Handy Size Guide that Looks so Good you could stick it on a wall!

[RubbishyUser]

Hello folks!
The number one mistake that new mappers make when mapping is to underscale or oversize their map in the first alpha, making sightlines ridiculously huge or doorways impossible to squeeze through. That's because Hammer has very little frame of reference - short of sticking some little men on the landscape or memorizing some hammer unit numbers for various well known locations.
BUT NOT ANY MORE!

I wanted to create an easy to parse guide to converting between hammer units and known locations. I know how long Badlands Bridge is in game, but what about in Hammer units? But arena space is something that people picked up easily, or could at least learn the numbers from Grazr's guide. That's why I also wanted my guide to teach mappers the sizes and positionings of the various lobbies and gateways to different parts of the map. In short, I wanted mappers to look at a picture and instantly know how far away two well known points were in Hammer Units. These are those pictures:

I would reccomend printing these out and sticking them on the wall if you are a serious mapper! I genuinely spent a stupid amount of time making these so I'd like some unconditional praise and clicking that thanks button. I shouldn't have done this.

 

[Grizzly Berry]

You could have remade Badwater in Hammer with the amount of time you spent on that second picture.

 

[Tumby]

How did you make these pictures?

 

[RubbishyUser]

How did you make these pictures?

Good question. I used Crash's Map Overview to get the base shot, then I used Photoshop to draw the white lines on a separate layer on top. The map itself was "pixelated" with Photoshop's pixelate function, with the pixel size being determined like this:

number of squares between two lines = HU distance between two lines/512

size of square in pixels = pixel distance in picture between two lines/number of squares between the two lines.

The two lines I chose were the far sides of the map. This basically means that I'd say the picture is accurate to about 100 HU.

 

[ManBeaR]

Thank you, this is probably gonna be really useful. If you are gonna make another on of these, I would suggest gravel pit. Or eventually hightower.

 

[xzzy]

Or you could just compile the map and run around for a few minutes, both as heavy and scout. It gets pretty obvious pretty fast if there's scale issues.


It's also one of the few things bots are good for, testing if the map is too big or small.

 

[martijntje]

It's also one of the few things bots are good for, testing if the map is too big or small.

What would happen with bots if the map was too small/ large ?

 

[xzzy]

Same thing that happens with human map testers, you just don't have to schedule a playtest to try it out.

If the map is too big they'll get spread out and spend more time running than fighting, if it's too small it'll be a constant bloodbath. Expert snipers are crazy good at finding absurd lines of sight too.

 

[A Boojum Snark]

It is a nice idea but I feel you implemented it... backwards. The uniform white outlines are not quickly readable to understand what is what, and having squares of different colors that are to represent the same thing seems unnecessary. Would it not be a better reference to use a full color actual overview of the map, and put a white grid on it?

 

[RubbishyUser]

That was actually my original plan Boojum, but I found that either the grid had lines that were too thick so that the map underneath was obscured, or the lines on the grid were too thin and were less readable when on top of the map.

But actually the main reason I decided to do it this way was because it looked cool. In principle, there's no way you'd need these diagrams to be really accurate, so the main idea behind them was to give people the idea of size on a broader scale.

I might investigate with a 256x256 grid size though.

 

[RubbishyUser]

Quick update: I spent 2 days remaking the first two pictures to make them cleaner and to cut the crap from badwater, and then I added lakeside, gravelpit and mannworks. I also reduced the grid to 256x256 on all pictures for greater clarity.

Now I can actually start making the map that I made these to help me make.