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Post by Julius CMXCIX on Sept 27, 2014 1:53:38 GMT
What makes a good desert? Personally I prefer to make the desert really bleak and inhospitable, so I try to capture the atmosphere of Marko Crnigoj's Hattin scenario, which means a lot of featureless dunes. Sometimes I try to make interesting cliff formations to serve as the odd landmark. However, I notice that no one seems to agree with me on this, so I'm interested to hear what other people go for.
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Post by HockeySam18 on Sept 28, 2014 14:50:50 GMT
Generally the same- mix desert, dirt1, and beach terrain with a little bit of dead farm (inside the dirt1). Cliff pieces (especially that one corner piece), and some gaia objects, like the mountains I added in Merchant, or rocks, cacti, broken carts with corpses, etc.
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Post by Julius CMXCIX on Sept 29, 2014 18:38:24 GMT
You see I think deserts should look mostly like this, with extremely sparse objects of any kind.
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Post by HockeySam18 on Aug 1, 2015 5:55:57 GMT
I must have completely spaced on replying to this You make quite a good point. I was just having a look at the desert in Merchant, and it looks quite fitting. Another example of a well-done desert, imo, is the one in Mare Nostrum. That one is slightly more jazzed up with terrains and objects, but not cluttered or anything. It's funny that the AoK mountains are so small, because those dunes look like they'd dwarf the AoK mountains
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Matt
Stormwind Member
The Come And Go Man
Monsieur Mercredi
Posts: 1,811
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Post by Matt on Aug 1, 2015 16:58:01 GMT
One of the islands in my PTC entry was fairly desert themed. I don't really like ever going full desert, because then you are limited to two terrains and almost no objects.
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Post by HockeySam18 on Aug 1, 2015 17:46:30 GMT
That part was particularly well done. The large hill with the ruins was a nice touch, and the little clusters of buildings and greenery surrounding the base of the hill and near the shoreline were implemented quite effectively. I think designers will be using your PTC entry for years to come as a reference on how to pull off some lesser-known and more complex design types. It's also a gold mine for nice little tricks (like the raised TCs, the disguised Asian universities, and the piles of food behind oak trees to look like apple trees) that can greatly enhance the design of a scenario if used well.
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Post by Basse on Aug 1, 2015 20:29:27 GMT
The desert in Mare Nostrum is probably the only serious attempt I've made at ever designing one, or at least the only one I can remember. What I did was to design it the same way I'd design the open hillsides in The Rockspring Revolution, changing the grassy terrains to dirt and desert, and then cut down the amount of eye candy to half. I think it worked okay. The best desert I recall seeing is the one designed by Julius in The Merchant, which manages to be both realistic and nice to look at, which, when it comes to deserts, is quite an achievement.
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Post by HockeySam18 on Aug 1, 2015 22:57:19 GMT
I especially liked the infusion of thin lines of the other dirt terrains. One frustrating thing about AoK terrain blending is that mixing certain terrains creates sharp edges that have to be smoothed out a bit. This is also frustrating to me when I try to put small amounts of other terrain types into desert or snow landscapes. Same goes for putting dirt on grass.
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