Bridges

[thespaceinvader]

I think TSI was saying that the edges were too perfect, and I agree. Take a look at the bottom of the bridge on the right. I probably went too far with it, but that's the general idea. The railing edges could use some similar roughening.

organic_bridges.png

Also, are the terrain shadows going to be moved to the new shadow style? These will look out of place if not.

Bingo. Applying something similar ot the top stone would be good as well, currently it has no variation at all, and looks like on long strip of something kinda plasticky.

[Tet]

Hi very nice.
Have you considered a submerge effect for the pillar? It would look nice in my opinion and should be easy to add.

In reality there would be a reflexion of the bridge in the water in front of the bridge. This is obviously not the shadow, but it would be dark, like the bridge seen from below. You probably figured that out by now.

Can't wait to see it committed.

[Alarantalara]

Hi very nice.
Have you considered a submerge effect for the pillar? It would look nice in my opinion and should be easy to add.

In reality there would be a reflexion of the bridge in the water in front of the bridge. This is obviously not the shadow, but it would be dark, like the bridge seen from below. You probably figured that out by now.

Both of these suffer from the same problem: they rely on the area below the bridge being entirely water. The land to water transitions can come so close in all directions that any part of the area can appear to be land. Since submerging into or reflecting off land would look terrible, I probably won't do either of these. Also, because the water is now animated, I'd also have to animate the reflection and synchronize it with the waves for it to look right. The waves are currently part of the tile, so I can't just replace the waves with my own either.

[Tet]

Well what you need would be a special pillar on water with some transparency on the bottom ground. The reflexion might be more trick, but could work with the tranparency mode. Just make sure it will be covered by land transitions. Around castles, many transitions seem to work. I could mange for my temple experiment (only submerge).

[lurker]

Hello!

Sorry for not communicating for some time. I have not been idle: I have made the n-s version of the (rural) stone bridge and also the extra assignment: the broken bridge transitions. I you want to try it out, just extract the stonebridge.zip into your add-ons folder. A screenshot is always nice:

Note that the n-s bridge is so big, that it bleeds out of its hexes on all sides (consequently is is chopped up into many pieces and the WML is a bit complex). That is on one hand in order to be in the same scale as the diagonal versions, on the other hand it needs to be so big to be able to cross the chasm. Which it is, but atm the shadows are still there. I will probably fix them, but I thought I would let everybody play around with what I have right now so I get feedback about problems before I do so.

Greetings

Lurker

[Boucman]

why didn't you use the standard brige macros ?

I'm trying to reduce the number of macros, and knowing that would help me understand if/how I can use the standard bridge macros for them

if they need to be changed to accomodate your bridges, that would be fine too

[lurker]

why didn't you use the standard brige macros ?

I'm trying to reduce the number of macros, and knowing that would help me understand if/how I can use the standard bridge macros for them

if they need to be changed to accomodate your bridges, that would be fine too

Alarantalara tried (rather early in this thread). The Problem is that the bridge macro does not accoodate the bleeding out, which probably is unavoidable - there is a lengthy discussion about size earlier in this thread also. My guess is that the macro can be adjusted, but first we Need to know what we need from it, right?

Greetings

Lurker

Edit: Actually if the standard macro can be changed to allow overlapping of adjacent hexes, then the diagonal bridges are ok. The problem is the vertical bridge. It does not have only one *-end tile per end, but three: for the north there is a n-n end tile but also a n-nw and n-ne, If they overlap a hex with a castle or a keep they must be omitted. Same for the south. And to make things worse, also the middle part of the bridge can overlap castles or keeps, so it has two optional pieces also (though maybe you could argue that such a case is so rare we do not have to care about.)

I would guess, that Alarantalaras bridge will need more or less the same facilities as mine, so a macro would probably be useful. I just have no insight into macros, and frankly I did not understand the bridge macro (but I also did not spend a whole lot of time investigating it)

Greetings

Lurker

Edit2: A picture tells more than thousand words:

[Alarantalara]

why didn't you use the standard brige macros ?

I'm trying to reduce the number of macros, and knowing that would help me understand if/how I can use the standard bridge macros for them

if they need to be changed to accomodate your bridges, that would be fine too

To elaborate on lurker's post: units have infected terrain with creeping biggerism. None of the bridges fit within the hex boundaries and the standard bridge macro requires that. If the bridges are shrunk to fit the macro, either you lose most of the elevation and probably the sides with it (look at how low and flat the wooden bridge is), or many units become too large for the bridge.

Without shadows, mine barely fit inside the boundaries and my bridge is narrower than lurker's. I could get the shadows to fit if I reduced the height the bridge significantly and got rid of the railings, but it still wouldn't solve the need for an alternate bridge for small hexes, though I suppose I could do that with a multi-hex overlay macro (which I don't think exists either).

At the same time, neither stone bridge needs most of the complexity of the existing bridge macro either, since they can't change direction.

If I started over, I think I would try making a bridge using the wall transition macros.

Edit: I'll add a picture as well, showing where the new bridges go over and how close the wood bridge comes to the edge.

[Eleazar]

I hope you guys can get a better macro figured out, because it looks pretty painful to create/modify a bridge with as many little image pieces as Lurker has. I'd much rather see a bridge that's extends out of it's hex a little than one that's constrained by the narrowest space between hexes, like my old one is.


A couple things i noticed about Lurker's N-S bridge.

* It's not centered, it's a little bit to the left.
* the N end seems to extend much further into the hex that any of the other bridge ends. Is there a reason for that?

[lurker]

I hope you guys can get a better macro figured out, because it looks pretty painful to create/modify a bridge with as many little image pieces as Lurker has. I'd much rather see a bridge that's extends out of it's hex a little than one that's constrained by the narrowest space between hexes, like my old one is.

I cannot really comment on this, but it certainly will not be easy. Maybe the best we can hope for is a macro which handles the many pieces in a consistent way. And then, cutting them out as a last step is not so much of a hassle - annoying, yes, but not overly so. I would try to commit the xcf file containing bridge image and cutout masks, so the bridge can be tweaked as a whole.

Oh, and since we are talking about tweaking:
- It seems possible to posterize the bridge, so the result is more like pixel art than now. 10 or 11 different colors per direction seem to be enough. Should I do that?
- Is the bridge too bright? Should I make it a more saturated brown? As it is now, it cannot really be used for caves.

A couple things i noticed about Lurker's N-S bridge.

* It's not centered, it's a little bit to the left.

Yes, that is a simple mistake and easily fixable

* the N end seems to extend much further into the hex that any of the other bridge ends. Is there a reason for that?

This one is much more worrying, because, yes, there is a reason for that (and I am unhappy about it, too): You can see the reason on the screenshot four or five posts above - the bridge has to be so long on the north, so it can cross the chasm even if the chasm becomes wider on the two sides. The fault lies in the wideness of the bridge: a shorter bridge would have the two posts directly over the chasm. AFAICT this only happens with the chasm (which could be just left aside), but the terrain transitions are not final yet (right?), so I had to err on the safe side. Advice on this issue would be more than welcome.

Edit: The attached screenshot shows that the north transition probably cannot be shorter. The post bases are just barely on their hexes, which in turn are the only ones I can be sure are land.

notice_the_posts.PNG (88.83 KiB) Viewed 3076 times

Greetings

Lurker

[Boucman]

I havn't looked deeply neither at your macros nor at the bridge macros, but there is a common source to the "can't get bigger than hex" problem, if that's the problem with bridges it's pretty easy to solve

just move the [image] out of [tile]

I'll try to move onto bridges asap, I have downloaded your latest macro file and i'll see what I can do.

just work as you used to until I come back to you with more news, but we'll manage to get it to work....

[lurker]

Thank God, it's the cavalry!

I havn't looked deeply neither at your macros nor at the bridge macros, but there is a common source to the "can't get bigger than hex" problem, if that's the problem with bridges it's pretty easy to solve

just move the [image] out of [tile]

Ah, that is probably part of the problem with the current bridge macro. But I think there might be another problem the bridge macro is not prepared for (since that was not applicable to the wooden bridge): The castles must over- or underlap (is that a word?) the bridges on the right hexes to create a pseudo 3d effect. Like so (actually I see there is still a problem with the middle pieces: Usually I would now cut out this small part and not show it on hexes with castles on them, just like the n-s bridge):

Greetings

Lurker

[Boucman]

Ok, i'm working on the bridge macros at the moment... I hope to be able to have your bridge work with the normal macros once i'm done upgrading them...

there is already code on the current bridges not to have any terminations when next to castle, would that be enough for your problem ?

Bridges seem to not be properly layered at the time, nor to respect the calls to DISABLE_TRANSITIONS set by the castle. I'm currently working on the larger than hex problem, but once that is done i'll look into the layering problem.

This might mean that you will have to cut your tiles differently (and rename them to respect the bridge convention) i'm not sure if that's a big job for you... if it's a two minute job, i would be gratefull if you could post the result

if it is not, then wait for my final "go" to do it so I don't make you do some useless work.

hopefull our next iteration on the bridges will be reliable enough to handle both cases of bridges

[lurker]

there is already code on the current bridges not to have any terminations when next to castle, would that be enough for your problem ?

Yes for the diagonal bridges, no for the n-s bridge. The latter has three termination tiles per end, as I tried to show on the screenshot with the n-s bridges. Any or all must be hidden, depending on whether they overlap a castle hex or not.

And then there are the middle pieces, which now have "termination" tiles, too.

This might mean that you will have to cut your tiles differently (and rename them to respect the bridge convention) i'm not sure if that's a big job for you... if it's a two minute job, i would be gratefull if you could post the result

I you tell me how you need them tiled I can do so tomorrow evening.

[Boucman]

there is already code on the current bridges not to have any terminations when next to castle, would that be enough for your problem ?

Yes for the diagonal bridges, no for the n-s bridge. The latter has three termination tiles per end, as I tried to show on the screenshot with the n-s bridges. Any or all must be hidden, depending on whether they overlap a castle hex or not.

if I understand you correctly, if we have a n-s bridge terminating on its north edge, you have three transitions

* one on the n hex
* one small on the ne hex
* one small on the nw hex

assuming that transition can spill on neighbouring hexes, you could be one transition to cover those three, and it would be removed as one piece when arriving into a castle, like it does for current bridge terminations... except bigger than hex

(that's what i'm trying to get to work, i'll keep you posted on my progress, just making sure it covers your need)

so, would that do ?

And then there are the middle pieces, which now have "termination" tiles, too.

these could easily be added, I have a good idea how to place them. Again, i'll keep that in mind, just consider they are bridge<=>bridge transitions and make one image for each direction, i'll manage with that...