Mirror Era v0.1.0: Chaotic Drakes and Lawful Undead

[Loci]

Mirror Era is a new multiplayer era based upon chaotic/lawful mirrors of the 6 standard factions, inspired by the discussion at http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=21144. The goal is to provide more "balanced" factions, more interesting matchups (including chaotic/lawful mirror matches), and alternative factions for team balancing. The "mirrored" units are currently indicated by hastily-modified unit sprites; if the era shows any value then the sprite art processing can be refined and custom art may be added for some units.

Mirror Era version 0.1.0 is currently available for Wesnoth 1.5.x; I welcome any comments/suggestions.

[MCP]

Are they eventually going to look like evil twins(in the case of chaotic undead)? Different color scheme to feel more evil or something, but otherwise exactly the same?

[KingdomAmericaCMG]

I havent look at your code yet but since you have chaotic loyalist, is the mage of light which has an aura of light, did you make it so its an aura of darkness otherwise you are hurting your own units. im not sure where else there might be instances of that.

[Loci]

MCP:
The majority of units will remain recolored versions of their standard sprites. Ideally the Wesnoth engine would be adapted to allow on-the-fly recoloring similar to how the team-coloring is currently applied, so that Mirror Era would shrink to a much smaller size. Some units, however, would benefit from custom sprites (currently this includes the Mage of Darkness and White Mage who are wearing way too much white, and the Woses which may change to giant walking mushrooms at some point). Even with custom sprites, the unit mechanics will strictly track mainline (no new units, no new attacks, no altered damages, etc.).

KingdomAmericaCMG:
Yes, the Mage of Darkness has a delumination field, and the lawful Shadow and "Lightgaunt" have "lightstalk" instead of "nightstalk". I believe these were the only units with ToD-dependant abilities, but if I come across any others then they too will be mirrored correctly.

[CIB]

MCP:Ideally the Wesnoth engine would be adapted to allow on-the-fly recoloring similar to how the team-coloring is currently applied, so that Mirror Era would shrink to a much smaller size.

ImagePathFunctionWML. It's well possible, I used it to recolor oozes in the Mini Ooze Campaign(http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... e&start=30).

[Loci]

ImagePathFunctionWML. It's well possible, I used it to recolor oozes in the Mini Ooze Campaign(http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... e&start=30).

Thanks for the suggestion, but there are lots of units, each with lots of images, each with lots of colors and I'm not quite crazy enough to attempt that directly. I generated the current images using batch processing in Photoshop (generally involving a channel-mix), and I'm planning to try extending the ImagePathFunctionWML to allow something like:

~CM(R={10,50,40},G={0,50,50},B={90,0,10},TC=magenta)

or

~CM(foo)

where "foo" is a channel-mix formula that was previously specified. The image path function would recolor the image (except for team-colors) using the channel-mix formula supplied, passing the resultant image for any further image path function processing and caching the result under channel-mix (so it won't replace the standard image in the cache, but won't have to be recalculated each time either). This would allow drastic procedural recoloring of images and could prove useful elsewhere in the game (special units, unique items, special effects, etc.) and seems like a straightforward extension to imagepathfunctionWML.

Then the Mirror Era recolorings would be reduced to defining a number of channel-mix formulas and appending ~CM(*) to all the images in all the unit files (which should be easy enough to automate).