Massive Multiplayer map made

I've been working on a huge map for use in a massive multiplayer game and have finished it's first incarnation. This map is called continental shift and has 106 Build Points for a maximum of that many players. It is a very approximate version of a map of the world composed entirely out of a custom tileset of colors. Althought it is huge I believe that the map is also suitable for 50 players and will be fun.

Gallery of new maps

Ever since the map editor has been in a de-facto completed state I have been dabbling with creating different variations of map that would be played when Phalanx gets completed. I will just show you a few of the maps that have been made with the current tileset we have to give everyone an idea of what these maps will look like:

Ancient Greece

This map is an approximation of a map of ancient Greece. These are many islands (hundreds) that weren't put in because it would crowd the map too much but this map is already a pretty large map sporting 13 players maximum.

North America

This map was an experiment with using a custom tileset but turned into a colorful map rendition of North America with the 3 primary countries (Canada, the United States, and Mexico) clearly color coded. It also includes an approximated carribbean and is fun for about 8 players.

Islands

This map was actually based on a concept art picture of Phalanx I had rendered in photoshop. Since then I have decided to turn it into a nice small 4 player map. Islands lets players compete for the very scarce resource of land and makes naval dominance the primary tatic as no land unit is safe from a sea to land attack.

Mainland Race

This map works by setting all players in a start point in one section of the map. The object of the beginning game is to race your units to the mainland and establish yourself before your enemies do. This creates a more interesting scenerio in terms of game play as many different tatics in the beginning game can alter the course of the whole game.

Map Editor done and map respository up

Here is a preview of the map editor with the new map screen overlaid. The state of the map editor rignt now is what we are going t0 use until we finish the game play. At that point, we will take a look at the map editor and see what else we can do to polish it off. The next item of work will be diving into the network code and getting back into the server and client interactions that we began with. In the following weeks we should have something along the lines of a server capable of logging in users and chatroom interactions.

Getting back to maps in general I set up a map respository on the google code site that will house many user generated maps. This will allow players to download common maps over http rather than rely too heavily on the Phalanx server. Phalanx servers will still serve maps not in the repository but users will primarily check the repository first.

As far as the tile set contest is going. I have decided to give 2 weeks more time because there have been interest in it but writing the tiles is more involved than I thought it would be.

UPDATE: Because google code has a no-delete policy I switched the repository address to http://xmpp.bluefishtech.net/phalanxrepo/ and some of the maps are already up.