Mapping Tips: Rockies

This is a (unfinished) collection of Rockies-tileset-specific tips and tricks that might help you to make beautiful Rocky Mountains maps.

For general map making tips, see Mapping Tips.

Brushes and cliffs

The best thing about rockies tileset is the ability to smoothly connect any two of the three different terrain types - gravel, gravel snow and snow - using cliffs. You don't even need any manual texturing for this; you just make cliff first, and then, for example, paint snow brush on the top and gravel brush on the bottom:

Three-way transitions between cliffs and any two of these three snow densities are unavailable, but you see the picture below for possible workarounds (this sometimes requires manually fixing the direction of a few tiles).

The water can be painted on grey and on grass. So, gray supports both water and cliffs; it is an obvious choice for default terrain, unless you have something very specific in mind. Unfortunately, three-way water-gravel-grass transitions are unavailable. Fortunately, here is a possible workaround:

Anyhow, you'd have to use grey as your default terrain most of the time, and when your heightmap is just finished, and you see your map in FlaME for the first time, it's most likely all dull and gray. In fact, you'll hate your Rockies map until it's almost finished; it's all right, no need to worry about that.

Roads and concrete can only be painted on dirt.

Much like in Arizona, you can be a little slack about 3-way transitions between gravel, grass and dirt, supposed the borders of gravel are perfect.

One more thing about grass snow. You can't transition grass snow to snow, which is a pity. One of the workarounds is to make hard transition from grass snow to gravel snow (since they look similar, this transition will be hard to notice, even though no transition tiles are available for this), and then make the transition to snow.

Manual texturing

Decals and craters

There are a lot of one-tile decals that may greatly enchance the looks of your map. Just pick them one by one and put randomly on appropriate terrain. Check out tiles number 1, 8, 27, 28, 43, 47, 55, 56, 57, 58, 62, 73, 74, 75.

Diagonal cliff tiles

The use of diagonal cliff tiles is rather similar to Arizona. The only difference is that there are two of them: No.30 and No.69, the latter being a bit more snowy. One little hint here: don't try to use snowy diagonal tile too often. Even if there are adjacent snow and snowy cliff tiles, tile No.30 may still look better. This is due to a very inconvenient snow placement on No.69: the snow is placed on the left/right side of the tile, not on top/bottom. In case you use No.69, you should play a little with flipping and rotating to make it look good.

Roads and tracks

Rocky tileset is rather similar to Arizona in this aspect. Roads can only be painted on brown dirt.

Icecaps

This is probably the best part of it. Rocky mountain tileset has an excellent support for monolithic mountains, unlike other tilesets which tend to focus on classic cliffs-and-ramps layouts. With tiles number 54, 62, 76 and 77, you can paint icecaps on high mountains. Before calling any map beautiful, take your time to observe the 'Mountain' map bundled with the game:

Features

Trees, trees, trees! You have 6 kinds of trees here to spice things up. The most important thing here is to be sure that every 2x2 tree is placed strictly on a flat ground; otherwise some trees will be hanging above the ground.

As a nice effect, you can put some terrain effects above trees, like using 1x1 snow decal around a snowy tree, or a single snow brush click around a 2x2 tree.

Snowy trees are traditionally put into snowy areas, and green trees are usually placed over grass and dirt.

Another thing you should definitely consider using is snowy huts aka log cabins. They are of different size, and they may look even better when rotated on arbitrary angles.

Making maps for v3.0+

Current v3.0 texture set is extremely beautiful, but suffers a few playability problems. The similarity between gravel and cliff is especially painful. ​This map is a good example of what you should not do, even though it looks well in v2.3.

​Here is an example of a map created specially for the new renderer. It makes use of direct grass-to-cliff transitions and avoids the use of gravel as much as possible. Also, with the new renderer, you loose your icecaps painting capabilities, but you can still freely mix snow and snowy cliffs into the mountains.

Another nice example is given ​here. This time, the map consists only of snow and water, which turns it into a beautiful winter landscape.

​This map provides an example of using urban buildings in rockies tileset, which is possible in current master builds.