My first attempt at spring map making, a remake of deadlands. There are some quirky differences from the original (the terrain is steeper and less veh pathable, for one) and I rebalanced it a bit in hopes of making gameplay more dynamic.

There are also some minor things that might be fixed in a future release. The lighting is a bit too bright and could use some toning down. The cliff on the southwest side of the center hill looks like crap and needs repainting and new normals. Etc.

If you notice any other dumb issues, please comment so that I can fix them. For now I'm waiting on rolling any changes until I get some data on actual game play.

Also, if you think it looks good/looks like garbage, love it hate it feel free to say so. I'm all about making maps that people actually like playing on, even if it means I have to completely change my approach.

Note: Only works in engine 98+.

PR Stuff: Deadlands with a twist. Now your glaives can run free through the meadows as glaives were meant to do, your spiders can make their nests atop striking stoney cliffs, and you can fight to death for control of the mossy hill in the center and the +3 mexes it overlooks.

Includes reclaimable rocks and trees, skybox and other ssmf niceties. Perhaps an odd choice, the metal spots are like gold coins shining in the sun, and form an interesting collar around your mexes when capped.

Not 100% sure. It crashes on 91, possibly because it doesn't have an smf file, or maybe for some other obscure reason.

Looks promising at first glance, I'll dig into it later today. Nice work :3

I like this aesthetic much better than the original Deadlands.

kaen : thanks. :)

Jasper : I think it probably plays differently than DeadLands in more than one way. Whether that turns out to be a good thing or a bad thing has yet to be seen, but I don't know that I would count it as a direct replacement.

As with anarchid's concerns, this version favors bots more than veh. Basically only the bottom left/top right and middle areas are veh pathable, excluding the mossy hill which they can't climb (there's no mexes there anymore anyway). I intended the start boxes to be top right/bottom left like DeadLands, but if veh start in the low areas they will be stuck there, just FYI.

Skasi : please build mexes and solars on this map in game before you decide what you think of it. :| The only mexes that aren't in clusters give extra metal.

+1 for some veh ramps. No reason to exclude them from the fun :)

wrt veh/height: any differences in the heightmap itself are artifacts from how crappy SME is. :P I ended up incorporating those changes, but in general they're very minor.

On the other hand, the more significant differences in height come from the conversion from smt to mapinfo.lua. I wasn't able to perfectly match the scale of the original, which is why those areas are no longer veh pathable. I kind of like the current scaling, but I'll try to fix the ramps to be veh pathable. That could be kind of difficult though.

There's also an issue that stops shadows from being cast properly, which is already fixed internally FYI.

wrt porc pushing: maybe, but on the other hand since there's several different routes of expansion and since the clusters can't easily cover eachother defense wise, you can still be penalized for not building units/expanding aggressively.

Proof is awesome either way. :P