'Brigadier Fletcher' Mapping tournament

Making my post early because I'm unsure how busy I'll be during November.

Adaptive Fangtooth Islands

The idea was to create a navy-dominant map with strong land elements (air was always going to be relevant due to map size). Here we can see this idea manifested in multiple long islands that can be fought over by land but cut off by sea. Most of the mass on the map is vulnerable to navy, so that secures it as the primary theatre, but the capability of hover vehicles to navigate the numerous ridges should not be underestimated.

Features considerable Adaptive mex spawning for meaningful games regardless of player configuration.

Note: The map is still actively under development, do not take the version currently on the vault as the final product until the week of the deadline.

Thanks to Jip for hosting.

Humble reminder that the deadline is in roughly two weeks worth of time

@jip said in 'Brigadier Fletcher' Mapping tournament:

You can use the following lists as a rough example to what we use to deduct points for this section. If you'd like to read more about AIs and what they may find difficult then you can read up about it on the wiki

Is this page a 404 for anyone else?

If it can't be fixed soon, then I guess I'll need my questions answered here instead.

1. How do I make my navmesh take up less space? currently it's at 36.9Mb, and I know I need it below 30, but how?

2. How do I check for the generated expansion markers?

3. How do I check for the generated large expansion markers?

4. What do you mean when you say "legacy pathing/AI utility markers?"

5. What defines a "small plateau?" Is it a T1/T2 transport struggling to drop an engie? or is there an actual measurement we can use?

Thanks!
-Crimson

@thecrimsonknight said in 'Brigadier Fletcher' Mapping tournament:

Is this page a 404 for anyone else?

I've updated the link.

@thecrimsonknight said in 'Brigadier Fletcher' Mapping tournament:

How do I make my navmesh take up less space? currently it's at 36.9Mb, and I know I need it below 30, but how?

Usually it is because of a noisy heightmap. Seton's Clutch for example is relatively clean and only consumes about 20 mega bytes.

@thecrimsonknight said in 'Brigadier Fletcher' Mapping tournament:

How do I check for the generated expansion markers?

Start a game with the AI adaptive. Start the game. Assign a hotkey to the map utilities window. Open the map utilities window. Navigate to the Markers tab and choose the marker types that you want to visualize.

@thecrimsonknight said in 'Brigadier Fletcher' Mapping tournament:

What do you mean when you say "legacy pathing/AI utility markers?"

The AI markers that you can place in the editor. See also:

• https://forum.faforever.com/topic/145/about-markers-ai-markers

@thecrimsonknight said in 'Brigadier Fletcher' Mapping tournament:

What defines a "small plateau?" Is it a T1/T2 transport struggling to drop an engie? or is there an actual measurement we can use?

There is no measurement. If transports have problems dropping units off (and after building a single structure, like an extractor or a pgen) then you can assume the plateau is too small. It will make it difficult if not impossible for the AI to understand how to approach it

Thank you Jip!

-Crimson

After a short discussion surrounding the submission of @TheCrimsonKnight I decided to drop the following AI grading criteria:

Navigational mesh

• Navigational mesh generates in more than 4 seconds
• Navigational mesh is larger than 30 megabytes

These were intended to limit noisy heightmaps. But in practice they also limit the creativity of an author. That would be damaging to the submission. As a result I'm dropping these two grading criteria all together.

Good luck for those that compete

My tournament submission was kind of a last-minute spontaneous idea that I thought I could accomplish without the normal amount, i.e., fifty plus hours, of effort. The idea is several large artificial monoliths for base-building surrounded by water and maybe just a bit of natural-looking terrain, and it's predicated on the phenomenon that if the water level is the exact same height as the land you get to build and move land units as usual, but the water textures are also rendered.

Kings of Beta Ceti

No one now living knows where the massive columns, dubbed the Kings of Beta Ceti, came from, what they're made of, or the significance of their markings. But these mysteries are going to have to remain unsolved, at least for a while longer. The moon, officially named Beta Ceti E 44, is approaching its perigee with the super Jovian and the entire site is rapidly flooding. The UEF scientists are packing up and leaving, abandoning everything but their data. Even the exceptionally expensive Black Sun instruments will soon be submerged.

Site brief courtesy of UEF Advanced Special Programs Division.

Image from Novax pass 29:40:10 local time.

Final transport leaving Logistics Command. The floodwaters have reached the peaks of the artifacts.

Each spawn has about 1k mass reclaim. You can go first navy factory without moving if you wish.

Each civilian area contains about 2k mass reclaim.

The Black Sun wreckage was reduced to 15% of its original mass.

I'll get this uploaded to the vault in the next day or two. Thank you @Jip for hosting another tournament.

One final shot of some flooded structures.

Oh man, wish I got to return sooner. Would have loved to participate.

@Morax There will be another one soon-isch

I am submitting "Stulta Aqua Pugna" for this contest.

These photos are before adding the shaders I'm going to work on with Index! So it should look even better soon.

@thecrimsonknight Images are a tad small so see

@adastranoob Fixed

@stlng how do I make the sky look like that?

@thecrimsonknight beauty, it's in simplicity 5/5

@thecrimsonknight you can grab the map from the vault and reverse engineer it. As far as the actual skybox, I used Gaea for the planet texture and GIMP to sphereize, fade it out, and add the star.

Shaders have been added!

@TheCrimsonKnight

Your map, Stulta Aqua Pugna, has been a blast to play! I've been using it to host extremely challenging survival games. The layout works great, the map looks fantastic, and it is an especially difficult map to try and win on. It also helped me fix a bug in my mod I was unaware of!

What I like about the map a lot is, while it is symmetrical, it doesn't feel symmetrical.

Anyways, here is a replay # of us all being crushed if you want to see:
#21177132

@rama That's great to hear! The idea is that the map is not perfectly symmetrical, but the differences are so minor, (and mostly aesthetic,) that it ends up looking more realistic while not sacrificing game-play

Humble reminder that the deadline is tomorrow (12th of November)