[M](2) Havens Lagoon - Page 4

On December 04 2011 22:43 Barrin wrote:
You probably saw me say my personal acceptable openness ranges are from 3.5 to 4.2. This map having 4.04 openness you probably thought you were will within (my) acceptable range; this contradicting what I said before the analyzer images were posting where I predicted the openness to be "unprecedented" and I think "astronomical".

You got me! ^^ Actually no you didn't (sorry hehe ^^). I should have been more clear.

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"Bitty Dot Syndrome", aka "Bitty Dot Openness Problem"

I have noticed an interesting thing about the way the analyzer calculates the average openness. I believe it has the potential to be somewhat misleading. I am not very satisfied with accepting the "average openness" as an absolute this-is-how-it-is-PERIOD type of thing.

- Me, 13 months ago.
(click and read -^)

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This map has more bitty dot syndrome than any other map I've ever seen.



"but barrin! not all of those are bitty dots!"

No. No they're not. They don't have to be.


- Me, 13 months ago in the previously linked thread.

Basically what I meant here is that the dots don't have to be small for the syndrome to still take effect. However, larger dots are definitely better than smaller dots. The larger the dot the better. There's a bunch of large dots here (though I would call at least 4 of them smaller dots).

I don't know if I ever said it anywhere, but the best way to turn a dot into a non-dot is to connect it with the edge of the map air space. Kinda like you see here: + Show Spoiler +

Connecting it to the edge like that also happens to be the cure for bitty dot syndrome... but really only if the "dot" (read: line) that's connected to is big. By the way, rocks are one way to connect a dot to the edge of the map (and if done right is almost always enough to cure minor bitty dot syndrome, unfortunately this is severe bitty dot syndrome).

You might notice that the main-nat has these dots (lines) that connect to the edge. Literally every map has this though, so that's not really good enough (~).

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Oh yeah I forgot to mention that dimfish, the sole creator of the analyzer, agreed with me about the bitty dot syndrome (he called it the bitty dot openness problem) before I even made the previously linked post (he actually made a post about it on his sc2mapster page a week before I made my post, but I never saw his until after I made mine). He proposed a new calculation of openness that would basically ignore the bitty dot syndrome, he called it "Playable Density". Perhaps I was wrong about the Average Openness being astronomical and unprecedented, but I would put my reputation on the line to claim that the Playable Density is well on it's way to being that bad.

I think Playable Density would be so much better to put a range of acceptability on.

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Anyways, all that said, this map isn't nearly as imbalanced because of the openness as I thought it was at first (though I'm not convinced it's completely better).

You're doing better than many mapmakers though so don't worry. Keep it up!