Map Piece Contruction Guidlines

[Madison Lastrega]

Alot of people (including myself) are wanting to add more custom map pieces to SoM games and not just reskinning the old ones. I have spent alot of my time researching, what som can and cannot do. I am writing this list of rules for map pieces, to help other people avoid some time consuming mistakes that I made in the past month.

(1) First thing to remember is that map pieces are very different from objects and items in EVERYWAY.
To help keep this in perpective, I will tell you just what the differences are between the two and why you must follow these rules. By trial and error I have made notes that should help others make nice looking effective map pieces in either blender or Metasequoia.
(2) Size MATTERS. for objects and items you have a little creative freedom to build because som can handle any object or multple objects up to 12,500k in size. However try to keep customs down to a size of LESS than 9,000k and do not put too many high poly count objects in one place to avoid to avoid possible slowdowns, unless you have a strong graphics card installed, and you assume that everyone else who plays your title will have a strong card as well.  Som Draws your map pieces in full and stores it as ram, so since SoM was built in 99 (released in 2000) the average computer had 64 megs of RAM during that time. So SoM was only allowed to have very little allotacated to it. (Don't know the exact number I'm sure JDO or Holy Diver would have that info if anyone needs it.) so to make a long story short, MAP pieces are limited to a VERY low poly count and I mean low.. The size limit is LESS than 500k or 1,500 polys give or take a few. However in my test pieces up to 500k have NO slowdown so build to that level only, any higher will make SOMDB.exe  DIE AND CRASH.

(3) KEEP IT SIMPLE with the above section in mind, Keep your map pieces simple and sweet. Use planes as much as possible, and delete any unused vertices and points or combine the mesh , after you complete the model. I mean why make SoM work harder than it needs to. If your making indoor pieces, remove sides of the model that won't be seen , once again, SoM draws everything at once, so if its not seen ,it's not needed. Rely on your textures to give the piece life, not complex models.

(4) THE BLACK RULE... As most of you already know for objects and items don't like BLACK. Black is transparent, anyone that worked with textures knows about holes because of black. However, Map pieces do not adhere to that rule. (mainly for shadows to be added). With that in mind, you can NOT use black to add illusions such as a single plane with a grass texture attached to it. The Black will be seen and will be ugly. I know this because that is what I tried to do.

(5) LIGHTING.... Textures and lighting for map pieces is different from objects and items,like objects do NOT rely on SoM's primative lighting sceme to give depth or perception. for map pieces you must add any shadows that you want visable, with that in mind, you may need clone pieces with different shadows. IE if you plan on building a hidden area, you must make a clone of you doors archway WITH shadows on the floor or the lack of shadows under the door will be a huge TELL and ruins the effect. Do not try to build map pieces with textures used in objects, for once again the lighting differences will be another tell.

(6) Lastly, one personal tip.....When building a set of complex map pieces, think of the big picture.... IE when making a new outdoor set, and you want a hill effect, like the .5 or 1.0 slopes. Building one piece at a time can leed to pieces that dont line up and give holes, so make flat plane that is 9mx9m (or 3x3 in map piece size) Shape the whole hill with bumps and curves, or how you want it, THEN split the model in to 9 parts, at the 2m lines and BAM you have made 9 map parts at once that will 100% line up no matter how it is shaped, and then lable your set with numbers 1 to 9 for ease in placeing:)

Hope this guide helps anyone who is thinking about making custom map parts(not just reskinning them) If I left anything out, I am sorry, but I think this covers all the key points to remember in making map pieces..................Happy Modeling......................................ML

[Holy_Diver]

The lighting of map pieces is actually very sophisticated if you make use of lamp objects and the "calculate lighting" option when building (outputting?) your map.

I can't say anything specific about details, but if you build a room full of columns and setup multi light sources, nooks, and alcoves, you can get very sophisticated shadows cast all about the room. Ie. the shadows of the columns will appear on the floors and walls etc, so I would not describe this as primitive.

The lighting to this effect is a achieved via colouring the vertices of the map pieces.

There are some drawbacks however which are really independent of the map itself. An object/monster/item can only be effected by up to four light sources at a time. You can check a box on your lamp if you want to count it towards one of these four. For a long time DX/OpenGL only supported 8 lights. So I think Som has the four map lights and these four local light sources and that's it. Unfortunately Som did not query the hardware for the number of supported active lights. These days that number appears to be unlimited (though I can't tell you what each light will do to your performance) ...but anyway I tried to make a map that made extensive use of lighting and found it nearly impossible to make the object lighting match it. You would have a well lit area with monster shaded completely black walking around in it because Som doesn't prioritize the intensity of the lights, though it does prioritize distance reasonably.

Anyway for that reason I can only recommend using lighting sparingly.



...I think it would be very easy to add an extension that never turns off lights on a map after they're turned on (seen) ...but I haven't done it yet so I can't say whether or not every light will actually be seen or not (probably)

I can also do dynamic lighting so you could turn lights on and off, but for that you would want to disable the baked in lighting (turn off "calculate lighting") ...on the plus side however the never turned off lights could also be applied to the maps themselves... which would unify the lighting for consistency purposes but sacrifice shadows via the calculate light option. I want to build an elaborate lighting extension module (called Dark Slayer) eventually which will probably start from this sort of arrangement and attempt to give authors an all new editor for applying shadows and other lighting effects to their maps... including a full map preview.


PS: *looks at Todd* Page created in 0.306 seconds with 21 queries.