Game map landscape critique

[Macattackk]

Here's an update pic based on critiques I've received. I made the beaches omni directional to fix a critique posted earlier. I'm going to do more work to polish them later but I feel this is a good start to illustrate the new look.

Thought I'd include some of the buildings that can be placed in the game in order to show off more of the new pixel perfect direction I'm taking.

Be sure to click on the larger image to get a pixel perfect view of it as it is scaled down a little bit when posted.

On the crisp versions, it becomes visible that many of your assets have a lower resolution that the tile size, and not even an exact multiple of it : Some pixel columns are doubled, some are not and the effect can be jarring.
If you can't get tiles that map 1:1 with screen pixels, well, you'd rather keep the overall filtering : it will help a lot blend images of different qualities together.
The "scattered dots" and "marsh symbols" seem to be overlays of a monochrome texture. It may not be too hard to increase their native resolution, and the result will look quite sharper, even with an overall filtering on top.
Strangely, the "stone deposits" seem to be natively higher-resolution than most of the rest, as it doesn't show the same kind of issue.

So I've spent a ton of time figuring out the best possible way to get things to be pixel perfect and I've settled on having images popping out of the landscape(which are flat to the screen) to be non-filtered images and everything that lays flat on the ground to be filtered. Since images that are flat against the ground are tipped at an angle, they will always have artifact lines when non filtered.

The good thing about this is that my mountains and buildings which stick out of the land look nice and crisp. I also made the rocks that lay flat on the ground to be non-filtered as it makes sense for them to be crisper as rocks and they have less of a visible artifact. They are not any higher resolution than anything else as you say, so its interesting that they seem that way.

If you're not zooming in and out, you should be able to match the size of the sprites displayed to be exactly the size of the images, which will give you better control over how they look in-game. What engine are you using? The only one I have experience with is Unity.

The green patches don't really read as trees, especially when compared to the scale of other parts of the map. Maybe try adding faint tree shapes?

Here, I did a quick sketch to demonstrate:
without trees:

I've made the mountains to be the exact right pixel/tile size for the screen and made them non-filtered to give them a crisper look. I also took some of your mountain tips and applied them. I think they look a lot better. I am going to have seasons in this game so I'll have more or less snow on the mountains based on what time of year it is. I'm using Unity for this.

I like it how itīs generated,
but could you make somethings with this little Lake Things?
Make some bigger together or such

Thank you. I actually have it so that lakes are able to combine together to form larger lakes via the tile system. Hopefully my new screenshots illustrate that.

[DawnBringer]

Interesting work. May I ask what's the basic algorithm you've used for the landscape creation?

[Macattackk]

Thank you! The terrain is tile based and is generated via random number ranges to determine what tiles become what land type. The first thing I make is the oceans in order to know what tiles are land and which are not. Then I create biomes which have different source amounts and size ranges. There's multiple forest biomes, mountain biomes, etc that get created around the map. Some biomes are able to render on top of each other, like forests and rocks, via a more complex shader. The only other part that isn't biome based are the rivers. They always source at mountains and try to snake their way to the nearest edge or ocean shore. Rivers have a shader which allows them to overlap other biome textures. I never have extra landscape game objects that get created on top of the base tiles. Everything uses a single game object tile with shaders that allow for texture overlapping.

[Macattackk]

Taking a break on the landscape and making the art better for disasters which strike it. I've added forest fires which only occur on fully forested areas and I've added hurricanes that strike on the shorelines. Any critiques on how I can make them look better/more realistic?

[Macattackk]

The previous ocean texture I was using was just an image I got off the internet and edited. So I made my own to replace it and did some messing around with the ocean shader code as well.

[yrizoud]

The moving shadows makes it really obvious that your raised sprites (mountains, buildings, and flat textures (dunes) don't follow the sunlight. If you don't don't have normal maps for those sprites, you should probably keep a fixed sun angle.

[Macattackk]

Yea that's a huge reason why the mountains still sort of look like cardboard cutouts. I have all the textures flat lit from the front but when the sun is at an angle it can look inaccurate. I'm thinking of implementing something like this using normal maps to my sprites:

[eishiya]

While normal maps will help with shadows on the mountains themselves, they will not help the cast shadows to look less flat. A fixed sun angle would help with that, but if the sun is fixed, you don't need normal maps and can just paint the textures to match the sun in the first place.

[Macattackk]

I really like the idea of having a full on time of day system to make the game view more dynamic and exciting. I'm going to try to make it work as well as possible. What I've done is lowered the resolution of the shadows in order to make them less defined so it seems like they aren't as flat. I hope this achieves the desired effect. Unfortunately it is causing some shadow flickering which I'll have to fix.

Here is a rough draft of using normal maps with the lighting system. Still haven't added the trees into the normal map, that would come in a more final polish pass.

[Macattackk]

Adding normal maps to more textures. Does it help make the scenery look more dynamic and alive?