Bridges

[lurker]

Hello,

@Atz: You are right. In fact I have seen that yesterday already - the screen on my laptop seems to be quite a bit sharper and brighter than at home - and have tried to fix it: I have shifted the arcs to the southeast in their entirety(*). The floor and the rails have stayed where they are, because I need them there to span the whole abyss. As a result they are no longer centered above the arcs. That is not completely unrealistic for this kind of bridge, I think, but I would really like to hear what others have to say about the matter.

@Sangel: I have desaturated the bridge a bit more, but not completely. I think it needs to stand out a little bit. But I think I may have found the thing that was missing most to make the bridge blend into the landscape: I had forgotten the shadow the south-eastern cliff would cast on the side. In the screenshot I have tried to fix that by blending the side into the abyss a little more and I will experiment with creating a dedicated shadow also.

Anyway, here is the current status:

test.png (267.83 KiB) Viewed 4138 times

Greetings

Lurker

(*) I cannot stretch them because they are carefully crafted to by nicely tilable.

[Boucman]

Ok, I already noted a limitation with my macros

single hex bridges are not directional at this point, i'll fix that eventually, maybe even before the week-end, but don't be suprised

[Atz]

Looks better where it meets the wall. I think it still looks a bit odd where the "floor" of the bridge cuts off, though. This may be inevitable - the top edge looks like it cuts across the corner of a rock on the cave floor, and there's probably not much you can do about that.

It could also be because the end of the bridge is a very sharp, straight line and is placed on natural terrain. In real life most bridges would meet a path or some other construction, and/or have a dirt and whatnot scuffed around the edge, which might blend the sharp edge a bit and make the bridge look more like part of the terrain. I don't know whether it would be feasible to include a bit of scuffed dirt as part of the end transition or something... I attempted this mockup so you could see the kind of thing I'm talking about.

[Eros]

non-artist alert!

Though the centre support fades away into nothing-ness while the NW support appears to butt onto the chasm wall. This looks good but the SW support doesn't appear to meet the chasm edge at all.

Now the developers can delete my post.

Edit: Your bridges are awesome!

[Spell]

You really should improve the contrast of the bridge. Looking at it is kinda difficult. My suggestion would be an bit changed color and more highlights (which shouldn't be brown.)

[lurker]

Hello.

I have spent another day testing the new macro by changing the relevant image files. They can be found in the attached test.zip.

Apart from the missing single hex variant and the broken bridge transitions I found the following issues:

A)The endings are clipped

(first row: new macro, second row mine)
B)The interaction with castles is wrong. (1)The castle floor is painted below the bridge, (2)The castles behind the bridge eclipse the bridge instead of vice-versa

(first row: new macro, second row mine)
C)The interaction whith mountains is wrong. Mountains should be below the ns-bridge in almost all circumstances, with the exception of the south-most transition, and behave like castles for the diagonal bridges

(first row: new macro, second row mine)

I have attached testbridge.zip. It can be dumped into your add-ons folder and contains the currently working bridge which does everything right (except one minor glitch and a bad interaction with the swamp which has to be fixed on the swamp side), which could serve as comparison while you fix the macros, if you would care. Also this whole thread is full of screenshots of cornercases this humble person feels are actually worth looking at when it comes to real bridges instead of rails and rail-like bridges (and they do not include branches and turns).

Frustrated

Lurker

[Boucman]

Unfortunately, I can't just take your configs and just dump them in mainline...

there are too many kludges, special cases, it doesn't use any macros etc...

that's OK for UMC which use terrains in well known maps, but in mainline if we start doing that the terrain WML would quickly become impossible to maintain as it turns into a pile of kludges over kludges over kludges.

we need to solve this the proper way, and we are almost there.

hold on a little more and we will get this going

Boucman

[Boucman]

Ok, we managed with eleazar to get the nw/se bridge to work, he found the way to cut it to fit with my macros...

could you recut the n/s and ne/sw in a similar way ?

there might still be quirks with castles and mountains and stuff, but we are in the process of reorganizing these, so their layering will change anyway...

hopefully, once this is done, we are good to go

[lurker]

Ok, we managed with eleazar to get the nw/se bridge to work, he found the way to cut it to fit with my macros...

could you recut the n/s and ne/sw in a similar way ?

Yes. Unfortunately I do not have time this evening, but I have updated my working copy and copied the files and will provide the missing ones tomorrow evening. Cannot test them though (because I will have to use the laptop).

Greetings

Lurker

[Boucman]

that's fine, i'll commit as soon as you post them

yay

[Eleazar]

There are still some odd layering issues, but i'd first like to try to solve the in a general, big-picture way rather than making the bridge accommodate the rather odd layering stuff that it reveals.

see here.

[lurker]

Hello,

Here are the missing (or rather all) pieces for the testbridge. I tried to be as diligent as possible with the cut, but since I cannot test them at the moment, it was a bit of an instrument flight. Please give them a glimpse before committing and post here if you find something strange.

Thank you

Lurker

[Boucman]

Thx a lot, they look good to my untrained eye, so I comitted them...

Now we just need the endings for water and we will be done...

There are of course all the layering issues with mountains and stuff, but I need to "recompress" all our layering conventions to leave more space for special terrains (currently all walls/bridges etc... are on layer -1 and 0 which explain all our collisions)

[lurker]

Thx a lot, they look good to my untrained eye, so I comitted them...

Now we just need the endings for water and we will be done...

Do we already have a naming convention for them? I probably could make them tomorrow...

There are of course all the layering issues with mountains and stuff, but I need to "recompress" all our layering conventions to leave more space for special terrains (currently all walls/bridges etc... are on layer -1 and 0 which explain all our collisions)

I am all for it. I am drifting off topic now of course, but how will it work? If e.g. the bridges and the mountains are on different layers, would not either a bridge always be over the mountains (even if the mountains are to the south of it) or vice versa?

Greetings

Lurker

[Eleazar]

I should have said earlier that the way i chopped up the images is slightly more simplistic than it needs to be. I.E. everything is cut on a straight line, though it doesn't necessarily need to be so.

Particularly the curving down pieces next to the shore might be cut more sophisticatedly to mesh better with the castle -- or maybe not. I didn't experiment.