Era of Ilthan

[Civhai]

Wow, that spriting is really difficult for a beginner like me. It's so small, that you can't really do a lot. One pixel is already so much. I tried to turn the upper part of his body, but that was extremely difficult. His body looked as if he was too much on the left side, then I moved it by one pixel, then it looked as if the body was too much on the right side and so one. The position of the head was the most difficult. And then I spend hours on trying to correct his arms and shoulders. Then I wanted to improve his skin color and I thought, I'd take the color of a mainline sprite. First I thought, that it looked extremely strange, then I looked at it at 1:1 and I saw that it was the best thing I ever tried. That's what I admire about mainline sprites. If you enlarge them, they look extremely strange. Just as if someone had mixed a few colors and divided them equally to some random pixels. But if you look at them 1:1, they look just perfect.

Now I really got stuck with the metal stuff. The armor looks really strange. I tried to make it look a little oblique, but making lines is so difficult if you only have a space of a few pixels and every pixel makes a big difference. And then I had problems with the sword. I always thought that weapons are the easiest thing, because you can just take a few gray tones and then you have it, but if you want to make it look realistic, it gets really difficult. I looked at the swordsman's sword and noticed, that he had a lot of white, so I tried that, too, but now it looks strange again. I think making an oblique sword is really difficult. Can someone give any comments?

next betaversion

pirate.png (1.46 KiB) Viewed 3654 times

[Turuk]

I would say that it might be the size of your head as well, as the head and the chest look to be about the same size. Also our left (his right) leg seems to have an odd bend in it.

[Civhai]

Ok, now I noticed what you meant with the bent. I have improved this now. But now, because we found out while playtesting, that wood pirates don't have anything good against undead, we gave the pirate a torch. Now he looks like this:

pirate.png (1.66 KiB) Viewed 3597 times

About the head I don't know, because he has a lot of hair and a beard. Maybe the head is still a little too big, but I'll adjust that later if necessary. Anyway, I think that I'll leave him like that for now, because one really gets tired if one works more than two days on the same sprite. Now we have some questions more in the direction of balance. We try to take the mainline as a guideline for balance.

The the Arton swordsman has 6-3 in melee and 38 hitpoints. He has the Smallfoot movetype and costs 14 gold. He always seemed almost not killable in our battles, so I thought he was too cheap, but on the other hand, he is pretty similar to the grunt but costs 2 gold more.

The Arton horseman is another problem. He has 7-2 charge in melee, mounted movetype and 30 hitpoints. He had almost the same effect on my mages as the loyalist horseman and because he was fast, he could enter my lines one or two times and kill a mage. I didn't think that this was very bad because it was just an exchange and I always got his horseman afterwards, but then I saw that he costs only 18 gold! So I thought he was much too cheap. My brother thought he wasn't too cheap because he is much worse than the loyalist horseman. While I felt as if he had almost the same effect. Now we adjusted it to 19 gold, but I still think it may be a little too few. What do you think?

[Turuk]

About the head I don't know, because he has a lot of hair and a beard. Maybe the head is still a little too big, but I'll adjust that later if necessary

Ah, that was my mistake, when I said the head and the chest are the same size, I did not mean that the head is too big but rather the chest could stand to be a bit bigger.

[Skizzaltix]

Actually, I feel like his head is too small when compared to mainline sprites. It could also have to do with the angle, though

[Civhai]

Ok, thanks, that sounds more reasonable. I'll improve that when I come back.

By the way, we've done lots of balance improvements in the last two days. Now I found out that you can use differential equations to calculate the strength of an army (theoretically). Sounds funny and I'll probably try that on my Era, too. Does anyone have any experiences about using math to balance wesnoth? Of course, I won't balance the era MAINLY on math, because I know that everything I can do is much to simple and since I don't know that much math, anyway, but just to take it as an extra feedback.

I'll be away for a week and won't be able to answer.

[Civhai]

Now, a year later, I wanted to state that the era is still alive. Sometimes, we did less, sometimes more, in the last few weeks, it awakened again. I don't remember what the changes since my last forum post were, but I assume we almost improved everything.

I think our balancing works quite well right now for the factions we worked most on, for the undead and earthman, some more work is to be done, though. The computer does extremly bad with the lizard alliance, but I assume that this does not really mean that they are worse than other peoples, but rather that they are harder to play. Their units can quite easily be killed compared to units of other factions, but therefore, they are very agile and can do a decent amount of damage at day. Therefore I assume that using their agility to achieve only fighting at the right time of day is even more crucial for them than for other factions and the computer just doesn't do so well with this.

We're just trying to move the era from 1.4 (!) to 1.8 and got some problems. If I understand the description in the wiki correctly, one has to put the campaign into the .wesnoth1.8/data/addons directory now. At my computer this works (except for usual porting problems, but we'll have to fix that anyway), at my brother's computer, he says:

20100704 13:09:39 error config: File not found '@campaigns/Era_of_Ilthan/Era.cfg'
20100704 13:09:39 error config: File not found '@campaigns/Era_of_Ilthan/units/'
20100704 13:09:39 error config: File not found '@campaigns/Era_of_Ilthan/units/lizard_alliance'
20100704 13:09:39 error config: File not found '@campaigns/Era_of_Ilthan/units/mountain_mages'
20100704 13:09:39 error config: File not found '@campaigns/Era_of_Ilthan/units/black_army'
20100704 13:09:39 error config: File not found '@campaigns/Era_of_Ilthan/units/desert_undead'
20100704 13:09:39 error config: File not found '@campaigns/Era_of_Ilthan/units/swamp_undead'
20100704 13:09:39 error config: File not found '@campaigns/Era_of_Ilthan/units/wood_pirates'
20100704 13:09:39 error config: File not found '@campaigns/Era_of_Ilthan/units/artons'
20100704 13:09:39 error config: File not found '@campaigns/Era_of_Ilthan/units/earthmen'

Does anyone know that problem or how to solve it?

I hope that after porting it to 1.8, we will be able to continue our work and show you some of it. Our era is quite inhomogenous right now, because first our art was terrible, mostly frankensteined or similar to an existing unit, while now we have become more ambitious, so even after finishing all units, we will still have a lot to do because we want to repaint some of the existing ones. I assume it is still too early to ask for help if we don't even have acceptable art for all the units, but if someone still wants to help, I think the best thing you could do is write the descriptions for units, since none of us is a native English speaker and hence it is quite difficult for us to write good descriptions.

[Dixie]

If you're using wesnoth 1.8, it's probably because some of the syntax changed:
{@campaigns/Era_of_Ilthan/Era.cfg} becomes {~add-ons/Era_of_Ilthan/Era.cfg}.

Go check your main.cfg

There might be other such problems with syntax changes, but I didn't do WML back in 1.6 and 1.4, so I wouldn't know all of it. In any case, you should double-check all your files, consult the wiki a lot, and possibly compare with other working eras.

[Civhai]

Ok thanks, we made it work now.

We want to start doing more for the era again and so I made an overview on the first page as most era developers do, you can download it there, too.

By the way, we use git for our development and think that this is a very good program if you want to develop an era with several people.

If you have any comments on the overview or if you tried it out, please post your feedback.

[Drakefriend]

No unit file works, you should probably get 1.8!

[Civhai]

I have 1.8! I even checked the download on another computer since it is generated by a script which selects only the files needed for normal use. What errors did you get?

[Drakefriend]

A "?" as the name of each unit in the leader list(after I updated _main.cfg, it was not even listed before I did this), which as far as I know means the unit is not recognized by the game, therefore aborting it (I did not try to chose a leader and play with him because of this). When I looked into some unit files, I saw that instead of

Code: Select all

advances_to

then advancement tag was

Code: Select all

advanceto

, which is outdated and does not work anymore. Ýou should probably update the era, because the main file and at least one element of the unit files is invalid.

[Dixie]

Maybe you could try to run wmllint on your era, it might simplify your life a good deal, I guess :

http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=30795

[Bvc]

I`m the second person who works at the Era of Ilthan.
Civhai has already told that the Era works. The bug that in the files is written "advanceto" instead of "advaces_to" is already corrected and I don`t know why it is in your file like that. And the pictures which aren`t at place was an other bug which we have already corrected.

[Civhai]

Hi,
now the problem gets really strange! I downloaded it myself and tried the following:

cat *.cfg **/*.cfg **/**/*.cfg | grep advanceto

And it yielded only one row in the whole era and that one had the old AND the new version, so I assume that it was a mistake I did while merging files with git. Even that unit worked for me. So somehow we are really talking about different things. Did you really download it from the first page? I now removed the old downloads from the middle of the thread to avoid misunderstandings.

By the way, wmllint seems to be really cool. I wrote a lot of small scripts myself and made even some integrity checks, but now I think wmllint may do that job. But somehow, I only have it in the data/tools of wesnoth 1.6 and that one really makes our files invalid for 1.8... And the thing I downloaded on the other thread doesn't have enough libraries, so it couldn't be run. Do you know where I can get the whole tool for 1.8?