Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Help - my map looks glossy - as if it is wet!

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An example of terrain that appears glossy or wet

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An example of a noisy normal map

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An example of a speccy albedo map

This is a combination of factors:

A bright albedo color from either strata layers or other decals. A noisy normal map. A speccy albedo map.

The noisy normal causes some pixels to be lit or darkened accordingly. If this happens quite rapidly (in other words: it starts resembling noise) then some pixels will be lit completely while you wouldn't expect it. Due to how Supreme Commander works with bright colors in combination with bloom it starts looking glossy and / or wet.

A solution can be to slightly blur the terrain before generating a normal map from it - this ensures that all pixel-level noise is removed prior to making the normal map!

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The 5th Nomad mission without a lighting map

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The 5th Nomad mission with a direct + indirect lighting map at a resolution of 4096x4096

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The 5th Nomad mission with a direct + indirect lighting map at a resolution of 2048x2048

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The 5th Nomad mission with a direct + indirect lighting map at a resolution of 1024x1024

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The 5th Nomad mission with a direct + indirect lighting map at a resolution of 512x512

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The 5th Nomad mission with a direct + indirect lighting map at a resolution of 256x256

The indirect lighting slowly causes more and more issues as the resolution is lowered. This may be due to me messing it up in Photoshop accidentally.

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The 5th Nomad mission with a direct lighting map at a resolution of 4096x4096

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The 5th Nomad mission with a direct lighting map at a resolution of 2048x2048

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The 5th Nomad mission with a direct lighting map at a resolution of 1024x1024

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The 5th Nomad mission with a direct lighting map at a resolution of 512x512

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The 5th Nomad mission with a direct lighting map at a resolution of 256x256

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The 5th Nomad mission with a direct lighting map at a resolution of 128x128

The map in question is 20x20 with a heightmap of 1025x1025. In this case I've made sure there are no artifacts to be seen in Photoshop / during the initial tests. I think we could get away with using the 512x512 version which has essentially no impact on loading times. For smaller maps 512x512 would be more than sufficient and you could get away with less but that has no further impact on the loading time of the map.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up. Even a top player could learn some things from this. Personally, even though I had internalized a lot of these concepts, hearing it summarized in this fashion is very useful and helped me identify some areas where my decision making is not as strong.

It may, in some cases be too dense, but it works well for the size of maps usually involved with FAF - and it overcomes a lot of issues where maps are either poorly marked, or not marked at all - which is a big plus. On larger maps, this many nodes will cause some visible impact in game speed - especially as you get more AI involved.

This is phenomenally written and something I hope to see more of. Nice work, Jip!