Castle Tutorial? | Water-Chasm Transitions

[Kestenvarn]

Thanks for the template, mesilliac. I do wonder a bit about certain parts of the concave one, though:

[mog]

What exactly do you wonder about?

The two black blobs were probably by an artist to lazy to erase them (as they are invisible on chasm).

With the bottom circle, you probably mean the mismatch between bottom left and bottom right elements. I honestly don't know if this was deliberate, but it looks quite good in game (gives the terrain a bit irregularity), so I left it when I noticed it.

[Kestenvarn]

Ah yeah, just checking what they were for.

[mog]

I have to correct myself on the two "blobs". The transition needs to cover the whole inner hex, otherwise the other terrain would show through the chasm wall. *That's* why the black is there.

[Kestenvarn]

I have to correct myself on the two "blobs". The transition needs to cover the whole inner hex, otherwise the other terrain would show through the chasm wall. *That's* why the black is there.

Makes sense.

I can see this isn't going to be enough as-is:

[Urs]

Very nice, but other than the very obvious ripples where the water meets the cave wall, it doesn't look very much like water, rather like some weird cave floor.

Overall I like the new approach though.

[Espreon]

Very nice, but other than the very obvious ripples where the water meets the cave wall, it doesn't look very much like water, rather like some weird cave floor.

Overall I like the new approach though.

I agree...

[Iris]

Very nice, but other than the very obvious ripples where the water meets the cave wall, it doesn't look very much like water, rather like some weird cave floor.

I thought it was a giant mushroom at first glance.

[torangan]

I had to get very close to see anything water like. Perhaps you could make it a little more bright?

[Jetrel]

I want to vouch in favor of kestenvarn's approach with these - I really like how the general direction they're going in, and in fact I'd like to see all out water use borders like this (although water in the outside world would have much more of a blue reflection from the sky).

I do understand that there's a bit of an issue with recognizability on these. I think that comes from the lack of any surface ripples whatsoever, and unfortunately for part of what kestenvarn was trying to do with these, I think we're gonna have to knuckle down and provide some. I do understand that real cave ponds would often be mirror-still, but for a number of reasons, that's hard to recognize as water inside wesnoth (probably the biggest reason is that we can't do the "mirror" visuals). So I think we do need ripples, however, I'd agree that they should be a lot more subtle and sophisticated than the current water tiles, which have held up pretty well over time, but which do leave a bit of room for improvement.

The color, and the edging, are a vast improvement on the current cave water tiles, and I don't want that to get lost in the noise of this thread.

[Kestenvarn]

Been busy the last few days, so instead have been thinking of different things to look at as inspiration. Two that came to mind were the water from Starcraft and the water from certain 16bit RPGs. Maybe animated.

[Jetrel]

Maybe animated.

Food for thought - a little something I made for that other project I'm poking at:



It could stand to have motion besides the edges, but ... edge motion like that is fairly easy to pull off, and works wonders on the comprehensibility of what the material is.

[JAP]

I dont know if this is the right place for this question but...
If we have animated water we would probably soon have animated forests (treas moving in the wind etc), and i remember from another thread that some suggested snowfall and such things.
I like the sound of all that, but i wonder if someone can anyone make an estimate of the impact on performance it would have, if most or all hexes of a map was animated? (using the current gameengine)

[zookeeper]

I like the sound of all that, but i wonder if someone can anyone make an estimate of the impact on performance it would have, if most or all hexes of a map was animated? (using the current gameengine)

It'd slow down performance to a crawl more or less. At least on lower-than-high-end computers.

[JAP]

Ahh i had a creping suspicion that that would be the case.
It should be possible someway i remember that settlers II (i played that a lot back in 1996) used animated treas and water and could handle hundreds of units all at once.
But i understand that the game was newer written to handle that much animation, and it wold be a huge project to rewrite it so that it could yes?