My Terrain (Mine!)

[doofus-01]

Thanks guys.

In general I've noticed your yellow looks way too green, is your monitor weirdly calibrated or something?

What can I say? I'm colour-blind, red and green are basically the same thing. In this particular case, I used the colour-picker on the sand tile. If the colours are really off, I wonder if it would work to just post gray-scale that could be recoloured? That might not work with something this small though.

Here's a progress shot. Still not done, still not fully shaded, but I made the castles a little smaller and I've got the keeps started. The design of the keep tower top is still in progress, I don't like the lipstick/rocket cones so far.

sandcastleshot1.png (380.6 KiB) Viewed 3612 times

My real reason for posting now is this: How does one use exploder? I thought I'd swallow my skepticism and give it a try, but I didn't get very far. I had 1.7.13 installed, I tried installing exploder afterwards with "scons install-exploder" and "scons install", got no errors. But when I tried to use exploder:

Code: Select all

name@computer:~/castle_project> exploder castle-convex.png castle-exploded-convex.png 
20100311 19:42:15 error config: File not found 'NAME'
... 
(repeats many times)

Failed: Unable to find mask corresponding to castle-convex-nw
name@computer:~/castle_project>ls output
name@computer:~/castle_project>

I did a quick search through the exploder.cpp & similar files in the same source folder, but didn't come up with a phrase "NAME". I don't know what else to do.

[Boucman]

ok, i havn't played with the exploder myself but all the images needed by the exploder seemse to be in

data/tools/exploder for the cfg files
images/tools/exploder for the images

i've been quickly poking around, and the tools seems to be broken in trunk, i'll try to fix asap, but i'll be away next week, so don't hold your breath. i'll keep you posted

[Boucman]

Ok, I got it to work, there were two problems

1) the target image needs to exist (no idea why) and probably have the right size. I used the figure12 in the castle tutorial and all seems to work

2) there is a bug in data/tools/exploder/models/castle.cfg you should replace all instances of NAME with IMAGESTEM

hopefully you'll have time to test this tonight before I leave for next week

[kitty]

The design of the keep tower top is still in progress, I don't like the lipstick/rocket cones so far.

Just an idea: perhaps take some inspiration from minaretts, not the round slender variety but rather the sturdy square based ones? Historically minaretts were also used as watchtowers.

http://images.cdn.fotopedia.com/flickr- ... -image.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... 822%29.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... inaret.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... -11-12.jpg

[beetlenaut]

If the colours are really off, I wonder if it would work to just post gray-scale that could be recoloured?

The color is pretty good now. If it needs to be fixed, it would be much easier to tweak it a little than recolor it from greyscale.

[doofus-01]

hopefully you'll have time to test this tonight before I leave for next week

I should have some time to look at it, I'll report back tomorrow (Sat) ~2-3pm GMT.

perhaps take some inspiration from minaretts, not the round slender variety but rather the sturdy square based ones?

Funny, I'd tried a slender minaret, but gave up. The first image gives me an idea though... (I'm not sure how a square base would work with all of the wall transitions, but maybe if exploder works it will be easier to tell.)

If it needs to be fixed, it would be much easier to tweak it a little than recolor it from greyscale.

OK, I'll forget the grayscale thing.

[Sgt. Groovy]

I'm not sure how a square base would work with all of the wall transitions, but maybe if exploder works it will be easier to tell.

You can of course keep the basic design, just replace the square base with hexagonal one.

[Darker_Dreams]

I'm not sure how a square base would work with all of the wall transitions, but maybe if exploder works it will be easier to tell.

You can of course keep the basic design, just replace the square base with hexagonal one.

After reading the line Groovy replied to I particularly thought this link (the second kitty posted) might be worth highlighting;
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... 822%29.jpg

It's got something of the basic tower shape, but is still pretty and interesting and would work fairly well with the hex-nature of Wesnoth. It's also not a space-needle (I'm not sure what you didn't like about the slender minaret, so I'm kinda guessing there). Looking through the wiki-pages it's used on there are some other pics of how it looks from varying angles, including this one;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WKMos ... r_1866.jpg

just $0.02 from the peanut gallery.

[doofus-01]

Boucman: The NAME -> IMAGESTEM thing worked:

castle-exploded-convex2.png (33.27 KiB) Viewed 3283 times

I'm still not sure how useful exploder is though. The convex & concave castles are not really so difficult just using the existing castle images as templates. The keep-castle transitions are not as easy (but more tedious), and I don't readily see how to address those with exploder. Cutter, on the other hand, does appear to work and does appear to address my problems with positioning the individual images. The naming scheme of the generated files might not work with the current terrain macros though. I'd need to play around with it to say much more, but I guess I'll have some time to do that before you get back.

This is a progress shot:

sandcastleshot2.png (321.93 KiB) Viewed 3283 times

This design works for me. That's true about the hexagonal example, but part of what makes the minarets is the fine detailing, which I don't know how to do on these images (too small). It will just end up looking blurry like the elf castles. Maybe later on there can be variations that look more like minarets.

I think I will make the castles even smaller.

Thanks.

[doofus-01]

I need to take a break from this, but this is the current state of things:

[Issyl]

I like it a lot. I will say that the sand walls lack texture in general though (this has been said before I think).

[em3]

Ar you sure about chopping off concave keep towers? They look weird... like chimneys.

[Sgt. Groovy]

I would also say that three different kinds of towers is too much, two would be better. The keep tower is otherwise good, but the details might need some readjustment, now the top looks like it has a face on it.

[doofus-01]

A face? Which one has a face?

I'd had in mind to put flames in the chimney-like ones, but I think I was just getting carried away. It would be too distracting.

[Sgt. Groovy]

The tall towers, with two windows side by side as eyes and one lower as mouth. It's one of those things where once you start seeing it as a face, you can't help but seeing it as a face.