My Terrain (Mine!)

[doofus-01]

A GitHub pull request is actually a really, really good idea (assuming you have a clone of the repository). It makes it really easy for us to review and merge changes. If you're done with this, though, zookeeper or I could commit it directly.

I don't have a clone, I'd have to start from scratch. I was able to do this once before, I can probably figure it out again, but it won't be quick. If one of you guys could commit it this time, I can try PRs in the future.

I wanted to ask about what other (potential) contributors should know or do, but I can't think of an intelligent way to phrase it... There are at least a couple of reasons things have died down here, and I wish I knew whether the person currently animating the shocktrooper was wasting time or not, but I have no helpful suggestions, so ... I'll go look into getting my git materials sorted out.

Thanks.

EDIT: Actually, I think I got it. https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/pull/754
Hope I didn't screw anything up.

[zookeeper]

I'd really like to get all this stuff that's just waiting for someone to get it in, in. My personal problem is that there's just such a crippling amount of it, and the longer my todo list gets, the slower I become.

Tons of unit description rewrites to sort through, get the opinion of someone more competent, incorporate their suggestions, put them in. Merfolk camps, castles, keeps. Shocktrooper animations, tons of campaign-related PR's to research and review and comment on and iterate on, desert elves to write and test and make sounds for and worry about, WML API compatibility breakage lists to write, writing a backstory for a faction I don't like, a bunch of campaign scenarios to redesign, bugs to fix, bugs to test, bugs to file, finding who to blame for breaking this or that, dawn/dusk sound volumes to decide upon, adjacent lightbeam tile overlap to try to fix, tutorials to rewrite, bigmaps to make, etc etc etc. And then on top of that there's the add-ons I'd like to find time to work on, and another (unrelated) game project I should somehow devote an equal amount of attention to in order to save it from death by neglect.

So, what usually ends up happening is that instead of devoting time to do those things, I find that I really need a fix of escapism right now and just play a game or something. Occasionally, I actually get something meaningful done. But usually by the time I strike off one item on my list, I've accumulated two more. Now, I'm not particularly blaming anyone since this is likely just a result of me having gotten too involved in too many things I shouldn't have.

As far as this thread goes, the merfolk camps/castles are the most pressing item. I got burned out on them because I tried to clean up all the transitions and stuff to spec (72x72, with stuff inside the hex, and still tiling properly) and thought it wouldn't be a big deal. But, it turns out I can't do that. If you can, then that would be great. As for the floors, right now I can't spend time investigating and researching them in order to be able to say anything.

Incidentally, I'll be out of touch for about two days. Perhaps that'll restore a few points of stamina.

[doofus-01]

Tons of unit description rewrites to sort through, get the opinion of someone more competent, incorporate their suggestions, put them in. Merfolk camps, castles, keeps. Shocktrooper animations, tons of campaign-related PR's to research and review and comment on and iterate on, desert elves to write and test and make sounds for and worry about, WML API compatibility breakage lists to write, writing a backstory for a faction I don't like, a bunch of campaign scenarios to redesign, bugs to fix, bugs to test, bugs to file, finding who to blame for breaking this or that, dawn/dusk sound volumes to decide upon, adjacent lightbeam tile overlap to try to fix, tutorials to rewrite, bigmaps to make, etc etc etc. And then on top of that there's the add-ons I'd like to find time to work on, and another (unrelated) game project I should somehow devote an equal amount of attention to in order to save it from death by neglect.

Yeah, you are trying or being asked to do too much. I'll go through the PR route, which won't help with judging and QC/clean-ups, but at least I'll know if there's a conflict with some new thing.

EDIT: I should also say, while I'm glad that the Shocktrooper animation is on the radar, I'm also concerned that this is all on the shoulders of someone who, understandably, sounds close to burn-out. The path to (code) developer is clear, but how do you get new blood for the art department? There can be no amateurs(!), but why would a (commissioned) professional get involved in the uncelebrated and unending drudge-work?

Terrain graphics has a lot of crappy transition drudge-work to be done (as much a terrain-graphicsWML puzzle as an art project), and animations have a lot of work left to do (and making a great GIF is not the same as making good animations for Wesnoth). Story images and portraits are well suited to commissions, that isn't such a concern.

[vultraz]

I've merged your PR.

[doofus-01]

As far as this thread goes, the merfolk camps/castles are the most pressing item. I got burned out on them because I tried to clean up all the transitions and stuff to spec (72x72, with stuff inside the hex, and still tiling properly) and thought it wouldn't be a big deal. But, it turns out I can't do that. If you can, then that would be great.

So I'm looking at these again, and I'm not sure I understand what is wrong. Can you elaborate? Thanks.

[zookeeper]

So I'm looking at these again, and I'm not sure I understand what is wrong. Can you elaborate? Thanks.

I might be missing something but I think the main things were the weird non-72x72 dimensions and stuff spilling outside hexes in some keep-rim-* and castle-to-ground-* tiles.

I tried to clean those up the best I could, but then castle-to-ground-* didn't completely cover the transition area under the netting and keep-rim-* didn't really mesh well with the corner stones, and so on and it just became a worse mess.

Because of the way the terrain drawing works, having stuff spilling into multiple hexes does actually impact performance, especially when animations are involved such as is the case here (because of water). Basically, all terrain graphics get placed and then cut into hexes so that each hex has its own list of hex-shaped images; a castle corner tile is no longer one image placed in the junction of 3 hexes, there will be one extra hex-shaped image on each of those three hexes. Whether this happens or not depends on the rule that is used, but for example TRANSITION_COMPLETE_* does that. So each image placed by TRANSITION_COMPLETE_* which puts not-completely-transparent pixels onto a neighbouring hex means that there will be one extra blit when that hex gets redrawn, and if that happens a lot then the number of images per hex balloons, which is a problem when that hex gets drawn X times per second because of animations. I did a clean-up run a while ago to fix a lot of those kinds of issues in core terrain images.

So, burdened with that knowledge, I had to try to trim them into neat hex-sized pieces first. As an alternative, it could make sense to bake in the castle-to-ground-* transitions into an alternate set of wall tiles, just like what was IIRC done with the "inner" tiles previously.

[doofus-01]

Sorry if I'm being dense, I just want to be sure I'm fixing the right things.

I might be missing something but I think the main things were the weird non-72x72 dimensions and stuff spilling outside hexes in some keep-rim-* and castle-to-ground-* tiles.

There aren't that many non-72X72, aside from the castle walls, whose dimensions I copied from the default castle walls. But things like this are the problem, need to stay in the white, keep out of the red?

castle-to-ground-example.png (3.23 KiB) Viewed 3999 times

So each image placed by TRANSITION_COMPLETE_* which puts not-completely-transparent pixels onto a neighbouring hex means that there will be one extra blit when that hex gets redrawn, and if that happens a lot then the number of images per hex balloons, which is a problem when that hex gets drawn X times per second because of animations. I did a clean-up run a while ago to fix a lot of those kinds of issues in core terrain images.

It's the TRANSITION_COMPLETE_* images that are the problem, the walls and corner overlay are still OK?

By the way, is there some way to see what images are redrawn for what hex (preferably in the map editor), sort of like how ;sunset can show animation hex redraws in the game?

[zookeeper]

There aren't that many non-72X72, aside from the castle walls, whose dimensions I copied from the default castle walls. But things like this are the problem, need to stay in the white, keep out of the red?

Yeah.

It's the TRANSITION_COMPLETE_* images that are the problem, the walls and corner overlay are still OK?

Yes, I think so.

By the way, is there some way to see what images are redrawn for what hex (preferably in the map editor), sort of like how ;sunset can show animation hex redraws in the game?

Not really. I have a little local hack which lets me see, in the editor, how many images there are per hex which helps a lot, but as said it's just a hack and not a proper feature.

[doofus-01]

There aren't that many non-72X72, aside from the castle walls, whose dimensions I copied from the default castle walls. But things like this are the problem, need to stay in the white, keep out of the red?

Yeah.

It's the TRANSITION_COMPLETE_* images that are the problem, the walls and corner overlay are still OK?

Yes, I think so.

All right, I've cleaned up the transition images to fit in one hex. I think it looks OK. I didn't touch the rules. The images in the attached archive are drop-in replacements. In the screen-shot, there is a goofy corner-case a few hexes E-NE of the cursor, but corner-case was going to need some special rule or image anyway. Maybe I'll get to it tomorrow.

screen-shot:

[ForestDragon]

doofus is back to doing water castles, Yay! keep up the work, looking forward to the keep revision for it though

[doofus-01]

I've worked on this a little more and put it in a pull request #773:
https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/pull/773

[zookeeper]

I've worked on this a little more and put it in a pull request #773:
https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/pull/773

Ok, looks pretty good to me. Except... it includes the unused wood*.png images too, accidentally I presume?

I think you can just push a new commit which deletes the files, since I can merge the PR by squashing it into one commit so those deleted files wouldn't show up in the history at all then.

[doofus-01]

Except... it includes the unused wood*.png images too, accidentally I presume?

Ah, yeah... I guess I was rushing and did not review to the extent I should have. I think I may also need to fix some parts of the terrain graphics WML so the Cme & Kme terrain codes and images aren't "hardwired" anywhere outside the terrain-graphics.cfg file. I will put that in one commit, and delete the wood.png files in another.

[Shiki]

How about using Cm and Km as terrain codes?
That's the scheme which other castles follow, and the village is ^Vm too.

[doofus-01]

How about using Cm and Km as terrain codes?
That's the scheme which other castles follow, and the village is ^Vm too.

Those codes are reserved for the castles, these are the encampments.

I've update the PR:
. removed the wood#.png
. got the terrain codes into the terrain-graphics.cfg file only
. did a slight touch-up to the stone-posts (could keep doing little minor things like that forever, but I will stop there)