On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 01:45:34AM +0100, Michal wrote: > >For the U shaped tiles, and maybe even the corner ones, it might look > >more realistic if the beach corners were less sharp. I don't know how > >far into the center of the tile the edge art can impinge, but personally > >I'd love to see some artistic license taken. So for example, dotting in > >some micro-islands here and there, sand bars, haystack rocks, sea > >cliffs, etc. The beaches give a lot of character to the overall map. > > > >Also, I notice there are even and odd variants for tiles. I suppose > >that's so the compositor doesn't lay down two obviously identical tile > >arts together? Is it limited to just two variants? It might be fun to > >infrequently throw in some random alternative to the tile. So for > >instance some of the U beaches take the appearance of a sheltered bay > >with rounded edges, others a mess of little islets, etc. > > > >Bryce > > > > What You just wrote, is EXACTLY my plan :)
That's awesome. :-) > (This is why we have the connection sensitive borders, it is why I requested > them, and to finalize the deal and give freeCol a pro look at last, I need > to make the custom border for each terrain, and You need to implement it > (the shape of the beach doesn't matter all that much, when the dispersion > tile border which separates it form the land proper is always a > straight line :)) > > First things first though, I need to make a one proper set of terrain-aware > beaches in which every tiles fit together perfectly and river deltas fit ALL > terrains, all beaches and the ocean together. Once that's done we star > making it fancier. Nice. Can I say I love that you're doing this, because with games good artwork is extremely vital. And for a game like FreeCol the majority of the art users will see is in the terrain graphics. > I don't know exactly how the compositor works either, but I got this idea: > If we could add a possibility of having an open number of variation of a > given tile/beach to the catalog. for example: edge10_even1, edge10_even2 > etc. So if I wake up at night and have a vision of grassland with rocky > beaches or just a single piece of a terrain I can add those, like the red > American or Australian desert or a prairie center tile with a lonely tree on > it or whatever, it could be added to the graphics folder without changes in > program. I can't speak for freecol but I can say that from other games I've worked on, usually the majority of the difficulty in supporting complex tile graphics is by far in the making of the tile artwork. The programming side *tends* to be more straightforward. In general, when truly awesome tile art exists, some programmer or other will get lured into implementing changes to support it. > And we could switch and choose between the available variations of > there tile in Editor for example by a right click. (It would add tremendous > power to editing and scenario - then I could make even the largest maps like > the popular America large look natural. That reminds me a bit of the starcraft map editor, which I lost many, many hours to after college. :-) > We wouldn't need to create new terrain types or mess with text files > to add new visual varieties to the game. IS this possible? Actually... The even/odd notation makes me think that tile artwork is selected programmatically. So, if that's the case, there may not be a field in the software for specifying the artwork collateral ID# to use, so that would need added. Bryce ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Android apps run on BlackBerry 10 Introducing the new BlackBerry 10.2.1 Runtime for Android apps. Now with support for Jelly Bean, Bluetooth, Mapview and more. Get your Android app in front of a whole new audience. Start now. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=124407151&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freecol-developers mailing list Freecol-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freecol-developers
