Mefisto in vegetative state

[tr0ll]

nice tree tiles
and that wose is amazing, it near jumped out of the screen at me! may i use it as my desktop?

[Mefisto]

Of course. It's free to use. I'm glad you like it.

[Mefisto]

I continue making new sets of tropical foliage. Below are two modifcations of existing maps (the map for fifth scenario ot Heir to the Throne and the map for last scenario of Under the Burning Suns). This by no means the final version. I made tiles with dense jungle which are quite good. The same with moderately dense tropical rainforest. But the sparse foliage, intended for hills coverage, looks like crap. I need more palms and trees of medium layer, I've got enough bushes and tall trees. And probably gave too much contrast, though this can be explainable with very strong tropical sun rays.

What else requires corrections?

[Mefisto]

It has been a very long time from my last post in Wesnoth Forums. So called Real Life and Work have swamped me. I've got much less time then earlier to play with computer graphic but nevertheless I has been trying to make some progress. Of my Wesnoth Projects one is proceeding quite well. I made the next iteration of jungle and I consider it near final (I won't call it finished until the other confirm this). Here it is:

[uncleshelby]

That looks good! Especially with the ruined keep...

Also, you know that this will not be put into the game, at least until version 1.11x, right? Because of the feature freeze...

Off-topic

Wow! Is that windows 98?

[Mefisto]

I'm glad you like it. No problem with feature freeze. The others have to decide that quality of this jungle is good enough to be included in mainline. Everybody is free to use this foliage in UMC campaigns if they wish to.

And no, it's wine. This way I'm testing my terrains and animations in game, by replacing existing units and terrains from core data directory.

[lipk]

Nice terrains
What makes you prefer wine over a native a build?

[Alarantalara]

Forests are drawn slightly differently in 1.9.10 (they can appear on more terrain and the choice of which variant to use has changed in some cases). You may want to try your trees out in the new version.

[Mefisto]

What makes you prefer wine over a native a build?

My very bad skills in installing programs. My computer still runs on Ubuntu Hardy, I'm afraid to mess with it because I have too much to lose and I don't have a spare computer to install newer OS on.

Forests are drawn slightly differently in 1.9.10 (they can appear on more terrain and the choice of which variant to use has changed in some cases). You may want to try your trees out in the new version.

Thanks, I'll try it.

[Jetrel]

Wow, as far as I'm concerned, those rock - those are head and shoulders better than the stuff we've got in-game!

I encourage you to fix up anything you're dissatisfied with, but as far as I'm concerned, these are a sound replacement for the current jungles. Naturally these don't go in until after the feature freeze thaws, of course, but I'd very much look forward to having these in game.

Bravo!

[zookeeper]

Note that there's no problem with updating graphics during the freeze, so if you can update the current jungle by just replacing the old images, then that's fine.

[Alarantalara]

What I see is dense enough that we'd need a sparse variant for hills to maintain readability for jungle terrain.
That would require adding one line of WML along with the image replacements.

Of course if we just swapped the images, that would become a bug and then we could add the WML to fix it?

[Mefisto]

I am glad that my jungle is good enough even for Jetrel. I made an effort to make sure that the foliage isn't too saturated or too contrasting in comparison with existing grass, forests and buildings. I also made sure that the "small" tiles don't bleed into keeps or forts in their neighbourhood. I think that the tiles I posted are ready to incorporate into a game as they are. And from my experiments it looks like they don't cause any bugs in game.

I still want to work on "sparse" tiles. For now hills are partially hidden behind the foliage when surrounded by jungle tiles. So I need to think carefully how to distinguish them from the other tropical forest tiles. And I plan to make some "palms only" variants for beach or atol environment. But this will take some time, so no need to rush things.

[Sapient]

It does look nice but one thing that concerned me was there seems to be some very dark patches which are almost pure black. I remember it being said that terrain art should not have any black because the sprites won't stand out as well (or something to that effect).

[Mefisto]

This is not pure black but very dark green. But because of this I find your concern valid: the elves who has bright green and dark green and greyish elements of their clothing blend into the foliage very nicely. In game though they would also have vertical strips of health bar so they would be distinguishable nevertheless. I'll try to tune the shade of jungle.

I made some experimental "sparse" and "sparse-small" tiles and I have mixed emotions about the result. The density of foliage is similar too their deciduous and pine counterparts, you can distinguish forested hills from the plains, the castles and villages also aren't harmed but they don't look like real tropical foliage.

Any opinions?