--FROZEN IMPACT--SS scripted map--new pics !!

[Jaguar-Lord]

-----FROZEN IMPACT----

CONTEXT

Tiberus44 is a frozen moon orbiting around a dying star. The only signs of activity are the constant howls of the ice storms and the growlings and hissings of the Adeptus Mechanicus automated prometheum rafineries clustered along the Dante Canyon.
Three weeks ago, the global seismic detection network registered a powerfull signal, epicenter was localized less than three kilometers from Dante-9A pumping station. Unmanned probes sent to the epicenter were lost and never came back.
It was only when the first mechanical horror emerged from the mist that the Adeptus activated the isolation containment and decided to sent a message to any imperial forces nearby for help.

Map size : 1024x512

Number of players : 2

AI : survival

Mod : Souls Storm Eye Of Terror- Survival mod.
it is more likely that this map will be a mod in itself given some texture and new object modification, Eye of Terror mod will be mapping mod based on Survival Mod, AS, IDH and personal map texturing and addition and will be exclusively for Soul Storm.

Special Rules:
i hope to implement the survival scar code with the folowing (thanks to Fuggle help).

1)Prometheum is quite instable by nature, and some areas in the rafinery are not to be treated lightly.
2)The Dante Canyon is subjected to some seismic activity, random earthquake may occured with devastating effects on buildings.
3) this rafinery is not to fell into enemy hands, in this eventuallity the Adeptus will blow out the place with high explosives.
Or it may well be that the enemy is here to completly obliterate this place and perhaps the whole planet, starting a chain reaction into vast amount of frozen prometheum accessible via the Dante canyon.
4) the adpetus mechanicus is not the kind of stupid organization, the automated defense network will be quite usefull against early intruders. But again the power required to maintain the containement active is tremendous and can severely interfere with the stability of the pump station.

MAP LAYOUT:
coming soon

Map screenshot: meet the Khorne Soul Grinders heavy siege cannons.




Pumping station head plunging deep in Dante Canyon to extract frozen prometheum.





MAP STATUS /
wip.

MAP E.A.T/
two weeks for mapping in itself.
Scar implementation depends on Fuggles.

[fuggles]

Dude! You are some kind of genius, they look great!!

[Argonaut]

Holy Emperor that's astounding!

[Jaguar-Lord]

Thanks guys.
The Stone Grinder siege cannon was fun to retexture, and i am very inspired by this map, i want to make it so immersive that you can smell the scent of the prometheum once you exit the game.
I hope you like the wip of the rafinery standing near the Dante Canyon, it takes me two days of thinking drawing and mapping to get the result.
I plan to map four extraction rig like the one above...but i get now that i found how to do them it should be quciker to map.
You can see here the to ends of the map, one with the imperial rafinery and the other with a huge meteor crater bursting with the energies of the warp and where the AI bases will wait for the players to try and attack them.

More screenies next week.
JL

[Sentinel]

Shit... That looks unbelievable.
You have some serious talent.

[Jaguar-Lord]

As promised, some more preview of Frozen Impact.
Images are a bit heavy but they worht the wait (56k modems, please be patients..)

The adeptus mechanicus fortress rafinery concept as proven difficult to texture. Adding snow to wall and pipes was a bit time consuming and those pyramid edges gave me headache.But work is progressing pretty good.(I'm considering retexturing whole imperial bunker walls object set and doing a specific Polar mod for this, because i don't like to have non-snowy object on a snow themed map, but time will tell.)

Ok without delay: Dante-9A pumping station in full glory. Enjoy the tour and don't forget you gasmask !

First texturing attemps, without snow.

General view of North terminal form Dante canyon cliff edge.

Now with snowy texture, the walss fit better into the environment.

Overview of the Dante canyon viewed from the rafinery pumping terminal.

More wall texture deatail on the pyramid corner.

A close up on adeptus wall texture.


Tanks for you patience.

@ Fuggles: hope it will give an edge to your coding and give you inspiration.

JL

[Nerdsturm]

Great job on those decals on the side of the refinery/pyramid thing, though the rest of it looks pretty amazing too.

[Jaguar-Lord]

hello,

the more i work on these map the more change i want to do about the general look of some things.

In fact i'm slowly dirfting toward creating a whole mapping mod with custom stuff; that mean new objects, objects from the various mod included in this mod and retextured object from Dow, WA, DC and SS.


It is a pity that a lot of mod miss cruely maps completely designed and tilored for the new ambiance they want to create.
90% of the modders act focused on creting units and races but the lack of new scenery object is a real problem; let's talk about the Snowy Theme to illustrate my point of view!

What is a the main problem a mapper encounters when he want to create a polar/artic/snowy map ? snow object are limited to a ridiculous number !!!
The consequence is that lot of snow map will have the same feeling because of that, because there are not a thousand ways to combine a few object.

There's a very few, if any, mapping mod where (i don't know of any) you just change the environment to give it a different feeling) but i'll try to make a ARTIC/POLAR/SNOWY mapping mod by retexturing the more object i can do and turn them into a more "frozen" look.

I'm doing the same with my EyeOfTerror mod centered around Chaos theme.

I Understand that people are reluctant to install (nothing more difficult than unzipping a map...)a mod to play a map but i think that it could benefit the players and the mappers to have new environment and completly tailored maps.
Another point is that it allows us to make maps without bothering with the online compatibility.
and with around 200 people maximum conected in the lobby it is not really an issue.

The ideal would be that this mods are alimented by the comunity and managed to ensure a constant updating package (every six monthes ??) in case of new content, because standardisation is very important in this kind of project and benefit everybody.

Not being a confirmed modder myself there must be some thing i'm not aware of yet...

and to the bored one that can not suffer to read my bad enlish here's some incentive to read it carefully and try to understand what i'm blattering about ..



JL

[warforger]

Why do the stone grinders still have Guardsmen on them?

Other then that it's awsome.

[Jaguar-Lord]

because i haven't try to retexture them yet, i plan to make a "Blood Pact " renegade guardmens style..i have yet to find the texture they use but i think it is the guard men npc one...

[s1_ONE]

JLo i truly understand your feelings/frustration bout mapping with so few objects...

Almost always during mapping i have to change around the 70% of the scenery to match the actual ME object/decals pool (with decals, especially is something dramatic, considering i have to combine several levels to merge two different areas (even if painted..)

TBH since WA i found a lack of elements for the snow environment, but considering i dont know a fruit about modeling/skinning i wasnt able to make any new decent object, being limited so to use the WA ME..
And imo we should make something like a vault where you can get those custom decals/objects like for the custom replacement textures thread..

I saw only 2 guys working in this direction, Compiler, that gave me an awesome dead tree model (love you man ), and Palii that worked with me & the community for the awesome NightShift mod, but suddenly disappeared.. ><

About your idea of the custom object mod, what about creating instead a thread like the texture list one, and just adding your planned models/decals both to the Survival mod and the thread?

[Jaguar-Lord]

edit:
the Stone Grinder crew is no more Imperial guard :

the texture needs some modification but this wip is indicative of what i'm aiming at.

I saw only 2 guys working in this direction, Compiler, that gave me an awesome dead tree model (love you man ), and Palii that worked with me & the community for the awesome NightShift mod, but suddenly disappeared.. ><

Yes Paliis diseaperence is a real loss to the comunity, but I suggest you take a look at the AS mod object and you will be amazed at the quality of the object included in it, especially the skies !

About your idea of the custom object mod, what about creating instead a thread like the texture list one, and just adding your planned models/decals both to the Survival mod and the thread?

I thought about that but this will only lead to a messy affair because not everyone is fond of moving files in and out of the dxp2 folder (be it for SS or for DC).

You have to realize that when an object is rextextured in order to give it a different look every occurence of this object will look that way. I mean all the different map you got will display this object and it can severely affect the general graphic consistency of the map, if the "defensive_wall" object is retextured to "defensive_snow" it will suddenly appear in the "Jungle fever" snow textured and will be completly out of place.

An other way is to retexture and clone the object by hexediting it, this is not difficult to do but will break online compatibility of the vanilla game,hence no way to do it outside a mod.

For this reason making severall different mods and thus tailoring maps to these mod is a better solution.
Each map could be played by activating the revalent "Map_mod" via the mod management menu.

By doing so we would be able to have a complete control of the object and of the maps.
The problems is forsee is about mod compatibility, if you want to play the Steel legion mod on one of the Eye Of Terror mod, the more race-modd you want the map-modd to be compatible with the more complex it gets. For this experienced modders will surely have a solution. The more simple would be that each mod teams interested in this provides a standardized solution (wich i know nothing about...)

btw...S1One what do you think of Frozen Impact from the few screenshot displayed above ?

[s1_ONE]

Yes Paliis diseaperence is a real loss to the comunity, but I suggest you take a look at the AS mod object and you will be amazed at the quality of the object included in it, especially the skies !

you know, i was a official AS mod mapper but they disappear too
i mean, lolwtf...

And imo if you just dont edit the current ingame models, but you make new ones you should be able to create a collections of those models that can be used in mods.. (iirc all the custom models break the vanilla multi)
So that project would help mappers/modders too

btw...S1One what do you think of Frozen Impact from the few screenshot displayed above ?

Arf! moar screenshots!
It looks very promising, even for a WIP ^^

[Nerdsturm]

You guys should look at the DoW: Kingdom mod which I've been using to create some maps recently. Primarily it adds a new campaign but it also includes a huge number of new objects. Also, it'd be worth contacting the creator, etherdragon, if you were going to make a custom objects mod(which is an excellent idea in my view) since he mentioned it would be okay to create a whole new mod using only the custom objects if I wanted to make the maps I was creating compatible with SS, though that was going to be too much work for me.
Heres a link to it you're interested:
http://dawnofwar.filefront.com/file/DoW_Kingdom;81635

[Jaguar-Lord]

Dow Kingdom is very old news, and in Fact Etherdragn is part of the Darkness Within campaign team....and it is a long time not seeing him.

huge number of new objects

how really, i think it is some variation of a few object only, i'm afraid it is not a "huge number".
And thanks for Ether do having bring the community another metamap campaign
Thanks for the effort you made in briging us potential solutions but it is not what i'm aiming at.

[Finaldeath]

Haha, I like the new texture. Cultist guardsmen operating their old guns, nice

And a "Maps Mod" would work for custom objects. As long as one person put a little time into checking compatibility (ie; no object names clash -v.easy to do!), any maps could be dropped (or downloaded via. a tool? or a package installer?) into the folder and it'd work, because it's a new mod and doesn't affect vanilla.

[Skeletalowl]

screen shots look amazing

[Jaguar-Lord]

The map is progressing slowly towards completion, Retexturing elements and adding new object is taking time.

Here are some more screenshot:

first an overview of the map layout for you to realize the titanesque scale of the place.
This view is an early screenshot of the map made for planning. Green dots represents the Automated Defense Network remote emplacements (like detection sensors, Sentinel turrets, and automated minefields scaterers). Green and red lines the access lines between several keys areas.


advenced fortifications outside Dante-4A rafinery. PLayer two objectives will be to defend this point (under heavy bombardment from the chaos siege cannons)


the fortifications and the rafinery are connected via a large bridge, the only access way to the inner fortress.


The bridge leads to Dante-A4 rafinery main gate. This is one of several containement gate that the player will have to operate in order to keep the area sealed away from the chaos forces. Unfortunatly these huge blast doors requires some tremendous amount of power to work properly.


finaly, some close up on the new icy scenery:

rextured rocks with transparency added to make it looks more like ice.



enjoy !!
comments are welcome, especially during the wip step, because change are easier to do while building the map than when it nears the final stage.

JL

[s1_ONE]

gawd, im gonna steal you those models..
finally some good snow stuff! Awesome work JLo.. ^^

Btw, are you gonna make the refinery min gate a interactive objective? (like in the DoW sp campaign)
It would be great to see that..

whats the map size? 512*256?

[Jaguar-Lord]

hi S1One,

steal my model ? no, these models are free to use once the mod will be released

about the gates, we (Fuggles and myself) plan to use them as the folowing:
the gates are the main parts of a defensive system, the player in charge of the rafinery management will operate them by moving a servitor on a control room decal at a specific location. Operating a gate (open and close it) will cost a given amount of power, if the power is insufisant to operate the gate it will stay in the close or open state and wont move, if their is enough power to operate the gate the gate will open/close depending on wich control area the servitor is standing.
But the power resource will be needed to operate every device the rafinery has (automated defense pods, player base buildings, troop reinforcement and so on, and the general rafinery main purpose: extracting and refining prometheum.)
The promotheum extraction process CAN'T be stopped, if ever the power level drop under a given level the rafinery will get very unstable and will finally explodes.

about the map size:
512x256???? rolf*....the map is 1024x512 !! it is one of the biggest map i have ever done. but this info is in the first page of the thread, read it.

[Sentinel]

That looks sexual now. I love seige maps!
Is there any way for the attacker to take control of the gate?
If you were marines, you could just choose to leave the gate closed all the time, and then drop pod your army into the enemy base?

[Jaguar-Lord]

Is there any way for the attacker to take control of the gate?

no.

If you were marines, you could just choose to leave the gate closed all the time, and then drop pod your army into the enemy base?

that the kind of thing that we though about..
If you read carefully this thread you'll see the word SIEGE CANONS "Khorne Stone Grinders", and these gentle beasts are spiting earthshakers rounds at a veryyyyy long range. That mean that if you just wait and expect to tech to tier 3 you'll be reduced to pulp you and your base before a single orbital relay get built. and long before that the fortifications and the gates will just be blown out into atmospheric dust.

[Sentinel]

Ha, right, I suppose that would be some motivation to leave your base early!

[s1_ONE]

my bad, but now i got some question bout the leveldesign:
-are doors destroyable? if so how
(i mean, if arent destroyable i just can sit back em drinking a lounge cuz teh enemy of the empraaah cant touch my arse.. kekeke
if they are destroyable why i should waste resources opening/closing em while i can just sit back massing troops while the opponent spend time/troops on that door?)
- im curious bout the siege cannons implementation, i mean, did u used some markers for the earthshacker rounds (like DC IG fortress) or they simply shoot randomly once the have LOS.
moreover can you damage/destroy em?

Another thing bout the scenario design, looks like theres a part kinda pointless, the lower entrance, cuz the enemy cannot go there and theres nothing as well..

even if its still a WIP

P.S: its rofl not rolf

[Jaguar-Lord]

The door are destroyable of course.They are able to soak a huge amount of damage before being destroyed.
As for sitting behind and not wasting resources open/close them it depends on what you need to do outside that doors.

The level is designed for defending player to resist a swarm of enemy, and endless growing tide of infantry backed by heavy artillery and suport.
Air units raids (hell talons) will lead the way to airborne commando and deepstriking reinforcement once they spot key areas into the refinery and the only way to stop this will be to go outside and destroy the enemy beach heads and raid launching platforms.

the containement system is here to give the defending players some time to build troops and ready themselves to push back the arch enemy; this is a survival map remember.

The artillery will target keys areas such as the fortifications, the bridge, the main gate, the player base and so on....one of the primary objective will be to send troops to destroy the siege cannons. We will use the Hell talons as artillery spotter.
If you read Necropolis you remember that artillery rolling fire oblitarating everything on its way and aiming at the city to provide the infantry a clear assault corridor.

Another thing bout the scenario design, looks like theres a part kinda pointless, the lower entrance, cuz the enemy cannot go there and theres nothing as well..

the lower entrance...pointless? what do you call the lower entrance?
It is not because there is no way to go somewhere on a map ON FOOT that this area of the map can not be used.
You are completly wrong about "the enemy can not go there" in fact the enemy can go virtually anywhere we need Him to be via the SCAr magic, hordes of enemy can be spawn where we need them to be spanwed and attack from every direction.
I said the overview was a very early wip of the map, i just posted it for the people to have an idea of the map layout not an exhustive review of all the map whereabouts....ok?

For the fluff part of this : the Chaos force are able to summon reinforcement from the warp and after a while (once the contagion will enter the planet orbit the chaos will be able to deepstrike all his forces.

[s1_ONE]

forgot the SCAR-spawn possibility..

Anyway i was just trying to point out the unclear passages..

[Jaguar-Lord]

just a quick update :
i found a way to make animated decals playing on the ground!!!!
that mean now that the dante canyon floor is ANIMATED !!!
(puuurrr....animated flesh ground, my precious!!!)

i'll try to make a quick video about this as soon as possible.

[fuggles]

A-MAZING!

I have seen people do it for NWN2, but I couldn't follow the instructions

This is a magnificent day for the dow mapping world indeed. Excelsior!

[Avatar 720]

Not to be weird or anything, but on the first post you say Soul Grinders instead of Stone Grinders...

Anyway, neat map (I'm currently unable to come with a more complex show of excitement and astoundment due to a large cold destroying my braincells in my sleep), gunna love to see it when it finally arrives in full.

[Nerdsturm]

i found a way to make animated decals playing on the ground!!!!

Never realized that was possible, could definitely look very cool though.

Does it require that the decal actually change repeatedly, similar to the effect of say placing a crater decal under an artillery round hit for a few seconds, only repeatedly doing this with different decals to give the impression of an animation, or did you get the ME/DoW to accept decals in a form other than .dds or .tga, or some other way?

I'm only asking since, while either would be awesome, the first way(which is the only reasonable way to do that that I can think of) seems like it would take a lot of coding and trouble to do, not to mention it might be a drain on system resources. Regardless, I want to know how to do that.

[Sentinel]

It does open up a lot of possibilities. Like water above the water table, flowing blood, and a very warped and chaos-y landscape... to mention a few.

Will you be putting together a tutorial on how to do it after you release your map?

[Jaguar-Lord]

on the first post you say Soul Grinders instead of Stone Grinders...

ohhh my god....well depends on the mood of the Blood God i think,
"Stone Grinders Siege Cannon" or "Souls Grinders Siege Cannon" i don't know yet.

Like water above the water table, flowing blood, and a very warped and chaos-y landscape...

yes, these are a few of the possibilities, i'm working on tzeenchian animated flesh landscape for a deamon world, with eyes and mouth closing and opening....creepy.

[Avatar 720]

Well bear in mind that the soul grinder is actually a daemon version of a defiler on TT, so calling it a soul grinder would mean you have to completely re-make it or re-name it =P just a bit of warning.

[Jaguar-Lord]

thanks for this info, i was unaware of it. It will be "Stone Grinders Siege Canons " then.

[Avatar 720]

No probs. Playing a chaos TT army can have it's advantages sometimes =P

[Jaguar-Lord]

i was playing with the OE and AE when suddenly all my custom rgd files for the mod disapeared along with the main Inquisition Daemonhunt folder....
have to redo all the icy and gates and animated decals.....

I'll begin mapping the chaos crater next week, you'll be pleased.....

[Sentinel]

Shit, bad one.
Although now that you know exactly what you want/need to do, you'll be able to re-do it easier than the first time round.
You should try uploading your decals folder to something like FileFactory. That way you'll always have a back up without it taking up any space.

[fneep]

Can you give a very brief rundown on how you did the animated decals?

[Jaguar-Lord]

hmmmm....
i need to explore that unexplored teritory before submitting it to the mapper crave.

pm-ed you.

[Jaguar-Lord]

AHAH !! i just made my first special fx and put it in da ME and it works !!
No i can deal with serious matters, brace yourselves borther this gonna rocks !

[Skeletalowl]

niiiiiiiice congrats mate

[Jaguar-Lord]

allll right, news and good ones!

i'm in the mood of designing new FX for the mod, environmental fx. My only problem is to make them inot solid object (i can't use the OE nor the AE) but i find a tortous way round this problem.

My first finished FX is a Promotheum geyser (Old Faithfull.) for Dante Canyon.
here it is in action, playing on animated "boiling prometheum" ground.


enjoy !!

JL

[ombrephenix]

Une suggestion récupère les évents liés au impact et extrait les projections de débris. Re-textures les style débris lave en fusion et renommes les. Je pense qu'une simple colorisation devrai suffire. Et ensuite tu peut renforcé ton "combo évent" avec ceux ci .
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A suggestion seeks vents associated with the impact of shells. and extract projections debris. Re-style textures the debris molten lava and renamed them. I think a simple colorization will suffice. And then you can strengthened your "combo event" with them.

[Jaguar-Lord]

yes...but this does not allow me to create object to put on the mapvia the ME; off course i can always trigger the ?event files via scar but this is not what i'm after.
I want FX-OBJECT (rgd, whm, and whe !!)

ouais...mais cela ne me permet pas de créer des objects que je peux mettre sur la map via le Mission Editor. efectivement je peux toujours declancher les event via le scar mais c'est pas ce que je veux.
Je veux de OBJECT d'effets speciaux.

[ombrephenix]

hum... il est peut être possible de commandé a la communauté de faux objets juste pour fixé les évents . je ne maitrise pas l'édition 3D mais il me semble que cela est possible.

un objet qui pourrait être utilisé et la boite rose d'erreur. Avec une fausse texture pour la rendre invisible.
---------------------------------------------------------


hum ... it may be possible to the community commissioned a false objects. To help set the Évents. I do not know publishing 3D but it seems to me that this is possible.

An object that could be used and the pink box of error. With a false texture to make it invisible. and the provision has several defects heights.

[Jaguar-Lord]

no it is not that simple. I think i'm gonna make some cooperative work with an experimented moder in a few days. I'll dev the graphic part and make the fx.lua and he wil be in charge of making the object and bring out rgd out of the OE and AE. that is the good way to go.

[Jaguar-Lord]

Some minor update about more screenshots from the ME showing you the latest dev and progression of the map:

I had some hard time designing some prometheum tanks (storage, not vehicules... ) and retexturing a good deal of object to a more snowy look.

so, without delaying it anymore:


Adeptus Mechanicus temple main gate.


the prometheum storage areas, DO NOT FIRE THIS BANEBLADE BLINDLY COLONEL !!!

Enjoy !! comments are welcome.

Cheers
JL

[Sentinel]

Looks great!
What did you use to make the storage tanks?
I also like the steps decal, it really does work well.

[Jaguar-Lord]

the question is : how to make dome like shape with the height tool.
That not that difficult but requires a lot of practice to make a perfect dome shape the size you need it. (making a big dome is not difficult but making asmall one is another matter.)
I used GIMP to edit the heightmap most of the time.
I did create some circular gradient mask and applied them to the heightmap.tga When i need to have some smaller dome i scal down the dome mask and voila !

Then i created some circular decal do make the tank and aplied it on the new raised dome ground.

I also have a wip retextured dome object to fit the Frozen Impact map. I plan to add a flame throw FX to if.



JL

[ombrephenix]

Decals suggestion oil stain around the reservoirs. Starting bloodstains in another color.
or other textures