Mountain Test – Just Tiles
Board
This was an experiment to see if I could get the entirety of my original Dolgan’s Peak map into TaleSpire if I did it with only tiles… not quite, this is about 4/5 ths of the map. Dolgan’s Peak was a little less than 1/4 of the entire map.
My original goal was to create 1 square mile of mountainous terrain, using a 1×1 tile as 5 feet, so the map is supposed to be 1056×1056 tiles. The limiting factor in this is the hard limit in TaleSpire of 1 million assets.
Map Stats
- Full Map (if I could export it):
- Tiles: 1,216,706
- Props: 1,031,247
- Total: 2,247,953
- This Map (Only tiles were exported):
- Tiles: 954,866
- Props: 805,466
- Total: 1,760,332
I find it interesting that the Tile density is actually higher than the prop density, the terrain generator is actually quite efficient when making tiles but the verticality of this map adds a lot to the total tile count.
So, if that Asset limit was increased to something like 3 Million, I could export this map with plenty of room to spare… Fingers Crossed!
How to view this map
This is a big map, with vanilla TaleSpire you will not be able to see the entirety of this map from a single vantage point. TaleSpire has a 300 tile viewing limit on its camera, so even if you sat in the middle of this map and did a 360 you wouldn’t be able to see it all.
My screenshots were made using an Unofficial Mod from Thunderstore called, MaxDrawDistancePlugin. This can be installed with r2ModMan which increases that limit to 3000 and the drawing of shadows to 500. Shadows can be a huge GPU killer, both of these values are configurable in-game, I usually crank my shadow draw distance up to 1500 for screenshots.
But that’s not all! Since TaleSpire isn’t designed to view that far of a distance, not all of the tiles load in, so you have to fly around to all corners of the map when you launch it. I typically make bookmarks on my maps so I can zoom around to all the points but since bookmarks don’t get saved with a publish you would have to set this up yourself (Please add that feature BR).
Finally
I don’t recommend using this map for play, it might look nice from a distance but with the lack of props it isn’t all that much to look at up close. I mainly published it as a spectacle, to see what the limits of TaleSpire are, and for the devs to play around with for performance reasons.
This map was generated with the aid of Baldrax’s Houdini TaleSpire Terrain Generation Toolset
https://github.com/Baldrax/Houdini_TaleSpire_Terrain_Generation_Toolset
That is a pretty cool set up. But I think it is unusable in a number of ways. If it was set to the usual floor for Talespire, then the peaks would be usable. I usually like big boards, but I think breaking this into quarters would be more usable.
The entire point of this map is to test the limits of TaleSpire so dicing it up would sort of defeat the purpose.
I’m not sure what you mean by “set to the usual floor for TaleSpire” the lowest part of this map is very close to the board floor, as for the highest point, you can adjust that in the Campaign & Board Settings, I set it to 1000 tiles when publishing but perhaps that doesn’t get saved with the board. The highest peak is around 620 tiles, so totally “usable” in that fashion.
In my description above I do mention several reasons why this board might not be ideal for play, the fact that you really need mods to see it, and have to fly around the map to reveal the entire thing… lack of props.
Again, it is here as a spectacle.
I do have plans to make smaller selects of this larger map, I’m working on one right now, but even that one is going to go beyond the default height slider. Mountains just don’t look mountainous if they aren’t tall.
This is pretty sweet, enormous and took a lot of time to load up and run smooth but still pretty impressive. Looking forward to see what else you come up with.
Thanks, I’m always improving the toolset and am currently working on a select from this map, I’ll publish that when it is done.