[terrain-graphics] Towers & Cliffs

[doofus-01]

Thanks, Alarantalara, you've given me enough to keep busy for a while.

Edit: While nothing else does this, if you keep the shadows separate from the walls in all cases (including the existing ne tiles), you could have the shadows change direction based on time of day. I don't know if this is something you would want.

Keeping shadow separate is not a problem, but I'm not going to make the shadows move while no other terrain does.

I think I asked Eleazar about generic shadows for castles a while back, but it was a can of worms that didn't get opened back then. If we can remove shadows from all current village and castle graphics, replace it with generic village and castle shadows, making the shadows move with time of day might be practical. But that is another topic.

[doofus-01]

Alarantalara, or anyone else who can help, if you've still got a stomach for this, I've got some progress in Archaic Era in wesnoth-umc-dev.svn.sourceforge.net r12392 or later. I didn't put it in the add-on server because it is a useless update for most, but I guess I could if it is really necessary.

Starting from what Alarantalara posted, I've added some trim and reinstated the forward/back distinction, in addition to left/right. I believe it is necessary, but I'd be thrilled to learn that it is not. The shadows are kind of minimal, but I'd like to get the minimal cleared up before opening Pandora's box.

There are some problems, marked with red numbers 1-3:
1. That shadow shouldn't be there, clearly. I may be able to kill that when I'm fresher, but if it is obvious where I screwed up, I'd appreciate a pointer.
2. There are some situations which just look odd, but setting up the rules for all of them to look right is intimidating. For me at least. I see them as a combo of cases put forth in Alarantalara's shadow cases posted above, as far as shadows are involved. Glitchy masonry is another story, but at least this won't be a problem for more natural terrains, which can be muddier.
3. This is where I find it possibly necessary to keep the shadows short. Long shadows would be more realistic, but then they would interfere with objects and terrain they fall across. All that considered, the shorter, the better, unless it looks too cheap.

[Alarantalara]

It's a bit late tonight, but I'll see what I can do.

[doofus-01]

Thanks.

I think I got the shadow problem #1 fixed. It's in r12396 or later. It did remind me that I have a hard time keeping track of where flags are being set, it would be nice if there was a way to export or print that. Is that worth a feature request, or can it already be done?

I thought about the Time-of-Day shadow shifting. I think it might be good, at least to start, to simply remove the shadows at first_watch & second_watch. Is there any reason Time-of-Day can't be incorporated into the map editor?

[Alink]

I added ":layers" (in 1.9.0) for this kind of terrain debugging. Move the cursor on the hex you want to investigate and type ":layers" in debug mode (but, as often I recommend to use ":custom layers" and use the custom command hotkey)

This shows all the flags set on that hex, all the images (and which parts) used, and others various info. Images are ordered correctly and the letter (B/F) in the first column shows if background/foreground. BTW 1.9.13 make this more clear by fixing the hex-cut in the second column and filter out empty images, which removes a lot of noise.

And since you work a lot with foreground terrain, you should try ":foreground" too.

The editor already use some kind of dummy global ToD. It should be easy to read the preset chosen in editor settings and change it, but the problem is to read any custom WML schedules (also making it hard to have local ToD areas). A cumbersome workaround could be a text-field when you enter your custom ToD label.

Removing the shadows could be cool, but note that the moon can still explain them

[doofus-01]

I didn't know about ":layers". That is helpful, thanks!

Is there documentation for it? I wonder what else I am missing...

[Crendgrim]

There is the wiki page CommandMode, but that seems to be quite outdated... So a list with all new tags with which the Wiki may be updated would be really useful.