Further work on terrain

[freim]

(The quote below is from another thread, I'm using it as an example to start the discussion in this one)

I don't know if you noticed, but some are the trees of the forest transition are floating in mid-air...

I'm quite sure he has noticed. The thing is, the more gfx we make, the harder it will get to make everything work with everything else.

We basicly have 3 options:

1. Make a gazilliion special case transitions meaning we will eventually get completely bogged down and get nowhere.

2. Make the transitions so bland and generic that they will work reasonably well everywhere. This will look quite ok, but hardly never great. (this is where we are now more or less).

3. People just have to accept that not every terrain will look 100% next to every other. This will allow us to make more exciting terrain, more specialiced transitions that will look good against terrain that it is supposed to look good against, and perhaps less well for "weird" combinations.

We already have some cases of #3.

Fx gfx drawn with the castle WML code will overlap/end up behind certain other terrain/buildings. Fx castle<-> village, bridge.

Another one is cave wall. With the lack of an above ground unpassable terrain map makers now use this extensively. This was obviously never intended to be used for other than underground maps, and will basicly always look like crap when used like this.

Opinions?

[Woodwizzle]

How about option 4: A revamp of the texture layering engine. This would require coders working with input from artists, however the end result could have all the pros and none of the cons of the other options. It would just take some doin' is all.

This may also be a good excuse to move to an opengl based engine. so supported hardware could better render multiple layers. We could also get to play with things like parallaxing mmmmmmmmm delicious. =)

[freim]

How about option 4: A revamp of the texture layering engine. This would require coders working with input from artists, however the end result could have all the pros and none of the cons of the other options. It would just take some doin' is all.

This may also be a good excuse to move to an opengl based engine. so supported hardware could better render multiple layers. We could also get to play with things like parallaxing mmmmmmmmm delicious. =)

Actually Ayin is already working on an opengl client, which would indeed open up for a few new possibilites (we have discussed a few wacked ones already )

Note to those who will cry foul: This client will be an optional client in addition to the normal sdl one, not replace it in any way.

[HaJo]

cave wall. With the lack of an above ground unpassable terrain map makers now use this extensively.

Canyons are pretty much unpassable (except for flying creatures).
How about cloning it and replacing the graphics, e.g. with a wall or fence ?

[freim]

cave wall. With the lack of an above ground unpassable terrain map makers now use this extensively.

Canyons are pretty much unpassable (except for flying creatures).
How about cloning it and replacing the graphics, e.g. with a wall or fence ?

See this thread for the discussion for a new above ground terrain:
http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6606

[Eleazar]

I strongly agree that we should worry about the big things now, and leave the minor graphical issues for later. Making special terrain-to-terrain transitions seems to be a likely waste of time. Who knows when when one of those terrains will be updated. Special transitions that work between different classes of terrain (land-water) are more profitable if they can be made to work across the board.

I think we should consider 1.0 the "stable" version graphicly, and not be afraid to introduce terrain that's not entirely finished. It seems like most of the terrain people have been working on for a while exists only on somebody's harddrive. Lets bring it out, so the terrain others are working on will work with it. (which means i need to get on the ball and get SVN access going)

Also, lets not forget the that the GAMEPLAY is the purpose of the graphics.

The more i think about it, the people who wanted the new canyon to not have a distict bottom made a really good call. The MAIN purpose of the canyon graphics is to say to the player, "you can't walk here!" and secondarily to look like a recognisable geographical feature. Showing the bottom of the canyon distictly would have compromised that , but would have looked nicer.

I think too much of the critique about terrains graphics revolves around what REAL terrain X looks like, and not about usabilty issues. Granted we can also make the terrain look pretty cool, but that's not the main thing.

P.S. Some problems really can't be neatly solved without changes to the engine, (or at least a much deeper understanding of the terrain WML) like the changing the water under the bridge, and should be ingnored for now.