Hi, i'm making a very simple map maker for my game which consists of floatng islands. Each island will be collision detected using a region wrapped around each one. Basically I'm saying when you make an island its got to have some body. Anyway I'm thinking of making the islands sorta like in Starcraft scenario editor style, eg you place a block of land and then just keep adding more blocks to add more land to the island. But i'm thinking my island will end up blocky looking, any ideas on a brush shape that will still make the island look natural, thanks edit: oh n the map points etc are arranged grid style [edited by - johnnyBravo on May 14, 2004 11:57:17 PM]

One way I''ve seen it done is build the island out of square tiles, but have a different graphic for whether each edge of the square is shoreline or attached to more land. So a single square tile of land would look like a circle of land with water around it, 2 tiles of land together would look like an oval, 4 would look like a square wth rounded corners, etc.

This is really more of an artistic question, but a reasonable one to ask. If the tiles are small, even a very simple set of them(all land, diagonal pieces, all water) will look pretty good. But as the tiles get smaller it becomes more critical for the game to have a built-in mechanism for resolving the border between land and water. Otherwise the mapmaker will spend an inordinate amount of time mechanically prettying up the map instead of actually designing it.

An variation on this method is the one that old-style C&C(original and RA1 afaik) used; highly detailed, modular pieces of varying sizes. For collision purposes they were still small tiles, but when you were editing you placed them down in sizeable chunks, so that a cliff wall was really a rectangle of a dozen different tiles. It took ages to make maps doing this if you wanted it to look proper(rather than having the same cliff tile repeat); again, a built-in mechanism would help, but in C&C there were enough possibilities that doing it by hand was more effective for the purposes of the developers.

The Blizzard RTS games(Warcraft, Starcraft) used tiles too but rather than making their art assets in large chunks that had to be placed by hand they focused on making it easy to transition between tiles; this is generally a superior method if you want to make the maps quickly...but like you say it''s inferior for giving them a natural look.

It depends I guess on whether you want more flexibility or more attractiveness. If you want both consider doing a 3d landscape instead

I was thinking of doing the differently textured tiles depending on where they are but I can''t be bothered texturing a whole lot i guess,

and the only reason for my to use smaller tiles is for better lighting as i don''t use per pixel,

i can just use regions for the islands collision detection, as i am using indexed vertices