Your opinion about maps with map-wide assets
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I've been going back and forth on how to approach this and essentially there is no good approach. I'll write a more elaborate post tomorrow about the hows and whys.
As part of the experimentation I've updated Two Step Shuffle. If there is no limit then it would've looked like this:
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tldr; I'm not too fond of having two versions where one is low-res and one is hi-res.
This is a hi-res re-work of Two Step Shuffle. I used it to experiment with. You can view it in the video in the previous post or just enjoy these screenshots:
This is some of the work that needs to be done in order to make two versions of a map.
World Machine
Miss match
World machine itself can render at a lower resolution without a problem. But, we do not want to introduce features that are present in a higher resolution, but look odd in a lower resolution. For example: a cliff that is slightly offset in the lower resolution, causing the according map-wide assets to miss-match the heightmap.
As an example in Kaali:
High-res version based on a low-res heightmap from the top
High-res version based on a low-res heightmap from the sideThey no longer match. Typically this isn't an issue because you're not viewing the map from such an angle. But I suspect cinematic shots will be more common because you installed the high-res versions of the textures.
scaling
One solution would be to just use the high-res version and resize it.
original 16k (340mb) version
4k (22mb) version of 16k albedo textureThe high-contrast you'd expect / want is gone. The erosion was processed at a resolution of 16k, creating small pathways that can not be captured in 4k. Therefore they get 'merged together', reducing the overall contrast / sharpness even further than just being in 4k. To mitigate this you can create a version with more contrast by default, but at that resolution it just takes a lot more time (RAM).
Detail
Another issue is that there are just less pixels in a 4k (or 2k) version of a texture. A solution is to make the texture more transparent to use the stratum layers to compensate for the loss of detail.
Luckily, this can be tuned in World Machine using a parameter in the automation script. Sadly, this adds more complexity and it hurts the maintenance and flexibility of the template as adding or removing parts requires not just changing the template, but also the automation script.
Automation pipeline
I made an (extensive) automation pipeline so that I do not need to touch Gimp or Photoshop for anything. The idea is that I do as much in World Machine as is reasonable. This would need to be refactored / adjusted to make two maps instead of one. Once that is set in place I do not expect it to be much more effort, but it makes the entire workflow more complex and that is typically not something good.
Decals
I anticipate over 95% of the players to be playing on the low-res version. This version should still look decent. In order to compensate for that there would need to be more-than-required number of manually placed decals. Even though they can look brilliant, it is very time consuming (Archsimkats Valley took roughly 40 hours to make - majority of the time clicking decals) but more importantly: it is uninteresting work. At some point you cap and don't learn anything from doing it.
There's more than just these points, but for the sake of time I'm leaving it at this. Point being is that the overall pipeline gets significantly more complicated and the time investment increases by a lot and I'm just not sure if it is worth it. Just 'dumping' a 4k version is not an option, as I have an intended experience that I want people to feel when they play a map.
And last - where could I host the hi-res versions of the decals? We're quickly talking about gigabytes of data.
