Eleazar's Terrain Improvements

[Eleazar]

And i'm back....

Great.

I'm not sure what technical questions you need answering at this point, but for animations, there is the new "builder" system... I convert the top level macros one by one as I need them, but if you plan to animate something, drop me a line and I'll adapt it for you

My WML questions are collected in this post, and marked off when answered.

The main one is the water transition thing. To make this water work and look good, we'll need 2 sets of animated transitions for water-to-water. One short transition (the one rhying made) for smoothing the difference between out-of-sync animating tiles of the same water type and one more gradual transition to put between different colors of water. As you've seen in trunk the current transitions are too abrupt. In my testing of more gradual transitions they tend to muddy up the animation. Does that sound do-able?

So:
1) do you still have and if so can you send me the files for the animated water before you chopped the transitions off? That will save me some time and decrease the chance of error.

2) Can i send you files with the transitions and the base all together to run your automatic transition chopper on? Any special requirements for the files?

3) What's the deal with villages? I can't change the base terrain on any of them with the editor. How come i can put whatever base i want under forests but not villages?

I believe this was rejected by the MP developers because of the vastly different stats combinations that could be created this way, in regards to movement costs and defense.

I'm not clear on the gameplay effects, but i think there's good reason to see if there isn't something that can be done. For instance. I went through some of the HttT maps to add in some of my terrains to see how they work on real maps. Northern Winter was a perfect candidate for my dead grass, except all the huts that aren't snowy have haloes of bright green grass.
Sure i could make a new "hut on dead grass" terrain, but we already have 30 "village" terrains, and we've now got 3 colors of grass and 3 colors of dirt, and i'm thinking about adding new cobbles, other hills, who knows what else in the future-- the number of reasonable combinations gets absurd really fast.

Also Alarantalara think's he has figured out how to do it so it doesnt' mess up MP:

[Gambit]

I believe this was rejected by the MP developers because of the vastly different stats combinations that could be created this way, in regards to movement costs and defense.

There ought be some differentiation between making something possible to do, and actually doing it in mainline/default.
I'm very sorry if I'm not supposed to be posting here.

[Eleazar]

Gambit, i don't fault you for posting here, but the discussion of villages is getting scattered over too many topics.
I think it best that further discussion of how villages should work occur in this thread.
Once a decision is reached, we might have more to deal with in this thread.

[Eleazar]

To throw this out there a little early so we can think about it.

With animated water-land transition waves we will need to standardize water transitions somewhat, i.e. they need to come out to about the same degree. There might be a few different versions-- i.e. perhaps a cliff-like transition for hills, caves, castles, and mountains, and a gentle beach-like transition for other terrains.

If we do this we can take another convenient step of standardization-- to put the landward water's edge as a separate transition from the terrain's transition. That sounds really confusing, so an illustration:

order.jpg (39.39 KiB) Viewed 5934 times

"A" indicates animated elements.

The point is we would no longer need to make a new land-to-water transition for every terrain. We'd make a few land-ending at water transitions, (in this example a beach) carefully devised to work with the animated beach waves. Since there's only a few we can put extra effort into making them good. Then a terrain's normal transitions could (in many cases) simply be layered over it.


While we're at it we need to work on the amount that land-to-water transitions eat into the water hexs. It's silly to have a "water" hexs that transitions have eaten into so badly that the hex is mostly land-- but we do in many cases.

[Boucman]

sounds good, we need to clean up a bit our layering and document much better the macros

I intend to do this at some point, but overall this idea sounds good, so let's go for it

[Eleazar]

I have some freelance jobs i need to pay attention to now, so i won't be producing tiles like i was, but i'll try to stay in touch, so that other folk's work on terrain, especially the water isn't hindered.

[Boucman]

that would be nice...

the thing that blocks me the most on the terrain front is... art review, I don't feel confident enough to juge/commit art. I'm a coder after all...

so (from my point of view) if you can do only one thing, please stay active on the forum, and explicitely post when you think something is ready for commit...

this is of course up to you, but that's something I would appreciate, I really don't consider my artistic jugement worth anything

[Jetrel]

I'll reiterate what boucman said.

If you could just pop in every week or two to keep an eye on terrain stuff, it's very helpful.

[Eleazar]

Jetryl, Boucman, yeah that was the general idea. Though i feel better about telling people what to do without generating content myself, since i was explicitly asked to.

[Eleazar]

further, quick color harmonization:

Removed the grass from the castle-to-water edge transition, and adjusted the color to match the dirt better. Obviously grass doesn't make sense in all seasons and locations.

[freim]

I have some freelance jobs i need to pay attention to now, so i won't be producing tiles like i was, but i'll try to stay in touch, so that other folk's work on terrain, especially the water isn't hindered.

Do you plan to finish all the terrain you have added?

No transitions have been updated to match the new tiles that I can see.

[Eleazar]

Do you plan to finish all the terrain you have added?

No transitions have been updated to match the new tiles that I can see.

Off the top of my head the 3 grass terrains are the only ones that don't exactly match their transitions (though it is fairly close).

I'd like to redo flat terrain transitions in a standardized way, so they work better with water and aren't so square probably along these lines. But the idea needs more testing before changing hundreds of transition files.
http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 56#p427756

[freim]

Do you plan to finish all the terrain you have added?

No transitions have been updated to match the new tiles that I can see.

Off the top of my head the 3 grass terrains are the only ones that don't exactly match their transitions (though it is fairly close).

I'd like to redo flat terrain transitions in a standardized way, so they work better with water and aren't so square probably along these lines. But the idea needs more testing before changing hundreds of transition files.
http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 56#p427756

Sounds like a good idea. I hope we can work out a way of layering it so we might reduce the number of transition variants also, it gets mind-numbingly tedious to make new terrain with the amount of transitions that has to be made.

[Eleazar]

A quick color harmonization of the my old wood bridge.
It's still ugly, but it's not so noticeably ugly now.

[Eleazar]

I created an impassable snowy mountain terrain. Easiest terrain i ever made.

I also went through HttT and UtBS two of the campaigns i'm most familiar with and added in terrain aliases where appropriate.

I added Snowy mountains to HttT's "Snow Plains" which i realized afterwards does technically effect Mov/Def.. but i'm not sure if it effects if significantly. It looks much better with the snowy mountains. Is this a problem?

Also messing with these maps has highlighted that we need a version of the hills in fall/winter colors. Relatively the hills are very green next to the dry grass.