*sluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurp!* Melee Map Maker
About the matter of
native reversed ramps:
For the most part, I honestly think this is something that is mostly brought up by people who have never actually made any map themselves (or at least nothing sophisticated) and feel repelled by the prospect of having to manually tile-edit stuff.
A ramp is nothing more than a matrix of tiles with one terrain level at one end, another terrain level on the other and some decent looking cliffs on the side. We usually have all of these at hand, and then the option to freely control the properties and looks of these, angle ramps differently or even curve them around, widen or shrink them etc, are what is really important to advanced map concepts, and some pre-fabricated strips of terrain with fixed measures and angles does not help with that at all.
Some terrain transitions and custom cliffs may have to be rethought for aesthetic reasons with the new HD textures, but there will most probably be easy to find solutions (assuming textures which look similar now will not suddenly translate into something completely different looking)
As an easy-to use starter set for novice map makers, I'd suggest just releasing some "failsafe" custom-made ones as an official brush pack (SCMDraft already allows for creating and saving custom brushes for future use) – I'd even compile them myself.
However, if some better custom ramp support is aimed for, the devil is more in the details:
- many ramps like Temple, High Temple (Jungle), Outpost, High Outpost (Ice), Compound, High Compound (Desert) Structure (Badlands) or Elevated Catwalk (Space) look very blocky when expanded, because of the different shading along the width of the ramp. Just having some extension tiles that blend in well would make these more acceptable to use (if the terrain level bugs are resolved too, of course).
- Some ramps (all of the above, Sandy Sunken Pit, High Sandy Sunken Pit (Desert), Rusty Pit (Space), and to some degree Sunken ground, High Sunken Ground (Twilight), Low Platform (space) and some more (depending on your aesthetic tolerance levels, I guess) lack good reverse options, because there are no good tile to blend the transitions to normal terrain. So additional transitional textures for these would be an aesthetic improvement (and a ramp with too poor aesthetics is basically unusable, so...).
So I am actually not against such additions, but I feel like a lot of consideration and testing will be required to figure out the best way to do this. What would be bad is if somehow mapmakers ended up shoehorned into using a very limited set of ramps with fixed widths and angles, as in SC2.
Another question that needs to be considered here: How important is backwards-compatibility of maps? Any addition of new tiles would completely kick this out the door, and probably some forward-compatibility of old maps as well, is some null tiles some one used in their map suddenly turn into something else completely (although EUDs are probably the far greater concern for UMS mapping right now).
As for symmetry tools/checkboxes: They are basically just another one of these newbie-friendly lazy man's tools. I only ever find them useful for outlining the rough layout of a map's terrain (and only after already having made a pencil sketch or something similar ; and if it is a layout with simple symmetry to begin with, so it is useless for any odd-spawn layout, tilted axis geometries or most things involving distortion patterns).
If I were to suggest a change: We really need a "smart symmetry tool". Actually this seems an awfully braggy title for a very simple change I have in mind: Since the usable area of a map actually excludes the bottom row and part of the row above that of tiles, the symmetry centre should (at least optionally) be considered at one tile above the actual centre (so between tiles (63,62), (64,63) instead of (63,63), (64,64) for a 128² map). Right now there is only the workaround of starting the map as (x-dim, y-dim-2) and resizing it to the proper size later in the creation process – I wrote an
article about this on BWMN some time ago.
And what is wrong with this damn website? It is always so bloody slow and completely dies on me half of the time I try to open or refresh a page...
Post has been edited 5 time(s), last time on Apr 1 2017, 2:28 pm by Freakling.
None.