Eleazar's Terrain Improvements

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Eleazar
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by Eleazar »

Here's something rather awkward.
walls.jpg
Screenshot from 2 brothers.

The interior of the wall and cave wall should match.
And in recognition of that their shouldn't be transitions drawn between them. Can somebody take care of this second part?
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
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zookeeper
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by zookeeper »

Eleazar wrote:Screenshot from 2 brothers.

The interior of the wall and cave wall should match.
And in recognition of that their shouldn't be transitions drawn between them.
Well, you can easily make them now draw the transitions against each other, but that results in other IMO equally bad-looking gaps in the intersections of those two terrains. Unless someone draws up a new set of cavewall<->stonewall corner transitions, I think the best bet is to draw the transitions both ways like they are now but try to get the layering right. However...
Eleazar wrote:Can somebody take care of this second part?
Good luck with that. I took a look and as usual, it's quite beyond what I'm willing to subject myself to. :augh: The whole "builder" thing used for the stone walls that's completely different from how cavewalls work and how I need to track macro arguments through like four different calls is such a jarring task that thanks but no thanks. If I had thought of it sooner I'd have suggested re-doing the whole terrain graphics system to be more comprehensible and useable as a potential GSoC project. :hmm:
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Eleazar
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by Eleazar »

I was hoping it might be a quick fix. If not, there are certainly plenty of more common and more grevious issues to worry about.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
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Eleazar
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by Eleazar »

OK, i went through the maps of several campaigns, using the new terrain aliases where appropriate. The most common thing that bugged me was how the normal hills look next to dry grass or dirt, or on the edge of a desert (UtBS). Our moderately green hills just don't work for fall or snow-less winter. So i made a dry-grass colored set of hills (Hhd).

I'm not sure i got the right color, or even if we really need 2 new colors to get the job done. But there is it for now.


Doing this gave me an idea about what we could do for desert mountains, or possibly making the mountains mesh well with other terrains. Instead of redoing the whole thing, simply make a desert appropriate transition for the bottom of the mountains. It's only the bottom fringe where any disruptive green occurs. Possibly the right mountain fringe transition could be used automatically, so we could have a nice big multi-hex mountain, that transitions nicely to green on one side, and to desert, or winter, or whatever on the other side.

Feasable?
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hills.jpg
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Boucman
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by Boucman »

the whole cave-wall, cave-lit etc... is a bit of a mess right now.

once I finish documenting the macros and have a good grasp of what's going on, i'll try to make things better...
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Eleazar
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by Eleazar »

Here's a serious glitch. The orcish keep is covering up the heads of tall units to the south
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Picture 4.png
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Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
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zookeeper
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by zookeeper »

Eleazar wrote:Here's a serious glitch. The orcish keep is covering up the heads of tall units to the south
That doesn't happen in 1.8 though, so it's some trunk change that made it happen.
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Eleazar
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by Eleazar »

zookeeper wrote:
Eleazar wrote:Here's a serious glitch. The orcish keep is covering up the heads of tall units to the south
That doesn't happen in 1.8 though, so it's some trunk change that made it happen.
I took the screenshot with my hybrid 1.8.1 binary with data/core and data/campaigns added from trunk.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
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Eleazar
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by Eleazar »

State of the Transitions:
big trans.jpg
Not counting castles and water, there are about 14 different sets of transitions. I'm lumping virtually identical transitions together, i.e. all the dirt variants have the same transition shape, colored appropriately.

Many of them are wider than they need to be. They stick out 6-10 pixels from the corners before they seriously start to blend with the surrounding terrain. Unfortunately Biggerism seems to be occurring in terrain, the newest castles are significantly wider.

When done right wider transitions can look nice, but in many cases we don't have room. Single hex wide water gets obliterated in most cases. We need to standardize land to water so we can use a single or a few sets of animated waves with all land terrains.

In some cases this will result in terrain that is a little more obviously hex-shaped, which might bug some people, but i don't think is bad. IMHO hexagons give a more naturalistic appearance than the long, straight edges some transitions provide.

I'm starting with the most common terrain flat:
Picture 1.png
Picture 1.png (70.22 KiB) Viewed 4141 times
Once i finish the multi-sided grass transitions, i'll start on the standard flat terrain to water transition which will fit right under that transition. it will look something like the castle-to-water cliff.

Any objections, concerns, or ideas should be stated before i do a huge amount of work.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
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doofus-01
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by doofus-01 »

Eleazar wrote:Unfortunately Biggerism seems to be occurring in terrain, the newest castles are significantly wider.
Sorry about that. If it is really a problem, I guess I can revise them. The orc castles are a pile of rocks and dirt, so it made sense to me that they were wide. For the sandcastles ... it just happened.
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Eleazar
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by Eleazar »

doofus-01 wrote:
Eleazar wrote:Unfortunately Biggerism seems to be occurring in terrain, the newest castles are significantly wider.
Sorry about that. If it is really a problem, I guess I can revise them. The orc castles are a pile of rocks and dirt, so it made sense to me that they were wide. For the sandcastles ... it just happened.
They are great looking castles, and i know castles aren't easy.

But they are too wide to work with any sane standard water-to-land transitions, which will become more obviously glitchy when we get animated waves. Of course desert castle may not often be used next to water.

I wouldn't try changing them now, but we'll see how the actually work with the new water's edge when we get it.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
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freim
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by freim »

Eleazar wrote:Any objections, concerns, or ideas should be stated before i do a huge amount of work.
Sounds ok to me to make them somewhat less wide. The only remark I have is that I think your example take it a bit to far. It would be good to try to break up the transition so it doesn't look so perfectly circular.
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Eleazar
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by Eleazar »

You're right. It needs to be more irregular, more broken up.

EDIT: more like this.
lessround.jpg
lessround.jpg (77.98 KiB) Viewed 5061 times
I'd also like to use random alternates for the most commonly used transitions.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
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Eleazar
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by Eleazar »

Reef vs. Ford
what we have here are two visually rather similar terrains.
  • Reef: Big rocks sticking out of the water
    Ford: Little rocks sticking out of the water.
Both need to be redone to work with the new animated water.

In violation of tradition, i think redoing the ford as really shallow water is the best way to proceed. I.e. as a transparent dirt-textured overlay. I'm having trouble with the WML, but i'll take one more crack at it.

The reef can stay as submerged and nearly submerged rocks.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
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Eleazar
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Re: Evaluation of Terrain and Improvements

Post by Eleazar »

OK, i couldn't make it work exactly as intended. I don't know precisely enough what all these macros do.

The plan is to have layering like this:

Code: Select all

All land bases and transitions
        ||
        \/

Transparent Ford Layer
        ||
        \/

       Water
What i got instead was:

Code: Select all

Transparent Ford Layer
        ||
        \/

All land bases and transitions
        ||
        \/

       Water
You can see the ford overlaying the ice near the red arrows.

I don't know how to get this to layer the way it's supposed to.

The ford tiles themselves are sort of a proof of concept, not a refined finished product. The same goes for the other new things visible in the screenshot. This ford has been committed to trunk.
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ford-issues.jpg
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Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
-> What i might be working on
Attempting Lucidity
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