Terrain tiling [Dirt for a change]

[Cernunnos]

Wow, nice!

In fact we don't have the same conception of the claw, this is why i used the adjective broken, i though it was a bigger crab



But your sketch is nice too, i don't know...

[Boucman]

is it really important that we recognise claw ?

it looks good

it looks coral like

it's the kind of architecture you would imagine in a low gravity environment...

who cares much after that, it looks good

[TheJM]

Wow, they look really nice. I honestly couldn't tell that it was a claw either, but I don't think it matters that much either. I like how they are right now.

I like the middle one out of all three, but they all look pretty awesome.

[Turuk]

Thanatos raises a good point, it would be great to have a larger variety of tiles in the game, even if the terrain does not change.

Exactly. Tiles not types.

Only person I know who would argue with someone who is agreeing with them.

On the other hand, some games did too much animation, imho. HoMM3's map was some blinking and twinkling overload... I am no fan of too much animation in general. For example: I find the new, always wing-flapping Gryphons annoying.

True, but I am not exactly arguing that I want the whole entire map to move, with trees swaying and snow falling on the mountains, dust rising off the road when you move and who knows what else. I just made the general statement that a little animation for effect is nice.

[Cernunnos]

Hola,

The three tiles in the following box, with transparent background on 126*180 (like current existing villages) there's also the xcf file for the second one, if you want to change the anim (or remove it).

Mermen_Villages.zip

(371.86 KiB) Downloaded 205 times

Bye!

Edit: this was debated before, it was argued it could be nice to add "tides" to the water tiles, but i think it's not a good idea, if the whole map moves with the camera centering on each unit, you'll be sick after 5 minutes of play

But yes, i think that some moving tiles could do great, like the mill does, since they won't be a mermen village right near a mill in each map, that's won't be too much imo...

[freim]

Imaginative designs made from scratch, good shading and use of colors. I think they look very good

[thespaceinvader]

this was debated before, it was argued it could be nice to add "tides" to the water tiles

Do you mean waves (lapping water, animated on individual tiles) or tides (gross movement of sea edges expanding and contracting over tiles between turns)? They're both possible, of course, but that latter can already be accomplished with WML. And I think both are good ideas, tbh. The former would have to be fairly subtle and slow, though. And it would probably be possible to include a toggle, as for idle anims, to turn off terrain anims, if such a toggle doesn't already exist.

Also, great work =D

[Cernunnos]

Do you mean waves (lapping water, animated on individual tiles) or tides (gross movement of sea edges expanding and contracting over tiles between turns)? They're both possible, of course, but that latter can already be accomplished with WML.

Well, didn't knew it was possible, how can i see how it goes?

Anyway, this post was more designed to thank the one(s) who changed the font weight of my login than to present new stuff (since there's not much for today).

Thanks a lot!

This done, currently working on the desert plants request from one of the old topics mentioned above, i plan to do some plants separately and then merge them into tiles, so for now that's only cactus, but i'll do some other things to go with of course :

somecactus.png (37.56 KiB) Viewed 3172 times

(can't upload on a file host for now...)

I also added a file in the previous merman zip file to make tile icons for the editor if needed, which i forgot in the first place.

Mermen_Villages_2.zip

(426.64 KiB) Downloaded 170 times

Well, not much for today as i said, but thanks a lot, really.

[mnewton1]

Nice you are doing a great job

[Sangel]

That's a great selection of cacti you have there - I look forward to seeing the tile variations you assemble from them.

What else are you considering for desert variations? Bleached bones seems an obvious possibility, but some kind of small rock formations could also work, particularly if they're in the same colour palette as the desert hills.

[starfury]

Do you mean waves (lapping water, animated on individual tiles) or tides (gross movement of sea edges expanding and contracting over tiles between turns)? They're both possible, of course, but that latter can already be accomplished with WML. And I think both are good ideas, tbh. The former would have to be fairly subtle and slow, though. And it would probably be possible to include a toggle, as for idle anims, to turn off terrain anims, if such a toggle doesn't already exist.

It occurs to me that some terrain animations could function the same way as the unit idle animations and play only once in a while. Waves would probably have to be an all or nothing, but it would work for the existing windmill, the mermen village, and stuff like

trees swaying and snow falling on the mountains, dust rising off the road when you move and who knows what else.

Granted you'd need some more frames for the start/stop sequences, and there isn't enough animated terrain to warrant this now, but long term it might be better to plan for this now.

It also occurs to me that having trees swaying randomly once in a while would make the paranoid see Elvish Avengers everywhere.

[Turuk]

Granted you'd need some more frames for the start/stop sequences, and there isn't enough animated terrain to warrant this now, but long term it might be better to plan for this now.

Sigh, no one really embraces sarcasm anymore. Ok, well I was half serious, but this discussion about should and should not be animated, the level of animation, and planning for how to deal with it is rather pointless.

As befitting the Wesnoth stance, someone would actually have to take the time/inclination/effort to produce work along those lines first, and then comes the inevitable discussion of whether to include it or not. This whole forum is full of "great" ideas that never materialize because they do not get past the thinking stage. There is an exception to this rule only in the rarest cases, as JW explains below.


That being said, good work on the cacti. The desert terrain is a bit hard to break up as it is given the color scheme, and a splash of green or olive plant life here or there will certainly spruce things up a bit.

[JW]

This whole forum is full of "great" ideas that never materialize because they do not get past the thinking stage.

The differenceis that if the idea is good enough to be picked up by a dev (in this case possibly Jetryl) then the idea will live even with no work currently having been done on it. (something like a feature request, or a BWH)

The question is then, is this idea good enough to convince a dev that it would be worth implementing for future works? If not, can someone create works of good enough quality to compel the devs to add such a feature?

[Cernunnos]

Hi,

Had a big day today so not much for now, i tried with the bones i was talking about, will surely continue after eating :


There's is one issue among others about which i don't know: the size of it.
As you know, tiles and sprites are drawn on different scales, there, i tried to respect the scale of a skull if it was drawn as any unit, it matches approximately the size of some buffalo skull with the unit scale. But cactus behind seem small compared to it...
That's the point i don't really know about... (don't know if i'm clear )

Well, will do some more this evening, bye!

[mnewton1]

I agree the unit is as big as a village so I suggest you scale down the skull a lot and maybe even make it be separate from the cacti

Edit and I agree with Thespaceinvader. The cacti could be a bit bigger