1. Funny, but my request is reasonable. 2. That's not earth, it may resemble the planet but that's no surprise. 3. No pics, might as well not have happened. Considering the premise of the game I think it's utterly amazing that there isn't an earth map available from Uber. Considering the focus on mods and custom maps I think it's even more amazing that there isn't a user generated one. For marketing reasons alone it would be worth Uber creating one. What's the hold up?
It can't be done. Map terrain is made up of two types of things; randomly generated terrain and manually placed objects. The random terrain can sometimes look similar to earth with continents and oceans, but you will never get Earth. The selection of brushes to add to the planet is very small and none of them do anything close to what you ask. I suppose it may be possible for someone to create continent-shaped brushes and add them to the game as a server mod, but that's a huge amount of work for a hacky solution. I don't know anyone with the skill, time, or ambition to do that.
So you're basically saying that the editor allows you to place land features but it doesn't allow you to specify what is land and what is sea? Well, that sucks. Surely Uber had some control over the maps they created? I think it's a job they should take on considering how obvious it is.
I'm pretty sure they don't. Sure they have control over the generation algorithms, but there is no such thing as land and water brushes which they could use to draw landscapes...
Yeah PA has never had terrain deformation, and in Uber's defense they never suggested it would. The original concept of the game was a result of a procedural planet generator that Jon Mavor created, and that is the basis of the map system. The advantage of Uber's system is it can create pretty much limitless different base map meshes, and as the maps are created on each users computer based on the maths, the maps themselves are tiny. The down side is you cannot create terrain that is very specific like Earth. I guess on a high level, the planet generation system in this does similar things to what No Mans Sky is purporting to do. I actually liked the old random maps- the idea I could play 1000s of games and never play the same map twice.... rest of the community all want the same maps over and over though. This is the problem with every RTS game I've ever tried on line. You could have a million maps available and I can *guarantee* that the number of maps actually played by anyone can be counted on 1 hand.
Is it fair to say that the procedural planet generator is a failed experiment? It seems we've very much stuck to purposely designed maps rather than randomly generated ones. If the random generation could also be fair 100% of the time.. and also be interesting, then surely all games would be played like this. But it's not, and they're not, so it's failed, right? It seems that we're now in a somewhat odd situation of having randomly generated land/sea terrain with purposefully placed mass spots and land features. Did Uber literally just keep clicking on [randomly generate] until they found a map they liked and then built it up from there? It seems like they went in the wrong direction if as a result of this they can't actually control what the maps look like. I think this game would be totally epic if the tools were available to create some of the historic maps from SupCom and TA and then Uber bundled these up and released official map packs (which everyone auto-downloaded). I've had some fun with this game but I can honestly say nowhere near the level of fun I've had with their previous games and it's a shame because I think it's largely down to the maps.
Then why aren't all games played on random maps? I wonder what percentage are played on random maps? It's a pretty awesome feature but I suspect it isn't being fully utilised.
Random maps don't guarantee interesting terrain features. Often the best maps will be ones that use the best of both methods. You can make very good, natural-looking maps by playing with the sliders and trying new seeds until you get something decent. Then you should look it over closely and make small changes as needed. Remember, the random map generator doesn't know anything about how the game is played. It doesn't know that bases need plenty of room to build, that small puddles are often pointless but large oceans can lead to good naval fights. It doesn't care about putting metal spots in areas that would be fun to fight over, either. It does however make some pretty natural terrain on the right settings.
That's the problem with the map generator though isn't it? All you can do is change a few sliders, click generate, and hope for the best. Considering the nature of the game I don't think it's too much to ask to be able to generate an earth map. It's a no brainer. Look at all of the best maps in the previous games, they were all intelligently designed. The options you had available because of the maps were massively variable! Uber went to all of this effort to get the game mechanics working which must have been a very hard task however they have fallen tragically short of finishing this game which means most of their hard work has gone to waste. It would be amazing to play PA on any of the TA, SupCom or SupCom2 maps. I think it would be more fun to ditch the planet idea and just play on flat maps if that's all that's possible.
The planet idea is fine if we had full control over terraforming and not having to rely on random planet generation. Procedural generation sounds cool but, as noted above, it creates boring planets. Also, the bugs would have to go. Too many bugs in the editor.
