)
Lets talk about that water, it's very clean and bright and the water suddenly becomes very blue 4 meters out from shore. there is no sand rather than at the predefined level of distance and the other body of water has no similar traits about it at all either.
I don't know about where you live but in my Tasmanian shithole paradise wherein I am less than 500 meters away from a body of water at any point in time, this is alien and unnatural to me. As with everything else, I can tell if it's the default, and make it look nice.
Also, make your initial elevation high enough so that if you want, you can hide the 3 water layers underneath completely.
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It's weak, but I did this.
Lets move on to props, in that image, you can see that the same tree group is just splattered all over that area with no rhyme or reason. Props are the area where I find new mappers are at their laziest.
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I've seen this same rock a million times and lazy and thoughtless placement of it (and it's cross theme counterparts) give me the shits. I shouldnt have to tell anyone that your rock should not be floating in space, especially if this map is a possible contender for a tournament.
Instead of using one tree for your reclaim, find and test out brushes that contain mutiple. make sure they're all theme fitting. Test out your brush mutiple times and adjust the settings so you get a good result.
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Be consistent with how you paint onto the terrain and make sure you don't paint on textures that wouldn't support your props, like trees onto rock or sand for instance.
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And feel free to add more props like rocks if you want to designate areas with more mass.
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Rocks are normally not one in an empty field, and to hide that fact that it is indeed the same god damn rock again, seek to add smaller rocks and vary them out.
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Now for decals, everyone knows how much I love my decals, and despite the user knowing how to place them, I thought it was lazy that he had neglected to do so.
I'm not going to tell you what decals to use or how to place them, just make sure the LOD is set so they appear when they are needed and dissapear when they are not, higher LOD means the higher you can see them from.
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Lighting affects your decals, so changing it to suit a balance of all your elements is important rather than setting it after one.
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Make sure wrecks serve a purpose and everything that I already mentioned above regarding props.
I made some small comments on gameplay but I didn't go far into it (I've already spent all of my free time today here doing this..)
I mentioned the spawns looked copy pasted, boring and unnatural. Some people like the quad adjacency square thing but I really don't.
The expansions were not so much prominent as it was more or less just a straight line of mexes from one spawn to the other with a hydro at random. The middle in the pic below that he made looked too dominant.
Players hoping to make good maps should think about where and why players head in different directions on a map and use the terrain, mass, and props to guide them there. I'm not going to tell you how to do that, but feel free to watch replays on maps and analyse them if you have the time.
That concludes my post, good luck on your submissions.
Feel free to ping me in discord if you too, want to be relentlessly bullied.
This map was not saved and was not handed back to the user after these edits.
Spoiler: show
