Springtime (the map shown a lot previously) is in a finishing state! The map was made for one of the developers of the LOUD community. It was a remake of 'Valley Passage' but then more aesthetically pleasing.
The map had a few goals in mind:
- Constructing a map layout other than in World Machine without losing the original layout / flexibility.
- Making the map competitively easy to read.
Therefore this map has a 'core' and an actual map file. The core file solely (ab)uses the ozone editor to construct the general layout and uses stratum masks to construct masks that can be used in World Machine.
A screenshot that is taken at roughly the same location, depicting the general layout
This is all fed into World Machine and then used in the actual map file. If anyone would want to 'move a mountain' later on then I'd change it in the core file, run it through the world machine template for this map and then update the actual map file accordingly. A large portion of the process is because of this procedural in a non-destructive manner.
Center of Tatsu is another map that I've been working on. It is the first design of this topic:
A screenshot that is taken at roughly the same location, depicting the general layout and a few stratum layers used for masks in World Machine and the according output
The aim of this map was to solidify the workflow. And solid it certainly became. I was able to completely remove Photoshop from the equation which is critical because Photoshop is both commercial and slow software. The workflow is more automated by the use of a script. The only reason I required Photoshop was to convert the files to the .dds format. As an alternative Image Magick is used for that in combination with a script:
#!/bin/bash
# Variables used throughout the script
resolutionMask=256
resolutionHeightmap=513
target="../center_of_tatsu.v0001/"
for entry in "output/"*;
do
# determine old file location
fileOld="${entry%.*}"
ddsOld="$fileOld.dds"
# determine new file location
fileNew=`basename $fileOld`
ddsNew="$target/env/decals/$fileNew.dds"
# only change if file we want to convert is newer
if [[ "$entry" -nt "$ddsNew" ]] || [ ! -f "$ddsNew" ]; then
# convert the file
echo "Converting: $entry"
magick "$entry" -define dds:compression=dxt5 "$ddsOld"
# move it to the new location
mv "$ddsOld" "$ddsNew"
else
echo "Skipping: $entry (not updated)"
fi
done
This is only a snippet of the script. But essentially there is no more manual labour in converting the textures to the correct format / size. Now I can click and go - go get some coffee, talk to my neighbour, study a bit, end up at the toilet and then when I'm back all the textures produced by World Machine are converted and stored at the right locations.
On top of that it is significantly faster than Photoshop - converting an 8k texture could take up to an hour in Photoshop, where as it takes about a minute with Image Magick.
When developing the map I used 2k or 4k textures rendering the generating / conversion time to at most a minute, allowing me to quickly assess the results in the old GPG editor. By using the /EnableDiskWatch
program argument the textures are automatically updated and therefore the results can be seen without restarting the editor.