Kessel: Spice Mines

Description
Each of the following six files has been made by the same author over the course of a very short time; to commemorate the prolific production of one author in such a short time I will write a short essay in six parts: "Caring for your work" or "why it's important that you spend more than an hour or two making a map or mod you plan on distributing."

Part 3:
Knowing this, that quantity itself - while one viable option for endearing yourself to a group of people - is not marked by the absence of quality, it is easy to lose sight of quantity as a of means to an end (that is to say as a popularity device) and see it become an end unto itself. When one forgets that they're working on a mod to distribute to a public and simply sees it as an exercise in increasing in volume the size of their body of work, it can become an issue.

[Continued in "Anax: Hidden Village"]



"Kessel: Spice Mines," by cyclonassasin, is another simple, four-CP map - this time set on Kessel. At least it's not one of the stock game planets, right? Wrong. Sort of. This Kessel (like his [url=http://starwarsbattlefront.filefront.com/file/Kessel_Spice_Mines;100572]last version of the same name[/url]) is basically "Mustafar Renamed." In fact it is so similar (is it the same?) as the other version of the map that anything said on that one basically applies here. There are few defining features so it was hard to tell if this was the same or just very similar.

What could be done to improve it? Here are a few tips:

-The sky. Yes I will say this for every one of your files. You are not on Yavin, this sky does not fit, and you don't have any surrounding anything to block out that ugly black cutoff in the sky texture. Change it.

-Texture variation. Please don't use a monotexture on the ground. It is ugly and unrealistic (and in this case it looks like lava and I find myself wondering how we are all walking on lava and not dying) - at the very least throw in a few spots of a different texture blended on top, even if you do want this to be the main ground texture.

-Terrain smoothing. If you don't use the "blend" tool or maybe a bell curve raise, you're not going to get natural-looking terrain, I promise. You'll get these funny hills that look like they're made of sculpted paper or maybe by a new wave junkyard artist - whatever they are they will not look like anything you could expect to occur in the natural world.If the screenshots appeal to you, go ahead and give it a try.

-Mav