Playable Terrains (Discussion)

[Hugget Sukker]

Discuss Playable Terrains
I've decided to specialize in non-cinematic terrains, and have gotten quite interested in the many styles, tastes, preferences, and techniques for this.
I hope this thread will encourage some interesting, inspirational and educative discussions.
Here are some examples you could take up for discussion.

How do you like your playable terrains?
Level of detail - Doodad-to-unit scale - Etc.

What makes a terrain playable?
Organization - Space/Pathing - Balance - Etc.

How do you achieve your taste of quality in a playable terrain?
Tricks - Doodad constructions - Models - Etc.

Discuss your own terrains
Do you have a screenshot that you would like to present for this discussion? As example, or topic.

More questions/points
Answer your own question, or ask it to others. Make a point for discussion.

 

[Arcany]

How do you like your playable terrains?

I want playable terrain to amaze and interest me. The level of detail is important, as well as good tile variation and very important: Good looking trees. I like towns being really towns, not just some houses and likewise forests to be forest, there is more to a forest than trees and a river for exemple.

What makes a terrain playable?

The difference between terrain as art and playable terrain:

The mayor differences are that playable terrain looks good from multiple angles and has pathing, while terrain art usually only looks good from one angle, has no pathing and allows extensive use of lets say lightning techniques. Realism has the upper hand in playable terrains and beauty has the upperhand in terrain art.

How do you achieve your taste of quality in a playable terrain?

Everything contributes to the total picture: good pathing, selfcrafted buildings from doodads, good rivers, good mountains etc. This is all achieved by a combination of skill and good looking models.

 

[Hugget Sukker]

What is more important? Eye-candy or atmosphere?
I'm not saying these are contrasts, or that they can't appear simultaneously.

I think they contribute to each other, foremost. Yet there is a possibility of weighing the scales towards a more ambient terrain, or a more epic terrain. The ambient terrain has atmosphere and a grand wholeness, with few of those stingy, telltale features that are supposed to make your eyes fuzz around to get the whole picture.

I think a balance must be found. Too many hard objects, like huge trees that almost block your game view, or large bumps in the ground everywhere, can make a map confusing by stealing the player's attention too much. Or too many interesting objects with sparkling colors.
Contrary, a terrain can be so harmonically focused on atmosphere and ambience alone that it may become boring. Too few illusions, I would call that. It needs something that sparkles, placed VERY strategically.

 

[Arcany]

What is more important? Eye-candy or atmosphere?
I'm not saying these are contrasts, or that they can't appear simultaneously.

I think they contribute to each other, foremost. Yet there is a possibility of weighing the scales towards a more ambient terrain, or a more epic terrain. The ambient terrain has atmosphere and a grand wholeness, with few of those stingy, telltale features that are supposed to make your eyes fuzz around to get the whole picture.

I think a balance must be found. Too many hard objects, like huge trees that almost block your game view, or large bumps in the ground everywhere, can make a map confusing by stealing the player's attention too much. Or too many interesting objects with sparkling colors.
Contrary, a terrain can be so harmonically focused on atmosphere and ambience alone that it may become boring. Too few illusions, I would call that. It needs something that sparkles, placed VERY strategically.

I think the most important thing is to have a good atmosphere, eye-candy can be used to enhance it afterwards. The sexyness of the models only complements the terrain you have already established.

There is indeed a balance that needs to be found. The terrain must not become chaotic, but on the other hand not too dull.

The keyword is 'playable', the most important thing is indeed how playable it is: not chaotic, not boring, no objects blocking your view etc.

 

[Hugget Sukker]

It depends on the pace and massiveness in the gameplay.

 

[Megafyr]

1. How do you like your playable terrains?

Imported models is a must. Blizzard default stuff just doesn't look good. Also doodad placement is really important. Every single doodad should be places with highest precision. No doodad spam, because that will only cause bad fps to older computers.

2. What makes a terrain playable?

Scripts mostly. Also pathing really is important and should be done well.

3. How do you achieve your taste of quality in a playable terrain?

Always ask the question:"Does this look good?" If the answer isn't:"hell yeah," then you should change what you made.

4. Discuss your own terrains.

I have but I can't upload it now. The motto is:" Warcraft III doesn't need to look like it."

 

[Fingolfin]

I think correct scaling is very important. I hate it when people for example use the loarderon stone wall for city walls, when an ogre could step over it with no fuss.
Also, i think diversity of scale is important - usually when you're placing doodads, you first want to have the layout of the map complete. Then if you see a road for example, you place perhaps a bigass tree with lots of roots on the opposite of the road (seen from the camera angle) instead of in front. The biggest doodads should be waay big, and the smallest small. It contributes to epicness.
Finally, make sure you do cliffs (using cliff models ofc) and place them apropriately so that it's clear where the terrain is walkable and not.

 

[Lexandritte]

I specify in non-playable maximal-detail terrains (but not HRP). You can see a bunch of screens here

http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/terrain-board-267/between-the-worlds-138238/

For me, playable terrain of maximal quiality is one that where the units and buildings are propotionaly scaled (no buildings size of catapult, or towers height of two footman). Usually, because of this, I don't even use buildings-units. Common tricks are doodad construction, playing around with effects so they can be seen on game camera in most of angles, if confident - illusion, when you are meking objects closer to you smaller, so they look farther away, or when you include pseudo-playable terrain - like bridge over or under another bridge, which is just decoration, but looks like it can be walked. Imported models are not the most important thing, but they help. Most common things to watch out for are objects that obstacle camera at sertain angles, walkable paths (walls where needed, platforms where needed), NO CLIFFS GODDAMIT, no crazy colour mixes. And consistency of detail. And balance of decorations. And lots of other common things.

Another interesting thing is conversion of cinematic terrains to playable. This usually works with scenery, as it is hard to put pseudo-mobile decorations (like arc robots) into playable terrains. You can put a destroyed one in though. In cinematic, what important is a point of view, which is hard to achieve in playable. What you must do, is force the player to look the way you want. For example, if you played HL2, do you remember going up the citadel in second coffin? How at first small windows appear on your sides, and then big one with panoramic breathtaking view over City 17 appears, and your coffin slows down? Same here - make the gamer to go through certain location (this can even be done with standart cam, but custom ones work better. Just kill the fog of war), maybe have them have glances at smaller bits, and then BAM - something they can stand and stare at. Best works with big chasms, due to standart cam point of view. Fallen tree as bridge over the giant waterfall in forest. Bridge over chasm. Top of tower. Giant multi-layer cavern with crystals. Best works with bridges though. If it's PRG, make the gamer feel smal lcompared to the world, by putting giant-scaled constructions around them (just remember about camera obstacles)

 

[Super-Sheep]

Every warcraft 3 map sucks because they have cliffs.
























-.....

 

[Hugget Sukker]

Lexandritte... It seems to me you use simple but good models, and that you are well-capable of blending them into the Blizzard content.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
TERRAINS IN GENERAL
Important that a player or viewer gets the feeling the world was put together with some thought. It's sceneries, not a natural, random constellations of life, minerals, and more. It doesn't matter if the scenery includes architecture and junk placed by intelligent life. City as wilderness; it needs a human soul.

HOW I LIKE THE PLAYABLES; AND HOW I DO IT
I like a playable to look best from the bird-view, if we're talking a map with a normal camera. That's the most pleasant place to have your camera when playing, so players will typically choose that perspective. How I achieve this, is simple. I use that perspective when "checking how well it looks".

I want the ground to be dynamical. I kinda work in layers, actually. If I use a sand ground texture in some places, I always raise the height on it, so it looks like it is spread on top of the surface around it. I view my tilesets as layers that can lay atop of each other this way. Along with this, these lesser height changes must ofc follow the larger height changes. The lesser height changes must not be noticeable. However, it is noticeable when they aren't present; then you will notice how the ground is just some painting without dynamics. But I don't raise/lower just because I can. I only do it if there's some sense in it.

I don't hate Blizzard content, but I hate unmatching, unvarying, and unneccessary messes. I scale my doodads as they can tolerate. Doodads, hi-res as standard, must not be scaled too much beyond their original scale, or the texture will look ugly at some point. I vary Z, X, and Y scales seperately for doodads. And it's more important to me that the models match each other than whether they look good individually. Thus, in a playable, I prefer to use lots of Blizzard content over mixing Blizzard content with imported files that don't match in (because of the file size, you know, because it's gotta be playable, not cinematic). The entirety is more important than the detail, ofcourse. And don't get me wrong, details make the entirety. They just have to match! But how they look individually doesn't matter. It's how they look together.
After a long rush of terraining, I start wiping away anything that is unneccesary to avoid spam. In fact, I whipe away some things that allready look good, just to make more room for the things that look even better. You gotta kill your darlings very, very frequently.

Many people can make a terrain with a good style, using good models. But not a lot of people can do so with proper balance. Many are tempted to overdo, others are tempted to slack. How do we know when it is enough? How do we know if the viewers who rate it would rate it the same way after playing in it? There's a huge difference between looking at a screenshot, and seeing the stuff while you're playing.

 

[Arcany]

I don't hate Blizzard content, but I hate unmatching, unvarying, and unneccessary messes. I scale my doodads as they can tolerate. Doodads, hi-res as standard, must not be scaled too much beyond their original scale, or the texture will look ugly at some point. I vary Z, X, and Y scales seperately for doodads. And it's more important to me that the models match each other than whether they look good individually. Thus, in a playable, I prefer to use lots of Blizzard content instead of mixing Blizzard with imported (because of the file size, you know, because it's gotta be playable, not cinematic). The entirety is more important than the detail, ofcourse. And don't get me wrong, details make the entirety. They just have to match! But how they look individually doesn't matter. It's how they look together.
After a long rush of terraining, I start wiping away anything that is unneccesary to avoid spam. In fact, I whipe away some things that allready look good, just to make more room for the things that look even better. You gotta kill your darlings.

The problem with blizzard cliffs is you can't make realistic terrain with it because they look bad in most scenarios. You can't make realistic caves and mountains with them mainly because they go up like stairs.

Same goes for their trees, they just look bad. The only way they look remotely acceptable is from default camera view.

Filesize only matters when the map is supposed to be played online. If the map is singleplayer you can import all you want and go as far as you want to take it.

 

[Hugget Sukker]

Yeah. That kinda sucks. But I can't see how they are completely useless. I wouldn't base a mountain off cliffs only. But I might blend cliff-use with other methods to create mountains. Likewise, there are other things you can use cliffs for. They may not be too good in an rpg, though. Simply because they look like chasm walls, but are so short. In other maps they might be ok. Maps that don't focus on exploring a big world, but instead on conquering a world, floating over it with a commander's overview, for example.

 

[madcd]

well if i'm gonna jump in on this playable is genraly what i do only really made a select few maps with out pathing, pathing in my ind being the ultimate decided of playable, weather you can put a unit on it and it would move around in a realistic fassion. obviusly the next step is having even the most basic of triggers so you can do anything
as for how i like my terrians it dosnt always have to be the most rediculasy over the top it just has to fit, for my current terrian its a post apocoliptic ruined city where you fight as a mech amoungst the ruins with a projectile system so that it becomes a game of skill (lag). but for this map sure i hand made some 60 biuldings but i didnt put stupid amounts of detail becuase no ones going to see them from the perspective your gonna spend most of your time watching prity effects flying around dodging them and planning ambushes, so my piont is its all conditional and if you were following the terriaining mini challenge then you would see its not imposible to make alright terrians with all ingame doodas.

tho i do agree with every one so far in the fact that the most important thing is themed things have to look like they belong otherwise it just looks sloppy.