Profile of Rosbone

I have not played on the map but was curious how it compared to Crossroads which is such a fun map to play. I am not saying make crossroads 2 in this post


CROSSROADS
Crossroads has two great things that I think make it perfect to play on:
1. Just the right amount of sight blockers placed in locations that allow you to make aggressive moves. You can push up to a line of blockers and look around. Then push if it is safe. You can also really push hard and overextend, to some degree, because there are enough blockers that you can move behind one and escape.
2. There are more points than normal. The cool part about this game is feeling like you are doing something. That is the main tactile feedback that you are making things happen. So every push is rewarded with an immediate new point taken. And since there are more points, the next point is always near by and the point after that is near by. So you are not locked into going in one direction. This lets you adjust your strategy on the fly. If you planned to go left and then run into an overpowering force just turn right instead and cap that direction. On large maps with poor layouts you have to engage, retreat, or walk the 45 seconds to the next point. That whole 45 seconds you are falling behind on teching and panic sets in. You never feel like you are accomplishing anything and have limited options.

NEXUS FEEL
I think Blvckdream was feeling how empty the center of the map is (pink areas). That in combination with the munition being way out of the way. With the points being all pushed out to the corners the map feels very large. Units are walking for long periods of time before they are actually "doing" anything. So players may miss that feeling of accomplishment.

Since the points are pushed so far out, you have to go ALL-OR-NOTHING to one side and hope you do well. If you do not do well, you will retreat and then be way behind on teching. And then hope you do not smash your head on the next side because it will be gg if you do. Crossroads always feels like you can cap enough to come back. It is never all or nothing.

NEXUS MAP CONCERNS
I do not play 1v1 much, but the buildings around the fuels could be cause for concern. Hard to say if a top level player would camp a house with an MG. Seems like a waste of resources at that level.

Having 6 points on the EAST side and offsetting it with the fuel more on the WEST side could be an issue for some.

Just my quick thoughts. Hope that made some sense and hope it helps get us another great 1v1 map! Oh, and Luciano likes trains.

Rosbone Forrest

Version 1.1 (7/9/2018):
1. Added additional sight blockers by fuel buildings for flanking (Blue).
2. Added box crates by sight blockers to help keep units out of sight by pulling them to the cover object (Pink). North and south have crates in the middle of the sight blocker to keep unit spacing from spreading out and being suppressed.
3. Added two more fence breaks by south fuel. One for north to attack through. One to reach the new sight block without being seen (Yellow Dots).

This question is for the mapping pros or possibly ANDY_RE and will be VERY TECHNICAL in nature. Skip it if you are not a major nerd.

When making a map you select a palette of textures to paint the ground with. You can have many textures in the palette. When Relic draws the map, they divide it into 32 meter sections (chunks). Each chunk approves of around 8 textures being used per chunk. Many mappers are sloppy and paint like an artist. They tend to overlap chunks. Meaning, they paint a texture in chunk 1 but a little spills over into chunk 2. Chunk 2 now has to draw that texture even though it is barely/not visible. This could lead to slow rendering performance depending on HOW relic draws the chunks.

NORMAL TEXTURING MODE
Normal 3D graphics would indicate that the chunk gets split into a smaller say 32x32 grid. Each vertex of that grid is alpha blended and drawn using the textures you painted with. So if you used the maximum desired textures for this chunk you would have 24 total textures to deal with:
- 8 Diffuse textures
- 8 Normal map / height map textures
- 8 Specular map textures.

This would indicate that each chunk/mesh is drawn 8 times. Once per texture selected. This assumes code using shaders that does one pass for each texture (actually applies diffuse, normal, specular during the single pass). With modern cards having more texture units or better shader code maybe this number is reduced to only a few passes for each chunk.

Now you have to render all of the splines and splats in addition to all the rendering you just did.

Example Chunk Count for Lienne Forrest


MEGATEXTURE MODE
A name coined by John Carmack (the greatest human being of all time) for the game RAGE. In this mode you can paint a million different textures all at once. Splines, splats, etc can all be applied as much as you want. When the map is compiled, the 32x32 meter chunk is rendered into a single set of Diffuse, Normal, Specular textures. These textures would be of a fixed resolution 512x512, 1024x1024, etc.

This means that no matter how much crap you throw on the map, the 32x32 chunk will be rendered in one single pass by the videocard. This includes all splines, splats, etc. All done in one pass.

The trick becomes how well does the videocard deal with caching all the textures, etc.

QUESTION
Which method is Relic using? Does it matter for performance how many tile textures per chunk are used? I see SO MANY maps that have 8 textures used and can be reduced down to 3 or 4 with NO visual change.

The limit of 8 textures could be set just for Worldbuilder performance where each chunk has to be drawn seperately while you are editing on the fly. Since Relic needs to apply a lot of dynamic splats during the game (burn marks, artillery strikes, blood, etc) they may just do it all on the fly in what I have called NORMAL mode.

Will look probably next week into this map again.(Checking if i can see any bugs/ mistakes)

Always double check peoples work! The person making the changes MUST NOT be the person doing quality checks. They WILL MISS STUFF.

For some reason ALL of the maps have most of their objects set manually for height. So slight elevation changes leave objects floating in mid air or underground where they block pathing but cannot be seen.

I created the East VP flank (Blue path Thread #8) and removed one grove object as per ZombiFrancis (Yellow). Currently a King Tiger will fit in the new path.


And a closer look.