Castle-chasm/lava transitions

[Eleazar]

OK, i did some revised cave-wall transitions to eliminate some of the chasm/lava — cave-wall glitches. There needs to be a lot more done with the WML, but i think i've cleared up all the issues that changes to images can.
Modified cave wall added to trunk.

But there's still some serious WML that needs to be done.
The basic problem is that chasm/lava transitions get drawn instead of cave-wall transitions. The way i designed these graphics to be layered, is to draw all cave-wall transitions on top of all chasm transtions. It should work that way.

BTW once again, my changes to the cave wall make the special dwarf-castle — cave-wall transtions unaligned. I'll worry about that one later.

[pekka]

Dwarven castle floor is nice, but there is some trouble with the scale of it. Those stone tiles are huge compared to the rest of the buildings/floors in the game. Could they be somewhat smaller?

[JW]

Dwarven castle floor is nice, but there is some trouble with the scale of it. Those stone tiles are huge compared to the rest of the buildings/floors in the game. Could they be somewhat smaller?

I thought HCBMA (or some acronym like that), so the scale shouldn't be worried about that much. It looks great from these screenies - and props to you, Eleazar, for fixing one of the more annoying graphical glitches in the game.

[pekka]

Dwarven castle floor is nice, but there is some trouble with the scale of it. Those stone tiles are huge compared to the rest of the buildings/floors in the game. Could they be somewhat smaller?

I thought HCBMA (or some acronym like that), so the scale shouldn't be worried about that much. It looks great from these screenies - and props to you, Eleazar, for fixing one of the more annoying graphical glitches in the game.

I can find 3 different scales in wesnoth graphics: terrain scale, building scale and unit scale. The edge between the terrain scale and building scale is a little bit blur, but buildings are drawn in little bit bigger scale than other terrain. That is also good with relation of perceptional psychology; the strategically important buildings are easily spotted on the terrain which is drawn in smaller scale.

And if you generally compare unit-, building- and terrain graphics, there is explicit differentiation also in colors and contrast - just because of the same reason. Overall such development might have been subconscious, but it works pretty well. Now that it is conscious, we should keep it in mind in further development, IMO.

[JW]

That's a very interesting assessment pekka; I like it.

[Eleazar]

I can find 3 different scales in wesnoth graphics: terrain scale, building scale and unit scale.

Actually terrain is drawn to quite a wide range of different scales, from the grassland where individual flowers can be distinguished, to the mountains which fit an entire peak inside a hex. However, i'm all in favor of making this differences in scale harder to notice.

But i'm not especially interested in the dwarvish keep floor at the moment. I haven't merged in to the 1.2 canidate, and i don't especially care if it ever is.

I'd really like to see if we can make some progress toward eliminating the additional glitches between chasm/lava/cave-wall/dwarvish-castle in the next week or so, so it can be included in the 1.2 release.

[pekka]

And if you generally compare unit-, building- and terrain graphics...

Actually terrain is drawn to quite a wide range of different scales, from the grassland where individual flowers can be distinguished, to the mountains which fit an entire peak inside a hex.

I pressure the word generally.

[Jetrel]

I suspect the new dwarven tile floor might look better if it were shrunk vertically by about 30-40%, horizontally by about 20%, and had its contrast increased slightly.

It does look really nice as-is, though.

[Ranger M]

I suspect that it would improve tenfold if the gaps in between the stone blocks were deepened (to quote the woman who would be my art teacher right now if I did art "It needs more black dear"), at the moment it looks too smooth, like they are little smooth dips instead of joins, and although increasing the contrast slightly would help, it would still need to get even darker.

[Eleazar]

*currently ignoring comments on dwarf-floor*

here's an exmaple of some of the glitches we have.

not horrible, but still noticable.

EDIT: i realize mog has proposed a code patch to allow a better way to deal with many of these issues. I'm pointing them out so it can be evaluated which new graphics should be used in 1.2

[Darth Fool]

Ok, I see some (maybe all) of them, but just to be sure, could you edit that image and circle all the glitches that you see.

[mog]

I noticed that the new lava transitions are not in 1.2. Also, lava-castle transitions don't work at all.

Should the new transitions go into 1.2? If not, I'll try at least to fix the current transitions to work with the castle.

[Eleazar]

I noticed that the new lava transitions are not in 1.2. Also, lava-castle transitions don't work at all.

Should the new transitions go into 1.2? If not, I'll try at least to fix the current transitions to work with the castle.

The new lava is not in 1.2, so there shouldn't be special lava-castle transitions.
We're hoping more of the glitches can be resolved without changing C code. If so it can all go in 1.2. If not fixing what's currently in 1.2 would be appreciated.

[mog]

We currently have problems with the wall/chasm, wall/lava, wall/chasm/castle and wall/lava/castle transitions (in trunk, in 1.2 its only wall/chasm and wall/chasm/castle). But I can't see how we can fix them without making lots of custom transition graphics. So we should probably keep the old lava transitions in 1.2, I fixed the remaining problems there.

As for the wall glitches... I'm trying to make them as un-noticable as possible.

[edit]
Maybe there is a way... Is it possible with WML to exclude some rotations from a transition? (Or alternatively: would it be acceptable for wesnoth to print some "error display: could not open image '' " messages during map loading?)

If yes, we can selectively use one kind of image for northern and another for southern transitions. Because we usually already have transitions that look quite well at either the north _or_ the south, but not on both.

Like here (ignore the wall-chasm glitch for a moment)

If we could mix the northern transition from the left image with the southern one from the right image, the result would look quite passable.

[edit2]
I managed to fix almost all glitches by using this method. The WML is ugly as hell, but it works:

[JW]

Wow mog, the underground actually looks pretty!