A fence as an embellishment

[lurker]

Hello!

I'd like to propose a new kind of embellishment, a fence. Hopefully you will agree that it looks like being able to contain cattle and perhaps be a psychological hurdle against passers-by trampling on a crop field, while not being a real obstacle for any humanoid creature, or any spear or arrow - i.e. it does not mislead players about its purely decorative nature.

Anyway, it has some pecularities. First and foremost, it does not have a north-south direction. I do not think it would have looked any good, but it would also have made the whole thing much more complicated. Because, second, the two existing directions do have all possible transitions, including acute-angled ones like ne-se. This is needed to achive closed (rectangular) areas. Third, the fence is placed on the northern edge of its hexes. This is to avoid possible visual glitches with units placed on them.

If accepted, it would look like so:

If you would like to try it out, please extract the attached fence.zip into your add-ons folder. But first locate your system data folder, and replace the internal-tracks.cfg file with the version provided here. It contains a fix for what I am pretty sure is a bug, but which concerns a transition which does not happen in any current terrain.

This last one is an issue that I will raise separately on a more appropriate forum - unless somebody in the know stumbles across this thread and fixes it right away, of course.

Thanks

Lurker

[Eleazar]

I like it. It's quite attractive. Making the fence terrain-scaled is a good idea.

I'm still open to a unit-scaled fence however, which would be impassable.

I sent a pm to get the .cfg looked at.

[lurker]

Small update.

The images had a few small glitches. They are not easy to spot over grass, so I tested over snow.

[Sangel]

An extremely useful embellishment, attractively implemented. I expect to see this getting a lot of use both in mainline and UMC.

[LordBob]

The fence itself is a good idea.
However, I can't help thinking it has a very modern feel, with long, regular planks and every post very nearly vertical.
An example of a more typical old countryside fence : not every plank is perfectly straight, some posts don't stand upright, everything isn't perfectly aligned, and the wood is weathered until it's almost grey.
The key notion is that peasants fencing their field won't take the pain to cut & prepare their wood with industrial precision

Alternately, while we're at embellishment, hedges would also be commonplace in a mediaval setup.

[JAP]

With all due respect Lordbob, our example is still a modern fence.
It has planks from a sawmill and uses nails (very expensive in a preindustrial world).
A simple medieval fence wold be for example something like this.

[pauxlo]

The question is, how much of this "irregularity" can be shown in this scale? The fence looks like there were used whole (thin) tree trunks, not cut planks.

[Eleazar]

The wood is about 2 pixels thick. I think this scrutiny is excessive.

[lurker]

Thank you all for your interest!

There seem to be three main concerns:

1) The color. This is easy to try out. Here is a quick variant desaturated by 50%

fence_desaturated.png (229.84 KiB) Viewed 7110 times

I think I like this color better, but it fits worse with the wooden houses. I have no strong opinion either way.

2) The general design. I have considered other designs, my preferred one being
. But it is an embellishment. That means all units - including heavily armored ones and small ones like dwarves and goblins - must be able to cross it without breaking it. Also stones and arrows flying across it should not see much of an obstacle. So I went for a design as light and as low as I could possibly find. And this type of fence is not uncommon, either:

3) The uniformity. Inspired by LordBob I have tried to make the logs a bit less uniform. It is barely visible. But I think I can still do something about it:
- I can turn the posts a bit
- I can make some constructive changes, like occasionally replace the lower trunk with one or two diagonal ones, or something along these lines.
This will take some time, however.

Greetings

Lurker

[doofus-01]

3) The uniformity. Inspired by LordBob I have tried to make the logs a bit less uniform. It is barely visible. But I think I can still do something about it:
- I can turn the posts a bit
- I can make some constructive changes, like occasionally replace the lower trunk with one or two diagonal ones, or something along these lines.
This will take some time, however.

I think the uniformity is hard to avoid without variations, but what you have now would be OK with some segments that would randomly be replaced with alternates. Like what happens with the ruined human castle (or a lot of other terrains). That might be what you were suggesting in the second bullet.

[LordBob]

The fence looks a lot better already. With the occasional alternate both you & Doofus suggested, it should fit perfectly.

Only nitpick I can think of is that the hightlights could use a tad more luminosity in order to stand out more, especially the top of the posts and maybe the upper row of planks (switching the picture to grayscales ought to help)

[lurker]

Here is the grey fence with variants:

I have tried also to add some highlights, hope it is all well. The images (and a preliminary WML) are attached.

Greetings

Lurker

[lurker]

Hello, all.

I pushed a few more pixels around to make the pieces fit a bit better. The changes are admittedly minor and wouldn't justify a new post, but I wanted to attract attention to the fact, that - barring more constructive criticism - I regard the fence as done. If it is considered good enough, now would be a good time to commit it.

Thanks in advance

Lurker

[zookeeper]

I'll try to take a stab at committing it ASAP.

[Boucman]

(i"ll reply here since I couldn't find another thread about your WML fix, but when you see and reply to this message i'll probably split to coder's corner in order to keep the noise down in art forum)

the fix you propose doesn't really make sense, so my guess is the bug you found needs to be corrected in a different way...

the macro you patched (TRACK_RESTRICTED3_N_NE_S_PLFB) is supposed to "mark" with flags a tile that is connected on its N,NE and S direction, that is the tile labeled 1 in the map= section

you are right in thinking that the adjacent tiles (the ones labeled 2) should also be marked with a -connect- flag, however it cannot be done here because each 2 tile needs a different -connect- flag depending on its orientation and your change mark them all with the connect-@R3 wich is only correct for the north one.

the idea of the whole set of macros is that each recognise and mark its own tiles and leave the marking of adjacent tiles to other macros.

you are probably right in thinking that there is a missing flag placement in that set of macros, but that fix isn't the correct one, I'll try to have a look ASAP...