I had a look to see if there is a subject which talks about what I am going to post about, but I don't find anything. Well dear comrades, I want to talk about the doodads. I find some of them .... strange ! How strange ? About their size. How is it possible, for instance, that the "gargantuesque" Thor is smaller than the buildings ? And I am not talking about the huuuuuuge Colossus which walks UNDER the electric pole ...
Remember your talking about civilizations that have hover craft. The street corner may be 100 ft in the air. Also I am sure they will finalize it. But you can't deny that those city maps look pretty cool. I hope we can play melee games on them.
Jshep, can you think of any goodreason why we should not be able to use the city tileset like any other?
Maybe its a storyline based map. Plus I can just see some complications such as where are there mineral deposites in the middle of a large city . Also the physics of it are kind of screwy. How can siege tanks shoot with a giant skyscraper infront of them. I mean do they have atmospheric range? Plus the game play would be very differant from your normal map. I mean you have to be careful when turning around the wrong street corner. Plus you got more to hide behind. Maybe even take over with. I mean does it affect their range if their shooting from behind a sky scraper. And what about Air units like the BC or Mothership. How do they fly in a large city with skycrapers taking up so much space.
If crowded cities today are any example, then the human race (the real one; not the StarCraft one) very well could have buildings that tall hundreds of years into the future.
Why would you? It's pretty clear to me that if Blizzard is going to make the buildings that big then it's going to be a story-driven map. If the buildings need to be made smaller then just make them smaller. You could do this in WarCraft III so I'm sure you can do it in StarCraft 2.
The sheer size of the buildings really gets in the way of the camera as well, making it illogical for competitive play. I'm sure that since they took the time to design them, they will be in the game, but probably just for the campaign or something story-driven, as stated above.
pretty much what everyone else said. for MP gameplay they might leave out the buildings but let the tileset remain
Yes true ! We can just play melee inside those maps. Impossible to build units, Especially Thors. This map with those buildings (and I confess, those buildings are awesome ! ) will be like the Terran installation bases in Starcraft 1 and Brood War, one of those maps like the one where you had to kill Stukov. PS : don't forget the Colossus smaller than the electric poles. It was on a screen shot. Can somebody paste a link to this picture I am talking about please ? I'll give him or her 50 minerals of reward. Yes, I am selfish. But it's the crisis ... LOL
The graphics isn't meant to be realistic. If units were true sizes for the environment, they would be too small to control, or the doodads would be too big and make the map seem really small. They're opting for a cartoon-like graphics style. That isn't meant to be realistic. Which is similar to WC3, where cliffs were head height, and Knights were bigger than the farms/houses.
Yeah, of course but ..... however. I just hope Blizzard knows what it is doing. It's true it must not be so realistic. Else we'll have to play with "real" size units and structures, to live in a real Starcraft 2 universe to play I understand what you mean. Ok for the Colossus under the electric poles. But for the Thor inside the city .... I think this map is for the storyline, as other members said. It will be a map like the 'terran installation' one, I think
I doubt there will be any ladder maps on this tileset. However, im certain that the buildings/tileset will be available in the map editor. I would imagine that SC2 will be handled the way wc3 was, and only blizzard maps will be counted for ladder matches, and everything else will just be custom games. In which case i can see some very interesting possibilities with these doodads in a melee map. And i wouldnt be so sure that the proportions are -that- inaccurate. The buildings look reasonable size (from what i have seen) for a marine to enter, then compare the size of the thor to a marine. they aren't THAT huge. nor are the colossus. I'd say it all seems pretty reasonable to me, if you dont try to make the Thor more than it is. And i dont have an excuse for the BCs sorry.
I think the tileset is fine, it's just some doodads, such as the really high buildings that might not be used for melee. I am sure there are lots of smaller structures that won't make the tileset inelligable for normal play.
I think it is really cool, and the folks at OnGameNet will find a way to incorporate this. The buildings can be like the other doodads, distractions, and if the buildings are in campaign, they c an be in melee, and you can be for sure that Blizzard has incorporated the buildings properly, such as units not being able to fire over buildings, and the air units can probably just swerve around, and there will definite be a camera angle changer.
I think these games are designed aesthetically, not particularly to scale, along these sort of lines: 1. Environment. The first step is the environment without any units. Get that looking right. Detail there should be in reasonable proportion. 2. Field of View. Perfection here is when you take the view as wide as possible, but ... -- the view isn't so expansive that the narrowest pathway is too narrow to rapidly right click on. -- the view isn't so expansive that your eye notices the landscape more than the graphical details. -- graphical detail isn't lost because it's being drawn so small. 3. Units. Units would be designed independently of the terrain, and scaled relative to each other. For reasons of being easily click-on-able and not screen-dominating, it would be rare for the largest unit to be more than 2x the size of the average unit, and the smallest less than 0.5x the average unit. The same goes for buildings. they should always be bigger than average units, but not more than maybe 4x the average unit. 4. Adding units to maps. Here, all units are scaled by the same amount to maintain their relative sizes. And the scaling amount is such that they draw onto the screen nicely. I expect this is done without paying too much attention to the terrain or doodads. Simply, it's designed for ease of player vision and clicking. So the unit scaling shouldn't be such that the smallest units are so small that they are hard to see (and with loss of graphical detail) or such that the big units dominate the map. ---- In contrast to FPS, I've always thought of the graphics in RTS games as being symbolic rather than actual. Where the unit graphics represents game characters, rather than is the game characters, if you know what I mean. So scales of drawing are much less important than they are in FPS. Effectively communicating the strategic layout is what is most important in RTS.
