Sage

I like big dragons and I cannot lie.

Could these three off to the right be new mobs, I wonder? I want to say yes, but the color palette looks a little vibrant for RO. Maybe that's just me. Second opinions? I saw a list elsewhere with a bunch of NPC images added in a recent server maintenance, with a whole bunch of Puzzles and Dragons... dragons. Also knights. Like the one mob shown in this video. It'd be very cool if we get all of those creatures as new mobs- I think the dragons in RO are pretty mediocre. Except maybe Nidhoggur and Lost Dragon, those are pretty baller.

Adventure Time? Like Finn and Jake Adventure Time? I can't commit to any team but I might consider trying to map something related this summer. That could be fun. I dunno. We'll see.

Hey Chem- Sorry to disappoint, but as far as I'm aware, this is simply a product of how lights are rendered in RO, which is not necessarily how they are displayed in Browedit. If you've played the game for a long time, you may not have noticed it on Gravity maps, but when you start making maps of your own, it becomes pretty easy to see! Here are some examples, from the Ayothaya and Glastheim dungeons. The Problem: http://i.imgur.com/1xoHg40.jpg Ayothaya Dungeon F2! http://i.imgur.com/73ciS6I.jpg Glastheim Castle F2! Oh no! Rings! While we can't solve the technical side of this problem without some major sourcecode tinkering (I think, anyway), we can draw peoples attention away from this through good map design! An improvement! The best way I find to do this is to avoid putting lights out in the open, with no variations in the ground texture or elevation to break up the rings. Laying down multiple lights unevenly is one way to do this. Take a look ingame at Comodo, and you'll see what I mean: http://i.imgur.com/l2xSCNU.jpg Comodo's beach! http://i.imgur.com/wS6k2qZ.jpg Something sort of similar I did! (Probably not the best example, but this map was made a year or two ago.) If you have a lot of lights close together, their edges will blend and you'll be left with peanut shapes instead of rings! Which is... an improvement, I guess? Textures! The best solution to this problem may not be applicable to every map, but where you can do this, you should! It's easy to see the rings on a flat surface, or an open area with a single texture repeated. If you place down a more complicated texture, however, it can make the the rings almost impossible to see. Having textures that compliment a light source (Like a bright floor emitting light from itself) can also do wonders to make lights look better ingame. Here are some examples in a new map I'm putting together: http://i.imgur.com/1LNGqmI.jpg Snazzy blues and greens! http://i.imgur.com/dOpMqry.jpg The base of the Ferris Wheel is all elevated ground and walls, which I got a bit lucky with! http://i.imgur.com/iMWsgGV.jpg A lit-up keyboard! If you look closely, you can also see a bit of that light-peanutting I mentioned before. Yes, that is the technical term from now on. http://i.imgur.com/Ra47Vax.jpg Even Gravity does this! Endless Tower has many great examples of this, especially with the complex floor pattern at the top of the tower. (I'd screencap that but I forgot the map name.) TL;DR: Can you get rid of the rings? No, but you can make people not notice them. Consider where your light source would be in this little world you're making, explore what you can do with varied textures, ground elevations and effects, and follow this rule of thumb that you might've already caught onto: Big lights tend to have bigger rings, and more intense lights tend to have more rings, but each ring is smaller. As to why your lights are green? No idea! It looks like all your color values are set evenly, and I'll assume you haven't got any green in the map's ambient lighting either, so that's probably just a distortion product of RO's light rendering. Hope that helps!

I'm not dead! HA HA HA! Alright, status update time, since I've been quiet and lurking for a few months now. College has had me a little overwhelmed this past semester, but my summer is looking like it'll be a lazy one, which means I plan on putting out an awesome 1.1 update. I've steadily began working on things again a couple weeks ago, and while I don't feel there's enough to put out a proper update yet, I'd like to showcase some of the things that'll be coming. Important notes off the bat: I'll be open to donations in the near future, to fund a personal RO-related project I'm working on with some friends, but everything I make will continue to be free. I don't plan on actually selling my maps now or in the future, and I'll be forthright in saying I can't give out any perks or compensation for that sort of thing. More on that another time. Contrary to what I may have said/implied before, I'll only be releasing updates to this map package every few weeks or months, rather than more regular mini-updates. Don't fret, though, whenever I get around to putting out a new release, you can expect at least a dozen new things to sink your teeth into. Here's a preview of what's to come! Electric Town! An amusement park and city of steel, built high above the clouds! I've not gotten to interiors yet, but there will be several, and probably a dungeon. This map uses no custom textures or objects, so you only need an up-to-date kRO patch to implement it on your server. Isn't that convenient? The Dorado Badlands! I've already shown some of this before, but it's a truly big region! Here are a few more admittedly work-in-progressy shots from a few of the dune fields, and the not-yet-done canyon village of Madelin, as well as a few of its respective fields! Mapping tutorials? So, this doesn't exactly pertain to my map releases, but I thought I'd pitch the question now to see how much interest there is. I'm considering starting up a series of mapping tutorials/guides, based of my methodology for putting a map together and making it look good. This series would probably be 85% design and 15% technical stuff- That is, I'm going to write it assuming that everyone reading already knows how to use all of Browedit's basic functions. There are many, many great tutorials and guides out there on the technical side of Browedit, written by people who know that side of the program better than I do! So, this series would focus more on things like "Making a town market look busy" or "What should be in every harbor town" or "How to make your mountains look mountainous" and shit like that. The point of the series would be to become a better mapper, and not just make maps that are "good enough." For this reason, I'll also be focusing on teaching how to become a better mapper without using custom models or textures, as I believe they make mapping too easy and everyone should learn good design before they start exploring that stuff. Would anyone be at all interested in this? Let me know. If I start such a thing, I'll also be more willing to provide constructive criticism and advice for people who want to learn.

Aw, bummer. Is Brow 2 still being worked on? I'd totally upgrade just for that one feature.

Hey guys. I hope I'm using the right term here... It's pretty easy to render lights and shadows in Brow, but is there any way to render colors over textures on the map? I'm poor at describing this so I took a few screenshots as examples. I've no idea how to pull this off and I don't think I've seen it done in any other custom maps. It's really the one thing that I think really keeps Gravity maps distinguishable from custom ones. I always get a little bummed when I'm editing a vanilla map and I've gotta recalculate lightmaps, which results in losing all these really nice definitions and details added with simple spots of color. So... Anyone got any ideas?

I'd ballpark it around late this month or early March, but don't quote me on that. I'd like to get all that done around that time, but my schooling takes priority. We'll see! I'll try to keep this thread updated as I make progress.

Oh gosh, I haven't dropped by in a few days and this really blew up! Thanks for the kind words, everyone! It really makes me smile seeing such a positive reaction. Considering how much I lurk this forum and admire your own work, this is really high praise for me! Thanks, Olrox! Go for it! Some advice though, since there was a problem with that map I only realized after making it! If you are going to have a group of objects making up something bigger, as I did with the trees in Carnivale (multiple leafy objects, and a separate one for the trunk, all duplicated over and over), make sure you're careful about how many objects you've got! I had a bunch of leaf clusters inside the middle of the trees, where they were really unnecessary, because players simply can't see them. There were so many objects on that map that my old computer straight-up couldn't render shadows for it! Consider that a little pro-tip: When you map, try to look at your work from a player's perspective, and try to focus most of your time and effort on the parts of the map they can actually see and go to! What an honor! I did have to think for a really, really long time over whether or not I would release my works for free. I eventually decided that I would because RO has been a large part of my life for many years now, and seeing as I've gotten fairly good at mapping, I thought this would be a nice way I can do my part to make the private server community just a little bit better. I don't have as much time as I'd like to play RO proper nowadays, but I'd really love seeing my maps just completely fill up with players on different servers. That is correct! <3 Update time! I am working on new field maps for the region surrounding Dorado Harbor. Here is an (Warning, big image!) overview image of what I've managed to put together over the weekend and monday. The two western-most maps are complete and available in the 1.0 package posted above (dorado and dor_fild01, respectively!) and everything east of those is a work-in-progress. Here are a few work in progress screencaps in closer detail, a few of which are more recently taken than the preview image. Unless something comes up in my schedule this week, I would like to release version 1.1 of my map package this weekend, which will just add mini-maps and data files for the exits of maps and other convenient things, so you all don't need to take guesses as to what interiors are meant for what buildings and things like that. (I think that could get particularly confusing as time goes on!) The preview images shared above will be included in version 1.2, of which I don't have a solid estimate for a release date right now. This is largely because I don't like to release my work before I've playtested it and made sure it looks/functions as well in-game as it does in the editor. Dorado is a large region- All in all, I expect it to be comparable in size to the Sograt desert before Gravity made it stupid and cut out like half the maps. Maybe a bit bigger. There will be another town accessible by land to the east of it, and you can expect a few varying landscapes, namely arid biomes like dunes, canyons, salt flats, and a volcano, all of which I think are awesome and under-represented in RO. What will definitely be in 1.2: Field maps East of Dorado, including a mountainous area, a sandy plain of dunes, and the southern beach! Several new Dorado interiors! Mini-maps and warp data files for the above! A small expansion to Aquitaine's fields! A dungeon! There are several I could whip up for this reason so we'll see what I come up with. Question: Would people be interested if I included, in a separate package, a collection of recommended BGM tracks for the various maps? On my test server I mostly just use songs I enjoyed from videogames and TV shows that seem fitting.

Sage's Awesome Map Package 1.0 Sup homies! I won't bore you all with some unnecessary convoluted introduction, so we go: This is a package of some of my better work, mostly made over the course of the last year and a half or so. This is not everything I have ever mapped: The maps in this package are mostly just the ones I've finished that are functional and do not possess incredibad errors or problems. What you'll get: 7 Towns: Port Aquitaine, Carnivale, Dorado Harbor, Tortuga Bay, North & South New Alberta, and Zhunan. 2 Ancient ruins maps: The swampy city of Lafayette, or the bright and open Lumina. Several fields for Aquitaine, a satellite village for Dorado. Several interiors for Aquitaine, Dorado, Lumina and Zhunan. Dungeon maps for Lumina and Tortuga. A badass airship somewhere in there. It's crazy big. In total, there are over 20 maps here, of rather good quality. This map release is by no means perfect. I will be open and honest about this. Flaws you can expect: Not every town has interior maps, and those that do, do not always have many. I may or may not add more in the future. Not every town has field maps. I will definitely add more fields in the future. This package currently lacks a data file to organize warps/exits between maps. One will be added in future releases. Mini-maps will also be included in a future release. Sorry! Why this release is still awesome: It's completely free. I am not charging for this release, nor do I plan to charge for future releases. The only credit I ask for is that you link back to this forum thread and mention my name. Just 'Sage' is fine. You have my permission to modify and tinker with these maps to your heart's content. They're yours to do with as you please: That said, do still give credit for using them as a starting point. I will add to this in the future, as I've many half-finished projects and new things in the works, including fields, dungeons, interiors, and the like which will augment the maps currently available. Some of these maps use objects from the recently released town of Verus. I highly recommend you keep your kRO client up to date, or else some of these maps will have missing objects and textures. Additional notes, because I love making lists: Do not ask me to map for your server. I will say no. That said, if there is something in this map package you like and want more of (ie, "More Dorado fields, please!") then feel free to comment and I will consider working on it. If you find any functional errors on these maps (such as objects you can walk through because I messed up the GAT,) then don't hesitate to comment about it in this thread. Even if it is something you can easily fix yourself, this allows me to save others the trouble in future releases. I am not asking for money for this release, but if you really want to make a donation, then drop me a forum PM and we can talk from there. Previews of Maps: Previously posted Showcase threads: http://rathena.org/board/topic/78212-showcase-el-dorado-harbor/ http://rathena.org/board/topic/73564-showcase-the-swamp-city-of-aquitaine I'll add more previews shortly. Download: Aren't I Nice? Enjoy. <3

Tutorial request! I understand the gist of how lighting effects work, but lately I've been trying to reproduce an effect I see on gravity maps, slight changes in the hue of ground textures: Like adding a green light to dirt to make it look more grassy, without having a grass texture. Problem is, this is what I'm going for, and this is what I actually get.

Ah! I just tested that and it worked like a charm. Many thanks! I think in the case of the town map I made, the problem came from me starting work at the normal height and then building the map top-down instead of bottom-up. I figured it must've had something to do with height levels.

Hey, custom map problem here. It doesn't happen on most maps I make, but on some (and I have no idea what causes it) it seems like chunks of the map just disappear (models, textures and all) at certain angles or zoom levels. Here's a few screencaps I took on one map, showing one part of a map where this is particularly bad. Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2 Screenshot 3 If anyone knows how to fix this, and what exactly causes it, I'd be very grateful!

I actually really like the female 2-1 gunner. I hope they don't strip her down into something needlessly skimpy before the final release. :/

Hah, something like that! I've got a lot of free time on my hands, and after working with brow for a couple years, it doesn't take too long to get a map done if you already know what you want it to look like. Thanks for the compliments!

Several hours a day, maybe three or four days.

I'm not a great talker, so uh, I'll keep it short- here's a new town I've been working on, inspired after pirates and old spanish harbors! Still a bit of a work in progress, but all I've really got left to do is lightmapping. Enjoy! Overview of the city! The town square and market! A gate... But to where? A detailed little alley! This place must be fancy... Who likes beaches? Coral under the docks. A bare train station... Adventure awaits up the steps! Expect more in the future!

Hey guys! I know it's been a while, but thanks for the kind words. Thought I'd share a pretty big update to liven up the map board a bit. The island's getting bigger and bigger- I've been busting my butt on fields galore! The east village! The bridge into town! A humble estate! A good ol' swamp boat! Farms! Burial grounds... spooky! The smallest of villages. What could this be? I wonder who lives here... A campsite! One of many. Lost ruins! More ruins! -Even- more ruins! A shrine in the swamp... An overview of a whole field. And a little peak of what's to come... (Work in progress!) A roadside inn! Such fancy buildings...

Not gonna lie- The female is so well dressed that when I initially saw this, I thought it had to be fake. Gravity, are you drunk? How are you not disappointing me for once?! Is this real life?! Name is kinda dumb, but I can forgive that.

Hey rAthena, sup. This here's part of a much larger project the centers around reshaping and expanding RO's world. The town I'm gonna show you guys today is called Aquitaine- The idea with this place (and the country it's in) is that it's themed heavily after the colonial/civil war era southern United States, sorta like a steampunk Louisiana. It's swampy, there are pirates and voodoo ladies and slaves, and the buildings are big and pretty. I've got a quite number of fields *mostly* done for this, as well as some interiors, but today I'm only gonna show off the town map itself. Enjoy! I'm gonna post links instead of images, as there's a lot to see! The whole city! A little patch of wilderness Sitting in a wagon The town burial ground... A fancy manor house Street across the river The River Landing The outskirts of town A country home The Chapel of Aquitaine Clocktower Square A further view of the Square An outdoor dining area The busy urban center... Southern docks Old Market Road Governor's Estate House along the River

What is this map called? o__o

Is there no way to hex a colored sky into a map without replacing another map already in the game?

Hahahah, oh wow, I really need to update my BGM folder. Good work nonetheless though.

Hey Spencer- really pleasantly surprised with this map. Looking over stuff you've done before, I can see a lot of improvement, so pat yourself on the back there. I like the blend of different objects (huts from Malaya/Dewata and houses from Nameless Island, etc) all seeming to fit together- that's something a lot of mappers (at least the ones that haven't figured out how to use custom textures) have trouble with; using existing models to make something that doesn't just look like a clone of a place already ingame. The only criticism I can really give is textures- I don't know why, but something about all the dirt just looks a little barren in a few spots. I can't fault you too much for that since I'm not totally sure what I'd do with it if it were my map, but hey, whatever. Cool fantasy vibe, man. Let's go out for frosty chocolate milkshakes sometime. Oh, and what's the song in that video?

Sup homies. I've been mostly lurking this board for ages now, and making RO maps pretty much since Browedit's first public release, figured I may as well start showing off a couple of my projects. I'm just going to put everything I make in those one thread for the sake of not flooding the entire board, because I start and finish projects pretty quickly, or get distracted and move onto new ones. I'll update this thread every now and then, even though a dozen and a half things are pulling my focus and attention in different ways these days. I just spent a few minutes screencapping about fifty or so images, so uh, without further ado, here's what I've been hammering away at lately. ADDENDUM: Everything I'm showing here was started in 2012. My previous computer with three or four years worth of other maps was stolen last November so all that is pretty much as good as gone. Doesn't bother me too much though, I've improved so much since then it's not even funny. If I ever find a copy of all that stuff on one of the external drives I have lying around, I'll make a separate thread for it. THE HARBOR OF NEW ALBERTA: Some background on this one: Alberta's being used for quite a few things right now on the server I play, but I always thought it was a pretty awful looking map, so my main focus right now is completely revamping the place to look like not crap. It has new fields, interiors, and tons of things, but for now I'll just show off the two main districts (entire town is four maps.) I gotta finish this place by the first week of June. THE MERCENARY GUILD: Here's a pretty elaborate little building in New Alberta, though it's in one of the districts I've barely started mapping yet. Been using a useless building in the default Alberta map to access it until now. Some parts are done but others are very WIP as the place is getting a bit of an upgrade from its current form ingame soon. These are screenshots from the latest version. Story-wise, this building used to be a wine distillery and a mansion. These are some classy killers. THE CITY OF ZHUNAN: Big city in the far east, and a regional capital. I finished this one in about two weekends (that is, about four days) at the request of one of the GMs on the server I play. The specifications I got were basically a castle in the center with a wall around it, so while this was a requested map, I pretty much had total creative freedom in this. City is completely finished but I may revisit it this summer to improve lightmaps (I just casted shadows, nothing overly fancy) and to add some fields to it. THE SOUTHWEST TROPICS: This is a little expansion project I started a few months ago, and I'll get back to it... Whenever it's in demand. These are intended to be fields for cities like Jawaii, Brasilis, Comodo, all those type of towns. MISCELLANEOUS MAPS: Here are some maps I never quite finished or lost interest in but might be interesting to see anyway. Probably won't return to any of these, but oh well. That's all for now. Come back later.