Malevolent Castle

[turin]

Why should the windows be on the outside? That would be really stupid construction, if you were trying to build a defensive formation. I would put them on the inside.

But JW is right about one thing - whichever you choose, it needs to be consistent.



With the stone wall, I would say it is a bit too high. Right now, it looks like a normal-sized wall with spikes on top. IMHO, it should look like a rather small wall (maybe 2/3rds the current size) with the spikes making up the remaining third, plus another third. (Bringing the total height of the wall to 4/3rds that of a normal wall, but the stone wall itself is only half of that.)

Put simply: Take off the top stack of bricks. Make the walls two stacks high, not three. The spikes are a good length, but would of course have to be shifted down.

[Cuyo Quiz]

What about making it a cathedral-vitral window, with metal bars in some sort of shape?. This could explain the great size, and the glow may look better.

Of course, if the wtowers are getting done wall-height, that makes windows useless.

[jonadab]

Sorry for the delay. I inadvertently allowed real life to interfere with Wesnoth. Shame on me.

Anyway, here's a quick shot with a shorter front wall, and a couple of the towers flipped horizontally. You can see the rear and side walls at the old height for comparison. I'm thinking the spikes on top of the shorter wall should be just a _little_ bit taller, perhaps.

Regarding the two middle towers (middle left and middle right), should they be flipped the other way horizontally? What about the back ones? I think the front ones are right.

TODO list:
* Try out ivy and/or moss on one of the towers. (Edit: ivy doesn't seem very distinctive at Wesnoth's size scale. Perhaps moss or lichen? Or I could make the ivy at a much larger scale (like, three leaves per tower), but that would probably just look silly.)
* Figure out something better for the tops of the towers.
* If the new wall height is better, do the side walls at that height.
* Try a differently-shaped window, and/or on the other side of the tower
* Maybe a broken tower in one place?
* Differentiate the keep in some fashion. (Perhaps it should have the walls at the original, taller size? Either that or some difference in the towers.)
* Different lighting/shading adjustments for the towers in different positions?
* Draw a tower at a different orientation (closer to oblique?) for the side positions.
* Flooring is needed.
* Eventually it should cast shadows.

JW: regarding vertical alignment of the towers, each item (tower, wall, window, ...) is on its own layer (except the enormous ones where the actual editiong is done at 6x actual size -- those ones each consist of numerous layers, obviously), so sliding something a pixel or so one direction or another is an easy fine-tuning to do later.

[turin]

The new height looks a lot better, I would say. I don't know about making the spikes taller - perhaps a good idea, perhaps not.

The problem with the side towers is this - imagine that they are cylinders, standing on end. You need to rotate them 60 degrees clockwise, so that they are oriented differently from the bottom and top walls. That would make them look different, but it would make them function the same in the castle, as opposed to now, where they function differently.

[Skizzaltix]

PS: Now I know what the towers remind me of... LEGOs!!!

Yeah, that's what I thought too...

[jacobolus]

Note that vertical lines in the bricks on the side walls should still be vertical. you need to skew the bricks, not rotate them.

[jonadab]

The problem with the side towers is... You need to rotate them 60 degrees.

JW said something about this as well, and I've now added it to the TODO list, above, as well as flooring.

Meanwhile, I've started work on moss, and I think moss is going to be very doable, much more representable than ivy in the number of pixels we have to work with here. I'm attaching another in-progress snapshot (updated), cheifly to solicit comments on this first draft of the moss (although other comments are still welcome). You can see the moss on the left and the ivy at the right, both at my halfway-scaled-down size and also scaled down to game size.

It has also come to my attention that my angles are slightly off for the side walls, relative to the shape of the hex. I needed to redo the side walls anyway, so I'm glad I caught this before I did so. (Update: did that now.)

Also, has everyone else stopped working on their versions? I think the last time I saw someone else post an image was on page 1...

[Sapient]

Yeah, I was considering doing my own version that was more similar to the image I posted, but I already have too many projects I'm working on (and Art is the lesser of my skills).

I like the moss!'

Also, with the skull feature, you have to consider what it will look like when it is a multihex castle: having all skulls on one side and none on the other might be strange. That's why it would look best as a "random" terrain feature.

[shevegen]

I like the last version with the plants.
I believe before people lose momentum it would be nice to take that last version,
it looks good enough for me.

[turin]

I like the blank towers.

[jonadab]

Here's my first attempt at a rotated tower for the side. Aside from the fact that the bricks obviously aren't the same as on the other tower and the walls, there is I think something additional wrong with this tower, but I can't put my finger on it. (I don't mean the missing top crenelations; various people expressed dislike for the lego look, so the tops of both towers still need to be redone, at some point, probably with a spiky look.) I'm sure I can redo the bricks, and make them look like the others, but I don't think that's the whole deal. So, help me out here, what else is wrong with this side tower?

[Ranger M]

It look smaller than the others, remember that when you rotate it the side which now faces towards you is longer than it was when it didn't

[Kestenvarn]

I didn't mention it earlier - wanting to see where you were taking this - but the sides of each wall and tower also look like plastic; not just the top. Too uniform and shiny, if you catch my meaning.

Might need a bit of texturing to roughen up and make them look more realistic. Also, adding braces of dark metal along the wall meant as reinforcement, like some fantasy castles have, can add a menacing look as well.