Blizzard cliffs!

I'm a little bewildened now, cause I get the feeling that Blizzard cliffs ain't good enough for todays maps. Well for functionality I cant picture anything better, and if used properly I don't find it ugly either.

What is this trying to make things photorealistic in a heavyly cartoonish game? As long as terrain is not flat, squared, symmetrical and ugly, what's wrong with some "platform"-cliffs? They've always been part of the game.


Please help me out here, and explain to me alternatives.

You can use a nice rock tile and make it unwalkable. Then use raise/lower terrain to make it look like a cliff. This approach actually doesn't look all that bad.

But technically it's not the same, right? Considering sight modifiers, hit modifers etc.
I understand this approach for cinematics, but not for a map focused on strategy....

Well when you can compromise the sight/evasion modifiers then it works pretty much the same. Typically what happens with cliffs is your attacks by default have a 25% chance to miss (by default) if the cliff level you are on is less than the cliff level the unit you are attacking is on.

But the questions remains to me. Is it worth it?
Why not use the game as it is, and considering the graphics is cartoonish already. The cliffs doesn't look horrible either, if used right. Flat, boxed maps is what hurts my eyes the most.

Because most cliffs look awkwardly ugly. Unless used properly (Rao Dao Zao, Archian. etc)

They're completely fine as long as they have a strategic purpose in the map imo.

It sucks that most people just spam them.

My only beef (only) with Blizzard is the way their pathing extends well beyond their visual edge on the bottom. This can easily be compensated for with rocks and trees.

People that diss Blizzard cliffs are snobs. An unwalkable and horribly stretched terrain tile is far more ugly to me than a slightly over-the-top ruggedy cliff.

Precisely. It's also a lot harder to make the stretched and raised terrain tile look good, not to mention the effort it takes to uniformly stretch it around to where you need it.

Additionally, the attack/evasion modifiers are lost. Modifying them, as xombie kept saying, doesn't do anything because you can only modify how high of a % there is to miss; not whether terrain height or cliff height is a factor.

Then comes the sight modifiers, pathing modifiers... It's all a hassle. For a cinematic, perhaps. A normal map? No.

You do realise that you can make your own cliffs, right? Just edit the cliff models so they're further outwards, and have a rocker top half, use them as doodads or some shit like that.

Agreed with Wulfv. If I'm playing a map I couldn't give a shit if you used blizzard cliffs as long as they were spammed around retardedly.

Ditto.

Yes, and I have tried; but editing over a hundred individual cliff segments is a task a little too daunting, even for me.

That's why the Vertex Modifier exists, you can copy and paste a segment, attach it to the side and then screw with the mesh just a bit. This cuts the actual workload & number of imports in half, or more if you decide to use only three long cliff models.