ruin teaser

Post by **Darth Fool** » February 17th, 2005, 4:26 pm

The image below is (hopefully) the last teaser for the ruin graphics. All 360+ graphics are done. There are ~40 some revised un-ruined castle graphics that take care of some glitches from the exploder and make all the graphics contain complete towers. This also transitions to having the complete wall below a tower included with it, instead of just half. there are also new keep to keep images that enable multi-hex keeps. there are ~150 ruined graphics. Each one was individually ruined, so they are all unique, no reflections. There are a total of ~200 sunken ruins where the bottom of all towers and the walls were masked to a 50% alpha. This results in a very nice sunken effect that conveniently works with any water graphic, although it makes no sense for deep water. The sunken graphics do not have any new ruining effects, only the change to alpha. All that is left to do is to integrate the changes to the various .cfg files with the latest versions, hunt down a mysterious missing image warning, despite no missing images, and release it upon the world. The current .cfg files use x,y, and z, in the maps for the ruined, sunken-ruin (alias of castle and coast), and swamp-ruin (alias of castle and swamp) but this may change if a dev decides to incorporate these into the main stream. Enjoy, and you may start proposing where these should be used.

Post by **Jetrel** » February 17th, 2005, 5:04 pm

Sunken ruins? SUNKEN RUINS?!

MERMEN CASTLE! YES! AWESOME!!

It would be nice to use such a thing for the mermen, in campaigns. I vote for its inclusion in mainline - both the ruined castle, and the sunken ruins.

Not to mention that this would be a grand old thing for scenario designers, not unlike frame's desert tiles.

Sweeet.

Post by **Quensul** » February 17th, 2005, 5:10 pm

Wow! These are seriously cool - it would be great if they could make it into mainline.

Post by **Sangel** » February 17th, 2005, 5:24 pm

I can see numerous places for ruined castles in HttT - say, in The Valley of Death - as well as other mainline and user scenarios.

And sunken ruins? Very, very cool. Nothing says "this castle is old" quite like it having been flooded by the sea.

Many thumbs up, Darth.

Post by **quartex** » February 17th, 2005, 5:56 pm

Both the normal and the sunken ruin tiles look really cool. If we can make some coral villages (for shallow water) then we really can have some fun mermen maps. I'm lookin forward to adding the ruined castles to my campaign. Great work, Darth Fool.

scott · Post by **scott** » February 17th, 2005, 7:52 pm

I suggest making the swamp castle more opaque. It doesn't look right having a transparent swamp with castle underneath. It looks great for the water but the swamp maybe should have parts of the castle sticking up in such a way that you can't see beneath the surface as much.

Post by **Quensul** » February 17th, 2005, 8:01 pm

scott wrote:I suggest making the swamp castle more opaque. It doesn't look right having a transparent swamp with castle underneath. It looks great for the water but the swamp maybe should have parts of the castle sticking up in such a way that you can't see beneath the surface as much.

Hmm... I would actually disagree. Maybe the swamp shouldn't be quite so transparent (since the water's murkier), but in most swamps I've been in, you can still see through the water somewhat, at least until you stir up the muck (yes, I know, WINR, but still). Plus, the current setup lets a sunken castle blend well across the swamp/water boundary without odd height changes of the wall.

Post by **Darth Fool** » February 17th, 2005, 10:06 pm

scott wrote:I suggest making the swamp castle more opaque. It doesn't look right having a transparent swamp with castle underneath. It looks great for the water but the swamp maybe should have parts of the castle sticking up in such a way that you can't see beneath the surface as much.

Well, once the sunken-ruins are made available, it would be straight-forward to modify them in a few ways. The current version is a result of the realization that if I did a semi transparent body, I could reuse the sunken graphic for both the coast, swamp, and any other water, without having to do special graphics for each and without having to do special versions and have the side benefit that if someone improves the water/swamp graphics, I don't have to do anything

My nod to the opacity of the swamp was to not make a sunken castle floor, but just leave it as a swamp. With a great deal of effort (more than I am willing to do at this time) one could go through the 200 odd sunken graphics and make them have more of a fade in effect by decreasing the alpha levels even more at the bottoms of walls. This would be a lot of work. When I was up to speed, I could do the 50% alpha on a sunken-ruin graphic in about 20-30 seconds. I imagine that this would take a lot longer. One might be able to come up with some code that grabs the alpha channel and then selects the already alpha'd pixels and applies some height filter on it, but this would have to be rather clever, as angled walls at the same height in the graphic are at different depths. Probably the right thing to do would be to count the number of alpha'd pixels above the pixel being considered, use that as a measure of the depth that the pixel is at, and then scale accordingly. A lot of work and you would still need to hand scan to make sure that the things didn't end up looking strange...

Post by **Quensul** » February 17th, 2005, 10:21 pm

I've been doing a lot of Gimp scripting lately for Wercator; if I understand what you're saying correctly, I think it should be doable. A bit tricky, as you say, but doable. If you would like to post an example Photoshop/Gimp/whatever file for a sunken castle, I can take a go at it next time I get fed up with a Wercator bug.

Post by **Darth Fool** » February 17th, 2005, 10:33 pm

Quensul wrote:I've been doing a lot of Gimp scripting lately for Wercator; if I understand what you're saying correctly, I think it should be doable. A bit tricky, as you say, but doable. If you would like to post an example Photoshop/Gimp/whatever file for a sunken castle, I can take a go at it next time I get fed up with a Wercator bug.

I will post at least one tomorrow (all my wesnothing is done on my home machine.) I may post the whole lot if I get sufficiently motivated tonight.

Post by **turin** » February 17th, 2005, 10:58 pm

you use the "castle exploder" to create these images, right? Then couldn't you apply the alpha to the one image, then explode the image...?

Sorry, I must be missing something, but I can't think what...

Post by **Dave** » February 17th, 2005, 11:07 pm

This looks very cool indeed....

I can just see the player's castle in Bay of Pearls being partially flooded by the sea, with the player having 'salvaged' the few hexes that haven't been flooded. That would look really cool

David

Post by **Darth Fool** » February 17th, 2005, 11:12 pm

turin wrote:you use the "castle exploder" to create these images, right? Then couldn't you apply the alpha to the one image, then explode the image...?

Sorry, I must be missing something, but I can't think what...

No, I don't use the castle exploder. It creates individual images that each have bits and pieces of towers. Not a problem for the original castle, but it causes problems with the keep. So, each of these was edited by hand. First I took the old castle graphics and undid the effects of the exploder. Each new image contains only 1 tower, perhaps 1/2 walls at the same height as the tower, and perhaps a whole wall beneath the tower. This eliminated at least one graphics glitch caused by the exploder in the regular castles, and a whole lot in new ruins where I have many images for the same tower orientation. For castles that are the same size or smaller then the current castle (not the current keep), the exploder still works. One could come up with special mask for each individual large castle, but that would be just as much work. Ultimately, I just used Wesnoth with ":refresh" as my imploder. Works perfectly!

MadMax · Post by **MadMax** » February 17th, 2005, 11:22 pm

Impressive.

Na'enthos · Post by **Na'enthos** » February 18th, 2005, 1:58 am

Jetryl wrote:Sunken ruins? SUNKEN RUINS?!

MERMEN CASTLE! YES! AWESOME!!

It would be nice to use such a thing for the mermen, in campaigns. I vote for its inclusion in mainline - both the ruined castle, and the sunken ruins.

Not to mention that this would be a grand old thing for scenario designers, not unlike frame's desert tiles.

Sweeet.

Hehe.. as much as I agree on the looks of the new tiles presented, I doubt a castle would fit for the mermen.. I don't mind if it's used, and I have no idea if anybone could come up with and make something more fitting (I keep thinking of the 'water houses'.. what are they.. reefs? Rocks?).

*shrugs*

Well.. never mind. Cool stuff, Darth Fool!