'Princess Burke' Mapping tournament

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.

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.

Reserved for Q&A

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

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

@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.

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

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

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

@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!

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

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.

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

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

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'.

My submisions:
Sentons winter

burke crater battles

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

@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.

@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.

Humble reminder that you have less then 24 hours to submit or make changes to your submission. Tomorrow at 14:00 GMT + 2 I'll download the last version of each submission that is in the vault at that moment. We'll manually share that version with the other judges so that you can not make further changes after the deadline has passed.

@jip I thought the deadline was set for today?