Map Graphics

[Kull]

That does look pretty cool....and best of all it's original! If it's not a processor hog, O Coding Gods, I vote we go with it!

[L o k i]

I just had another quick flip with the two, and realized it would get quite annoying having them flip each turn, so if its possible, it would be better if the darkness crept around slowly each turn.

For example, if there were 100 tiles in the X direction, and the darkness moved over 10 tiles each turn for 10 turns, it would do one whole rotation. This way it won't be so annoying. Also, you could change the attack and defence for the night time areas. Maybe, I don't know, its really up to how much the programmers can handle.

[Kull]

I do think it would be a *really* cool look, but the problem is that each Clash turn represents 1 to 5 years. So a "day/night" look wouldn't make a lot of sense. Still, if it wasn't too difficult to implement it would make be a great option for the scenario builders. A "Change of Seasons" option shares the same pluses & minuses, but would also be very useful for scenario creators.

Something similar could be used to change the very nature of the tiles. You could have a "global warming option", an "elliptical orbit" option, and even a "precession" option. The effects would depend upon the option selected, but could include flooding low lying areas, changing some grassland to desert, the ebb and flow of glaciers, etc.

[Mark_Everson]

Loki:

Great looking set of icons! Like you said, the houses in the front aren't great, but the rest looks good. As Kull says, I'm not sure what we would actually use the night one for. The big disadvantage of the night view is what it does to the rest of the terrain, which IMO is unacceptable. I thought we might be able to use the lights on, even with the normal map tiles, to signal electrification of cities. I think tie-ins between the graphics and game play like this are important. However, if they were at the cost of having to do a whole other set of city icons, I'm not sure would be worth it. If we end up not having to use an alpha channel for anything else for cities, and I would be easily accomplished with an alpha mask.

Looking forward to seeing more!

[L o k i]

My god... I really don't understand what "Alpha Channels" are. So many people explain it to me, but I can't understand it. It's the only thing I don't know about graphics!!!!!!!!!!! And it really annoys me!

Please tell me! Step by step perhaps??

I'm going to fix up the cities now. Also I don't think it will be hard to create a whole other set of cities for the night time. It would be about 3 hours work I think.

Changing that city image to night time was a mere 10 minutes worth.

I see what you mean about the rest of the terrain not merging well with the night time terrain.
How about we have 4 sections. Day Time, Evening, Night time and Morning. This way we can get some real nice looking images in the game. Ever seen a morning sunrise on a mountain? awesome stuff.. Unfortunetly we'd have to create 4 different times for each terrain. That would be a lot of work. I guess it really depends on when you want or when you think this game will be finished.

If the work was up to me, I could pretty much guarentee about 4-5 months to do the entire lot. However if I worked my arse off I could get it done in a month.

If you think this is all too much for the programmers to handle or if this probably isn't a good idea, then thats cool. I can understand that easily.

[L o k i]

I would really like to know how you propose to connect each tile within the game.

I downloaded V4, and when I clicked on each tile, it would come to the top layer, covering some of the tiles above it.

I don't think this layer over layer is going to work. First, you'd have to remove all those grey areas, otherwise you're gonna get all those lines between each tile, 2nd, if I click on a grassland, and there is a hill below that tile, the tip of the hill will go underneath the clicked grassland tile. Same goes for anything else that goes above the tile diamond.

How are you going to work this thru?

[Mark_Everson]

Loki:

Well, I encouraged you to go ahead and questioned things, so this is what I deserve...

What is in demo for it is a Simple, Kludgy version of what we're going to do. The tile updates only use a single tile. The next version will use a Real update method, and tiles designed with that update method in mind. I'll describe it to you simply, since I don't have much time right now.

Each tile update will be performed in a nine tile pattern. Using all the tiles that are adjacent to the tile we really want to update, and of course the tile itself. In an image buffer, I will assemble each z-level of all nine tiles. First the terrain itself will go down (z = 0) the nine tiles will be painted the same way that they would go up on the full screen image, that is right-to-left starting at the top. So the first thing that goes down is the tile above the tile that needs updating. Then the tile to the upper right of the one were interested in, followed by the tile to the upper left, etc. when the nine tile pattern is complete, we go up to the next z level. The crucial final step is to mask out the precise diamond shape of the bottom three tiles, and anything below. These three tiles are the one to the lower left of our tile, the lower right, and directly below it. The reason for this is that we require the overhang of trees and mountains and units from the lower tiles onto the tile we are interested in, but we can't change those three lower tiles themselves, because other things may overlap on to them. Say all we have is tiles and units. So I put the units on the tiles in the same order. Then finally of course I splat the buffer onto the screen. Following this procedure will result in a Perfect update. The reason I haven't done it yet is that I haven't taken the time to learn how to mask out things in java yet. It involves understanding color models, and I didn't want to delay things to learn how to do that.


Oh, on the alpha channel thing, it just means a partly transparent bit. That's all! So if you want to draw a unit with a colored shield, but the color varies from civ to civ, you use a simple transparent shield with a colored block behind it. If you want to have shading that goes across the shield, you can do this with an alpha channel. So the blue, or whatever color, will shine completely through those places with an alpha value of completely transparent, but only show partly through on the shaded part, which will have a different alpha value. So if black is the "shading" color, and the alpha value is such that half the background will show through, and half will be the black, you'll get a blue-black on that part of the shield.

[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited December 28, 1999).]

[L o k i]

I see.

And I just insert another layer, and reduce its opacity to 50% and draw on that. Same thing right?

[Mark_Everson]

If I understand what you're saying, yep they're the same thing. BTW, I'm just picking up all this stuff as I go along, so don't rely on me for grafix info too much!

[Kull]

Mark: The most important reason that Civ2 is still alive (other than profit-milking by Microprose) , is because it's so customizable. People have built scenarios in which the unit of time is months, days, and even hours. It's true that our primary focus should be on the "real" game of Clash, but if we make it possible for people to build scenarios which use days and seasons (with cool grafx effects like "day/night"), the game will have "legs" for a very long time. If it's difficult to implement or turns into a processor hog, forget it. But if Clash is half as cool as we think it will be, people will do things with it that we never imagined. And we want to encourage that!

[Mark_Everson]

Kull:

Yeah, I know what you mean. And you're right. But for the forseeable future IMO we need to stay focused on the basics, and just put "hooks" in to handle all the neat things we want to do eventually.

[Paul Crocker]

I'm back everyone My first Christmas in a sub-tropical setting - I highly recommend it

First, I'd like to welcome Loki to the team. From what I've read and seen, you can certainly bring some good ideas to the project. Now for my comments...

I agree that TIFF's are a real pain in the *ss, and that's why I've abandoned them for the terrain tiles. We're only using a 256 color palette and no alpha on the map tiles, so GIF's/JPEG's would work fine. I'd still like to investigate how to use an alpha with a GIF/JPEG (not possible as far as I can tell, since they're not multilayered) before totally abandoning TIFF's. We really need to put our heads together before getting to worked up and start cranking out highly detailed tiles (a big reason why my preliminary tiles were fairly shoddy at times - they were simply first drafts). We need to come up with an efficient way of displaying player ownership (colored shields, flags, etc). I personally don't care if it means using an alpha channel or an "ownership" layer on top of the units and cities. I just think it would be VERY inefficient (and downright cludgy) to make a tile for each player color.

As far as the map tiles go, there are still a few problems with them, but I'm on top of that. The gray outline that everyone is *****ing about is now a thing of the past, as I've already solved it - it's just not in the demo 4 graphics set.

Mark's solution to the overlap problem seems workable - we'll just have to wait for demo 5 to see if it really works well (I have faith in you, Mark!) I REALLY think that using an overlap will produce a higher quality map than in Civ. After all, we're not after a clone here. We want something better - which is why we want to get the creative juices flowing. I like the day/night idea, but think it's not the best thing for this project for the same reasons that Kull and Mark listed. I had already been thinking of something like that for seasonal changes, however, for scenarios - but as Mark said, we need to start basic, and build it up from there. It's the same reason that I don't want to attempt 20 different city styles from the get-go (we can add on later).

We can certainly use some talented artists, Loki, and if you're up to the job, I can put you to work on city tiles. We just need to work out some standards before you get too far, so that your beautiful work isn't made obsolete by some detail that comes up in the future. Kind of a pain, but it needs to be done...Here are the main points we need to consider:
1. Graphics file format (sizes and colors) - this has already been decided for the map tiles, so we can probably extend it to the city tiles as well
2. Method for displaying owership. We need to coordinate with JohnMcD and his buddy John, since the method that we choose for unit icons should be the same for the city tiles.
3. Palette considerations. This also requires coordination with the unit icon folks since we want to make sure that the units contrast sufficiently with any underlying tiles (terrain and city).
4. City styles - this may or may not be consistent with the unit icons. However we choose, our standard here should be flexible to incorporate future changes and additions.
5. The actual sizes used for rural vs urban and ancient vs modern cities, and apply this standard to all city tiles (ie for all cultures) to avoid confusing the players.

The main thing is to coordinate everything before doing too much artwork, or else we'll run the risk of throwing things out later as we discover problems. That's the best way to do things IMO This is especially important as we continue to add artists (a good thing as far as I'm concerned!) or else we'll have a dozen people doing their own thing and have a mess at the end.

[L o k i]

"I REALLY think that using an overlap will produce a higher quality map than in Civ"

Basicaly your saying that you don't want visable tiles, you want true looking land, like Age of kings for example, the land merges into the desert like it's supposed to. Am I right?

Ok
Number 1, I understand, please let me know what sizes and color to use. (I highly reccommend making the cities stand out from both terrain and units).

2. This is a problem I thought will come up. The graphic style needs to be similar, otherwise it will look very messy. So.... I don't know how you plan on doing this.

3. yep.
4. Just let me know, and I'll draw it. Just think of me as a slave or something
5. To avoid confusing the players.. I don't quite understand this, but ok. I do think that modern cities should be very large.
This is how I would do it:
Ancient - small to industrial - medium large to modern - very large.
This way we can actualy get the feeling that we do have a lot of people growing.

And lastly, I understand that, and all I really need is for you to tell me what you want me to do and how you want it and when you want it, and I'll do it.

Here's my ICQ everyone: 55459557

[Paul Crocker]

Loki: Thanks for the quick response. It's my understanding that JohnMcd (the unit icon guru) is gone until 1/6. I'd like to hold off on making any final decisions on this discussion until his return, but I think that we are already nailing down some specifics here. To answer your posting:

1. I'll email you the tile sizes. For now, let's start with the biggest (120x70), as Mark described in his email. If you are still unclear as to the overlap (top ten rows of the tile), let me know and I'll try to be more specific. If you look at a terrain tile in photoshop, it should be pretty apparent.
2. I'm leaning to using a separate layer/graphic to indicate player ownership. This has 3 benefits: First (and best reason), it eliminates the need for the TIFF format. Second, we would only need to create one city tile for all of the players, rather than one for each color, and finally, it would be the best method to allow for people to customize them later.
Any thoughts/comments on this? We would simply display a flag, shield, whatever over the city and unit icons. Of course, I'd like to here JohnMcd's and John Gooch's take on this as well (as well as anyone else out there that may have some insight on this)
4. Start off with any culture that you feel comfortable with. The Romans/classic style might be a good choice since that's where players start off in the demos.
5. I thought that having standard city sizes would be most intuitive to the player. FE NOT having a small African village be equivalent to a mid-sized Meso-American town. In other words, if population = 10,000 people, then the city icons should be the same size across cultures for that city size. This may need some more discussion. Mark hit on a great idea that includes some smaller cities in modern times, rather than all large metropolises (sp?) in modern times as in civ. This would help convey different population densities across the map. Question is how to denote smaller rural areas on the map (use your creative genious on this)

I see no problem in starting on some sample tiles to these specs - we can crank out lots of final tiles once we bang out the answers to all of these questions (especially #2) and get some feedback from the rest of the forum after unveiling some more sample tiles. I can't wait to see them!

[L o k i]

I think we should consider creating actual flags for each civilization. This way we can see how big we need the flag to be in order for the flag to correctly present it's correct country.
For example, I once created an Indian flag and it wouldn't fit in properly. So it was hard to tell what flag it was from. If it was slightly bigger, then it wouldn't be a problem. Do you think we could make the flag animate? A little wave in it. Just a small gif animation wouldn't be too hard I don't think.
I'm just giving these ideas now just in case we need to know before-hand so we know what we're trying to aim for. Otherwise we may have to start the process all over again in that area. But I don't know for sure.

I understand about the city sizes, all sounds accurate to me. About the small sized modern cities, that to me sounds a lot like suburbs on the out-skirts of the main city, and thats why I suggest the city being able to expand over the tiles. In this case, once the population reaches a certain size, the computer will randomly pick a suitable area (grassland, plain, hills) and plop down a small village area. And that too will also grow into a larger one. This to me sounds like a great idea and a realistic one.

I'll wait for you to you send me the tiles, and I'll start on a roman/greek style city. I have some good ideas I want to use for them.