Eleazar's Terrain Improvements

[Eleazar]

Further enhancements to the bank. (currently available only on ice). The main difference is less encroachment, though i also tried to make the bumps look more irregular. I'm pretty happy with how this looks and the amount of space it takes up. I'm considering this the beta version. I'm going to leave it in and stare at it for a while, but i don't think anything significant will change.

Except i'll look into adding a shadow.

[Alarantalara]

I realized the castle section of terrain WML is pretty complicated. I may be mistaken, but it seems that some of that complexity is due to trying to prevent castles from transitioning openly with castles of other types.

Anybody know why different castle styles transition as they do?

While I don't know the original reason for the design, I can think of a few reasons that it may have occurred.

First, there may not have been a standard method for cutting castles originally. The dwarven castle is definitely cut different and will not overlap as nicely as the image you have.

Second, the north and south walls are split between the two sides. It may be difficult to ensure that a wall doesn't change type halfway along, since some of those may look very bad.

Third, there are special transition pieces for castle-keep borders. They make the second problem effectively certain to occur.

Fourth, the keeps do want that extra wall to be present, which likely affected the current macro design. The current design assumes the presence of walls dividing castle sections.

There are several ways to achieve what you want for castle layout.
First, the internal dividing walls can be removed by changing the parameters to existing macros. One new macro would be needed to handle the new corners. The dwarven castle, with its odd cutting, would have to be left alone. The encampment may look odd in some directions, mostly when it is in a southern position, so it may also need to be skipped.

Second and more dramatic, new transition tiles could be made for all the corners and the wall_transition2 macro used for each. This could add over 3000 new tiles, half of which could be blank (and so left out for a final total of about 1500). It would allow for custom transitions between each castle type and would eventually look amazing. The workload and disk space required probably makes it impractical. I have actually done this for the case of encampment-cave wall and posted the result some time ago here.

Third and simplest (because it requires the least new code and no new art), would be to do the second while only renaming tiles and only choosing the tile based on one of the two castle types. It would add about 200 pngs all of which are already drawn.

Fourth, the castle tiles could be recut into separate towers and walls. This gains the some of the appearance benefit of the second solution in that the walls would always match the terrain they were near. It may also reduce the total number of tiles because of simplified transitions with keeps. However, it also requires more work than most of the other solutions and may not work well with the current dwarven castle, since it currently has no towers at some of the joints.

The first and third solutions would both look exactly like your image. They do not resolve the first and second issues I mentioned.

Edit: I forgot to mention cave walls. They use the same macro set as the castles. This may also have contributed to the current design, since again the wall should not go away when next to other walls. It also may cause problems with the fourth solution, though they may be no worse than the existing ugly terrain edges when near castles.

[doofus-01]

First, there may not have been a standard method for cutting castles originally. The dwarven castle is definitely cut different and will not overlap as nicely as the image you have.

I think the dwarf castle cutting style was the original. At least until relatively recently, the exploder & castle-cutter tools had scripts and examples that were of simpler human castles, and every castle wall was cut in the center, not just the horizontal ones. The towers were also shorter, because the mask the cutter used would lop off the tops of the current ones.

Seems you misunderstand the core problems (which granted i didn't go into in the previous post). I could pretty easily make similar banks tailored to each of the basic castle-types, if that was all there was too it. But..

OK, I think I get it now. It's tempting to try to come up with an alternate transition that would work for those three, but I don't really see how to do it and I don't know how difficult it is to do the water animations. I do know how difficult/tedious it will be to redraw the three castle types though, so I'm going to stay away from that. The orc keep would probably need to be completely redesigned. Fixing the orc castle seems reasonable though.

[Eleazar]

Eureka!

I got the double-sided grass-to-grass transitions working as i wanted them to. Currently the effect is a little blurry on the borders, but that's due to the low quality of my transitions-- only 6 per grass color.

[Sapient]

Not sure if you were waiting for feedback or not, but that grass looks fantastic. For some reason it kinda reminds me of moss, but in a good way.

My only concern would be to see how much it encroaches on other terrains if they are just a single hex surrounded by grass.

[Eleazar]

Not sure if you were waiting for feedback or not, but that grass looks fantastic. For some reason it kinda reminds me of moss, but in a good way.

My only concern would be to see how much it encroaches on other terrains if they are just a single hex surrounded by grass.

Thanks.

That would be a legitimate concern, but i only use this long transition with other flat terrains, i.e. grass and dirt. It looks like this.

I'm probably going to end up with 3 different transitions for each grass color--
very abrupt for water's edge,
long for grass and dirt, and
medium for everything else, mostly sand and snow.

[Zerovirus]

Holy crap. That grass is an entire order of magnitude improved since you started work.

[Eleazar]

Only one order of magnitude?

Here's a little thing that's been bugging me.
The grid doesn't draw well on the edges.

Grid.jpg (52.31 KiB) Viewed 4105 times

If the terrain was snow rather than sand, the hexes marked with an X would have no visible grid.

There were files for grid-top, and grid-bottom which apparently aren't actually used, and wouldn't have solved the problem for non-square maps anyway. I deleted them

The solution is simple- the grid needs the 6 basic transitions. Then all hexes will get a light and dark line on all sides, so at least one is visible no matter the terrain.

These files are in trunk, but don't currently do anything, i guess the code needs to be tweaked.

FR filed.

[Eleazar]

Here's a proof of concept (in game) shot of my castle-to chasm idea.

It's actually pretty simple-- i didn't need to use corner transitions, normal trans work fine.

I'll need to put in the work to actually make it look good, and do a set for Lava, but this idea looks like it will be much easier than i expected.

floating.jpg (82.81 KiB) Viewed 4007 times

This also bodes well for my plan to de-uglify this transition:

mountains.jpg (53.09 KiB) Viewed 4003 times

[rhyging5]

Eleazar,

For the "river transition", I suggest a reflex with more profundity and a bit of animated scum. Let me say that I'm working on waves and water transitions, really I want to help with this.

[Eleazar]

For the "river transition", I suggest a reflex with more profundity and a bit of animated scum. Let me say that I'm working on waves and water transitions, really I want to help with this.

I'm not sure i understand what you are trying to say. Remember there are a lot of people on these forums that can speak two languages. It would help if you also wrote you comments in your native language, so someone could translate whenever your meaning isn't clear to me.

* First you should realized that the screenshot you are working from is not up-to-date. I've changed the coastline since then.

* "a reflex with more profundity" I guess that you mean "a deeper reflection". If so, i agree, there should be more reflection. My later versions have more reflection, though i'm not yet happy with that effect.


Note: Earlier i had intended to use a totally different coastline for the cave terrains, but now i believe i can keep the same shape, and only change the texture and color, so animations you make for this will also work in the cave.

[Eleazar]

I added in a cleaner, brighter cobbled road terrain for those that don't want to use the new browner cobbles.

I also uploaded some more grass transitions, so the set is not so incomplete.

Those flowers really bug me for some reason, i don't know if it's the mix of colors or what.

[Blarumyrran]

The ones in the white square look fine to me, the ones in the red square looks like a 3d ellipsoid to me because of the placement of the brighter flowers.

[Eleazar]

The ones in the white square look fine to me, the ones in the red square looks like a 3d ellipsoid to me because of the placement of the brighter flowers.

What's bothering me isn't so specific. I don't have many alternates or any transitions yet, so i'm not expecting the tiling to look great yet.

They just don't look natural, or even like flowers to me, i keep thinking of plastic confetti. I'm gonna try taking out the purple, or at least severely reducing it.

[rhyging5]

yeah my english is not good....but not enought bad to need someone else to try to explain me. Seems that you understood exactly what I mean.

About the screenshot I used, I'm know is not your definitive version...Only I have pretended to show "alternative" version of reflection. Seems that you feel I disturb your work. Then is better that you say what exactly want from me on these transitions art.