What I could offer to the project...

[Ladonna of Thar]

I'm impressed - seems that here people aren't just talking but actually DOING something!

Well, before we get to the organizational stuff (erm... I'm not THAT great an organizer...) let's get the alpha thing done - I'll send you some small gfx as I intend them to be in some hours, so we both know what we're talking about, ok?

Btw, am I right in the assumption that the gray landscape in your applet is a plain JPG file? It's no calculated image, I mean?

Later.


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Honi soit qui mal y pense

[Ladonna of Thar]

Okay, I figured it might be best if I simply include the images on this page for demonstration purposes:

First, the image of a valiant warrior (just a quick'n'dirty sketch)



Then we have a genercic backdrop ("terrain")



To blend or warrior onto the terrain and make his shadow not black, but only darkened, we apply this mask:



So this is the result:



We have another mask for the shield only, the color of which should show the player our warrior belongs to:



...and by applying a color change to the original warrior according to this mask, we get the warrior for player blue:



So, that's the "alpha thing"


[This message has been edited by Ladonna of Thar (edited May 17, 1999).]

[This message has been edited by Ladonna of Thar (edited May 17, 1999).]

[Mark_Everson]

Ladonna:

No worries on the org thing. Glad to have you with us.

-Mark

[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited May 17, 1999).]

[Ladonna of Thar]

Mark:

Thx for the warm welcome

Alas, I wouldn't call myself a "champion" - I just know to use the tools of the trade - certainly I wouldn't compete with a Doc Ozone or the like...

As I already said, first a general agreement on how the baby should look must be made. My personal opinion is that we should strive for something in between CIV2, CtP and AoE, but maybe that's only because of me liking those "antique" gfx so much.

And as for "cutting edge" - is it necessary? Just don't let it look old-fashioned, that's all. I mean, you can only do so much realism, right?

As for the artists: While I certainly can do some gfx myself (and planned to do so, anyway), we need more people with defined areas of work. Just so that we talk about the same thing: If I know there will be, say, 100 different unit types in the game, and we have a team of 4 people doing the gfx (for the units only), let's say one for antique units, one does ships, one cannons & tanks and one jets and spaceships, this leaves 25 units for each artist. Now, let's say we aim at June 2000, so we have roughly 2 weeks for each unit, right? I can assure you, even nonprofessionals can get VERY nice results in 2 weeks. E.g. the little warrior on this page (bearing no real clothes, armor etc.) took me half an hour...

About the organization: Frankly, I suck at organizing - I'm just too chaotic, really. While I'm quite good in planning and designing, I wouldn't trust myself with the organization of a dinner party

Well, maybe we should get the gfx team together first; everything else might simply develop, hm? You planners / coders simply have to inform us on what has to be drawn.

I have read many things here in the forum - frankly, I doubt if even 1/10 of all the ideas can (or even SHOULD) be implemented, making it WAY too complex (and slow?). But it already seems next to impossible just to get all the info. Maybe the best start would be to set up some HTML pages which define

- what is fact now?
- what is planned?
- who does what?

The reproduced discussions in here are simply too much for the moment, sorry...

[Mark_Everson]

Ladonna:

What information that exists right now is on the status link off the main Clash web page. The page is at: people.mw.mediaone.net/markeverson/clash_status.htm

Its not completely up to date. We are still refining what exactly goes into Clash. The target is to have all the Big issues figured out by 5/31/99.

I think its fair to say that the preponderance of opinion is that civ2-ish graphics are the way to go.

I can organize a dinner party with relativelly few fatalities , but organization ain't my strongest area either.

BTW I like your quickie demo images, but am a little concerned on how a style like that will scale down by arbitrary factors. (Of course in civ2 its not perfect either)

-Mark

[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited May 17, 1999).]

[F_Smith]

Okay -- I think I'm beginning to understand 1/10th of this . . .

Yes, we can easily do that layering. And yes, the background was just a simple .jpg I grabbed off the web.

The warrior is excellent. I'll try putting him and his layers in the graphix demo next (maybe tonight?), and use the terrain tile you have there to generate a map.

But can I make one little suggestion? For the turn-based portion, we only need one graphic per civ for 'armies', don't we? Since an 'army' will be a combined group of thousands or tens of thousands of men, using an abstract graphic might be best?

But then again, my wife doesn't even let me dress myself . . .

[Mark_Everson]

F_Smith:

LOL. I think from one to several armies per civ is more like it for the ancient period. And also there'll be individual garrison units here and there to deal with barbarian incursions and such. As you get into the modern age and troops are much more dispersed along fronts I'd imagine we'd have a mixture of individual units and armies.

But I think you're right in that we want some kind of Army representation. My thought had been that we could have several cool army graphics for each age and area of the world, and that the player could pick between them when forming an army. The modern ones would prob. have to have numbers on them since we don't want to need to do 35 army graphics.

[F_Smith]

Welcome back, Mark:

I'm sorry about your Grandmother. I hope everything went well.

Just thinking out loud, but what if we simply used one graphic per civ to represent an 'army'? Like board games use to do?

Or, at most, one graphic for a mobile army and one graphic for a non-mobile 'garrison'?

What am I missing? Why do we need different grafix for armies of different makups?

[Mark_Everson]

Yes, I like the idea of a little window that gives you an "eye candy" represention of what's in the unit. It probably should be laid out in a battle line. So an ancient army would be laid out with infantry /ranged units mostly in the center and flanked by cavalry. These units would also be used in the tactical combat system when we do it.

Like I said, most people seem to agree that civ2-like isometric view is the way to go for Clash. The top-down map was an easy thing we did early on, but I think we need to change the demos etc over to the isometric style asap.

Gif is the standard image file type in java so far, although the newer 1.2 image capabilities may be more flexible I just don't know for sure...

-Mark

[Ladonna of Thar]

Okay, I go d'accord concerning your thoughts of one icon representing a whole ARMY - question is: can such an army be a mixed one or will it be an infantry/cavalry/whatever? Wouldn't we want at least the predominant type be shown graphically?

But, okay, if I take the "gfx demo" as a first assumption regarding the dimension, there's of course simply no use in trying to depict even half a dozen tiny warriors on 40 x 40 pixels... although... one could at least TRY do do some "Fields of Glory"-like gfx.

I propose to have strategical icons for the overview scale but some "eyecandy" gfx for detail scale. What of the following:

On the standard overview map, you have icons. But there should be a small window giving away detail information on that army (stack(, including a representative ("eyecandy") image of either the predominant unit type in that army or simply a scrollable list. This image, reduced in size, could be used as icon in a more detailed (zoomed) view of the map.

Please do not forget that while you may be hardcore strategy gamers and can pretty well get along with simple, numbered counters (I know I can), most people want some visualization of what they are commanding. Remember the beautiful, very detailed images of the "General" series? That's the way to go, I think.

Btw., think about it whether you REALLY want to have a flat square map. CIV2-like isometric view is lower standard today, I'm afraid.

Last issue for now: What gfx format to use? What can be used by java code? It better be something quite common so people can easily add their own graphics (TIF? TGA? Definitely NOT JPG!!!).

[xiane]

I just started lurking tonight, and already I've been driven to put my two cents in here, and probably elsewhere. This is inspiring, and I've got a lot of ideas and would like to help. I couldn't contain myself and started posting, sorry...

One suggestion, Civilization and its brood are springboards for your design, don't feel limited to making "Civ the way it shold've been.". You're proposing a better reasoned game, right now, already.

Would it be possible to place the cursor over army group icon for a moment and have a box popup with the grapical picture of the units in the group and their vital statistics? That would be very useful. Also, I think that the icons should be somewhat different for each army group and be in the color and style of the players nation. For example, a blue lightning bolt, a blue flaming sword, a red wolf, whatever - not a little figure, but a stylized counter with something immediately recognizable on it.)

Also in "look and feel" how about identifying the units by their home province, and the option of adding a nickname or something, maybe even history? People would like to know that their trustiest unit is the 1st Texas Armored Cavalry, the Lancashire Archers, or the Theban Phalanx.

[xiane]

Hmm. One post and already off topic. Sorry about that. I could offer enthusiasm and lots of pesky suggestions, from the look of it so far...

[F_Smith]

Hi, xiane:

Glad to have you. Post away!

I agree with both points. We will have 'tooltip' type info on units. And I *love* the suggestion of identifying a unit with a province -- esp. the history of the legion concept.

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LaDonna:

the unit size / map square size right now is purely arbitrary. We can use .gif or .jpg, as far as I know. Love the 'detail panel' idea, we should do that.

[Dominique]

xiane:

Not off topic at all IMHO (btw. I just changed my nick from "Ladonna" back to my REAL name ).

Now, the idea with the little badges / logos looks most intriguing to me - that way each army group could have it's own "coat of arms", something that was true in history and still is today (over here in Germany, those divisional badges were scoffed at because they looked like the old Wehrmacht badges to some radical renewers... about 15 years ago they were re-introduced because intelligent people had recognized how important it is to identify himself with his unit, which is easier having a badge or the like).

So, I fully support this idea - makes you, the leader, having a more "personal" relation to your units. Not simply "some knights" but "the Most Noble Order of the White Wolf". Sounds great, doesn't it?

And, in game terms, it's certainly helpful to be able to identify a certain formation on the first look, especially since we are considering using the same all-around army image for all units of a nation.

Great input, Xiane, I love it!


F_Smith (btw., what does the "F" stand for?):

As I said to Mark, neither GIF nor JPG are the ideal formats:

JPG is lossy at for this reason alone a no-no. Furthermore, it's quality lessens with each "load-change-save" procedure, and you never know when you have to edit an image for the xth time (let alone making it harder for the players to edit their images).

GIF can use only up to 256 colors - not a problem as such (AoE is done in only 256 colors!), but MUCH harder to do convincingly for the artist - especially in a situation like ours, who are spread all over the world.

Isn't there any way to import TIF or TGA? I'd even settle for BMP or IFF (both should be easy to use in your code).

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If somebody asks you "Art thou a god?", you tell him "YES!"

[This message has been edited by Dominique (edited May 18, 1999).]

[xiane]

Wow! Thanks for the compliments.

A little positive re-inforcement and I'm back for more. First if you could pick a target hex/square for your army group and one of those impresive looking arrows like you see on maps in war movies would appear in your color on the map leading to the destination (semi transparent maybe?). It would be big or small depending on the size of the force.

Which leads me to a gameplay element on the point, should I post it here? Why not. Military intelligence would on the map either nothing - you have no idea where the enemy army group is, a hazy arrow or two, meaning you think he's going there, a more solid arrow, with the proper enemy army group attached, the same arrow, but with a pop up of contents or if you're really good at intelligence, he moves - but nothing happens from his point of view no you know where he wants to go and can respond and go there first or go elsewhere. This would make an intel effort reflect its true value.