'Princess Burke' Mapping tournament

[Jip]

Grading: AI category

Reason game is unranked	Amount of unique players	Amount of games
The game has at least one AI	40,380	384,982

We have a rough estimate that there were 70.000 unique players in 2022. More than half of those players played games with AIs - over 380.000 games in 2022 alone.

Matchmaker	Month	Amount of unique players	Amount of games
ladder1v1	December	1,689	11,102
tmm2v2	December	930	968
tmm4v4_full_share	December	1,934	3,211

We took one month as an example, but even if we'd sum all the games together then the number of matchmaker games are no where near the number of games with AI. That is why there is a separate grading criteria to check for AI-compatibility. With thanks to @maudlin27 and the other AI developers there is a wiki article that has loads of tips and tricks on how the AI can perceive a map:

• https://wiki.faforever.com/en/map-development/ai-friendly-maps

We highly recommend you to skim it and to, eventually, read it through. The remainder of this topic will help the default AI (the one that ships with FAF) to understand your map properly.

Hotkeys

Over the last year we've introduced various abstractions to help the AI understand a map. We'll discuss each abstraction in-depth separately. You can enable a visualizer for them using these hotkeys:

Utilities window to toy with the navigational mesh

Utilities window to show markers

Utilities window to show the reclaim grid

Navigational mesh

The navigational mesh generates a quad-tree like abstraction across a map. There are various utility functions available to the AI to sample the abstraction. Once open, the following window will pop up on your screen:

You can use this to generate the navigational mesh (1) and to visualize it (2). When you visualize it there are two options: you either visualize the layer as a whole, or the individual sub areas in the given layer.

The land layer as a whole

Individual sub areas in a layer

The individual sub areas allows the AI to understand where it can navigate to. It can help it understand when it needs to use a transport to navigate to an area. As a quick example: an engineer from the pink area can't possibly navigate to the brown area, therefore it needs to call in a transport.

When evaluating your map using the navigational mesh we'll take into account paths that are dangerously thin. The minimum cell size is 1x1. But not all units can navigate through that. Take the Fatboy as an example. We recommend that any path has a width of at least 8 cells for land, amphibious and the hover layer. And a width of at least 16 cells for the naval layer.

(Generated) markers

A marker is a point of interest. I've written two extensive articles about it a few years ago:

• AI markers
• Pathing markers

Luckily with the navigational mesh in place you no longer need to place navigational markers. At the moment we only generate expansion markers. Throughout the year we'll start generating more and more marker types, but we're not there today yet. We're asking you to populate the map with the following markers:

• Rally Point
• Naval Area
• Defensive Point
• Transport
• Combat Zone

You can read up about how they work in the linked article about AI markers. You can find all the markers in the editor:

Grids

A lot of the AI awareness works through a grid-like setup. In particular the iMAP grid that the AI uses to determine threat values.

We ask you to keep this in mind where possible. As two examples:

• Reclaim spread over multiple cells means the AI can have a tough time understanding the real value, this is most important for the initial high-valued reclaim
• (Neutral) civilians over multiple cells means the AI can underestimate the real threat that the civilian base represents

[Jip]

Grading: strategy category

This section boils down to what options a player has available on a map. A few common questions you can ask yourself are:

• (1) Is it clear where a player can expand to?
• (2) Is it clear where a player can send raiding parties to (resources)?
• (3) Is it clear where a player would define the rally points of its factories?
• (4) ...

You can ask these type of questions to decipher the skill range that your map can represent. Usually the more options there are the more skill it requires to utilize all the capabilities of a map.

A few examples of maps with many strategic options:

• (1v1) Open Palms
• (2v2) Adaptive Archsimkats Valley
• (2v2v2) Lily Pads
• (1v1) Forbidden Pass
• (1v1) Desert Planet II - FAF Version
• (1v1) Regor VI Highlands
• (2v2) DualGap Adaptive

A few examples of maps with limited strategic options:

• (3v3) Open Palms
• (3v3) Astro Crater
• (4v4) Goodlands
• (6v6) Dual Gap

[Jip]

Grading: aesthetics category

The look and feel of a map is as subjective as it can get. But there are some things that you can objectively confirm:

• (1) Stratum textures should not look (obviously) tiled
• (2) Decals are to be used to accentuate the heightmap and stratum textures
• (3) Unpathable bits should be well-communicated
• (4) Terrain type is to be used - it matters more than you'd think

And a few personal suggestions:

• (5) No perlin noise ocean floors
• (6) No maps that are surrounded by mountains

A few examples of maps with little to none of these issues:

• Cadmium Green
• Perrote Glacier
• Zerg Canyon
• Adaptive Mars - Mangala Fossa
• Amoor

A few examples of maps with some to many of these issues:

• Rainmakers Survival (problems with 1, 2 and 3)
• Hardshield Oasis (problems with 1 and 2)
• Adaptive Islet (problems with 1, 2 and 5)

To immediately bust a possible miss conception: just because you use map-wide decals doesn't mean your map is going to look better. They are a great tool. But they are only one part of the machine and it happens to be notoriously difficult to get right.

There are many options to give you an edge in this section. You can experiment with the lighting and water settings. You can also look into subtle weather. Another useful tool is the use of color theory to find well-matching textures. And speaking of textures: you can always use custom textures found online.

[Jip]

Judges that grade

• Jip (confirmed)
• Resistance (confirmed)
• Deribus (confirmed)
• Relent0r (confirmed)
• StormLantern (confirmed)

Do not contact the judges directly. You can ask questions in this forum topic. You can find materials and guides on how to create content on the official discord. Make sure to give yourself the map author role in the #role-selection channel.

[Jip]

Reserved for Q&A

[Jip]

The Princess Burke mapping tournament is open for submissions until the 17th of June. You can read all about it in this topic. I recommend you to read it across several days. A lot of the information is written to guide your submission.

Have fun and good luck for those that compete

[Rodimus_Prime]

Sweet! Query; Can multiple authors contribute to a single submission?

[Jip]

@immortal-d said in 'Princess Burke' Mapping tournament:

Sweet! Query; Can multiple authors contribute to a single submission?

There will be only prize (license) available to you ( / your team) if you win. I'd like it to be clear who receives the prize when you submit your submission so that there is no discussion if you do win.

[IndexLibrorum]

Very cool, thanks for taking the time to organize this!
I've got ideas already...

[CaptainKlutz]

I'm dusting off my microphone and setting up OBS. Time to get to work on an entry

[MadMax]

how much weight is given to the aeon theme in the grading?

[Jip]

@jip said in 'Princess Burke' Mapping tournament:

You can earn up to 10 points for each category. They are described in detail below. Each category is accompanied with examples. You can use those to get an idea what we're looking for. The categories combined can get you up to 40 points. We can give an additional 6 points for exceptional work. The total number of points that you can receive is 46. The players are sorted from most to least points.

@MadMax that would be 10 points out of a total of 46. Quite a bit!

[Jip]

For those that compete - we recently found out that there was a long standing miss conception with regards to the use of textures from www.textures.com. It is also referenced in the description of the competition:

@jip said in 'Princess Burke' Mapping tournament:

An exclusion is made to content from websites such as www.textures.com. They allow you to share the content, but they do not allow you to add a creative commons license over their content. You can read more about how to properly license those textures in a separate forum topic.

What is relevant here is that textures based from PBR materials or from 3D scans can not be shared through our vault. And to be specific: we can only distribute textures that originate from photo materials. You can search for those:

Photo materials usually lack corresponding normal maps. Luckily, there are alternatives that provide PBR textures that are more freely licensed:

• https://polyhaven.com/textures
• https://ambientcg.com/

Both examples only share textures licensed with CC0.

I understand that this can be frustating, especially as the deadline is set to the 17th of June. I'm willing to extend the competition by a week if people run into time issues because of this. If you do, please make yourself known in this topic before the 8th of June.

Note that maps using textures from www.textures.com in such a way that we breach their license will be disqualified for not adhering to the vault rules. You can read those here:

• https://wiki.faforever.com/en/Vault-Rules

[Jip]

I've pinged all (veteran) mappers on Discord about my previous message. I've not received a request to extend the deadline. Therefore the deadline remains on the 17th of June.

[MadMax]

submitting my map Temple of the Marxon my write up can be found here

[CaptainKlutz]

Submitting my map Rhiza's Legacy. You can find writeups, more images, and a documentation video in the map's thread.

[IndexLibrorum]

I am submitting Project Luminary.
All write-ups, sexy pictures, and related information in the thread.

I've written a general report on the process of designing the map, and also written up a tutorial on how to use Gaea for creating masks. I believe together, these two post more than satisfy the requirements for 'Documenting the road'.

[ovenman]

My submisions:
Sentons winter

burke crater battles

Extra details:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/6208/burke-tournement-submissions

[IndexLibrorum]

@Jip Question about the grading: will the scores for all categories per judge be published? I think it would help a lot with learning which aspects were best received, and which need more thought in the future.

[Jip]

@IndexLibrorum Yes, they will be given separately when applicable.

@ovenman Please make sure / convince us that your maps meet the vault rules. And please pick one, you can only submit one map.