Map Graphics

[Mark_Everson]

Flags: One problems is that the flags might need to be arbitrarily sized. FE we may use the size of a colored flag in the background if the power rings don't work out.

Population size: You probably should fire up demo 4. The colored squares show local population. It is distributed over the land, unlike civ. Having a building of roughly the size of the squares in demo 4 was one thought we had.

Hopefully we can put some of these TBDs to rest soon!

[Lord God Jinnai]

As far as rural areas go u could do what was done in another game i played, Darklands. Basically for out of the way places they'd have a house or two here and there.

[L o k i]

The game would need borders..

[L o k i]

I have a question... about the city 'look'.

Do you want a few big buildings with lots of detail.
Or do you want lots of scattered little buildings and one slightly bigger one to stand out from the rest. But no detail.

Or do you want them mixed? (Mixing is hard because there isn't much 'distance' in the tiles without losing proportion to the rest of the map, it doesn't look good but it's more realistic).

I've created one building for the roman age, but I can't go any further with it untill I know the answer to these questions. I have also done one big castle for the castle civs.
There is some detail in both, but not complete. I like to get the basics first, then work on detail, saves me loads of time.

[Lord God Jinnai]

I think for things like castles there should be just the one castle with some small houses surrounding it. For modern times the buildings should get bigger toward the center.

[Paul Crocker]

I tend to agree with LGJ, although I think we should actually see both options before making a decision. Why don't you try making a few samples with various building sizes and numbers to give us a feel for how things will look. After we get some feedback from the forum we can then make a decision. You can send the city samples to Kull to place on the Clash website (and then possibly link to it from this thread). Thanks!

[Krenske]

Throwing back to the reefs at the top.

Areas of reef should be considered as a boost to trade and food +1 civ equivalent for each. As well they should be considered treacherous until a survey improvement is built on them by a civ. By treacherous I mean we could give them a 20% chance of damaging or sinking a ship. Once the survey is done the surveyor could choose to make it public or not. (Maybe making navigation data public knowledge gives trade and diplomatic benefits) Keeping them secret means other nations will still take losses.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Even then it shouldn't completely get rid of the risk

[Paul Crocker]

Loki: If you're out there, could you please contact me regarding Demo 5. I tried getting you're email from your profile, but it's unlisted. You can reach me at crocker@bellsouth.net Thanks!

[Kull]

ummmm....take a look at the Clash Team page.

[Paul Crocker]

*Looking somewhat sheepish...*
Thanks Kull! I sometimes forget about that valuable resource...guess I rely too much on the personal profiles
[This message has been edited by Paul Crocker (edited January 31, 2000).]

[X-Geis]

Hi, I'm new to the team. I'm Chris, and you can contact me at :
seaburn345@yahoo.com

Anyway to the reason for this message,
I'm helping with the terrain graphics, and I've been working nights to come up iwth ideas for what the terrain MIGHT POSSIBLY look like (Nothing Definite)
If you'd like a look, go to : http://wordsup.homestead.com/clash.html

here is a picture of what a few tiles together would look like.

E-mail and tell me what you think, I'd love suggestions or critism, (or praise!). I didn't really work on the land, I know, I'm just working on the sea sections.
[This message has been edited by X-Geis (edited February 11, 2000).]
[This message has been edited by X-Geis (edited February 11, 2000).]

[Mark_Everson]

Well, it's been a long time since there was any action in this thread!

The whole old art team has unfortunately either resigned or disappeared. Paul Crocker, especially, got a lot done before he left, and I think we can still use much of the previous discussion we had within the old group. Now, onto the new stuff...

Magnus Pettersson is interested in doing work on the tiled graphics for Clash, as well as other art. Welcome Magnus! Hopefully he will stop by this thread and say hi. In the meantime, I have posted some of his initial examples of tiled work he could do, and we have discussed possible graphics formats a bit also by email. His tileset examples are here. You can compare them to the ones done by Paul Crocker that are in the Demo 4 tileset which can be seen on the website map graphics page. Please let us know what you think! I'm going to hold off on my comments for a few days.

Also, if in the light of things we've discussed in other threads there are further comments you would like to make about the tiled graphics, or graphics in general, please feel free to resume the discussions where they trailed off.

[Richard Bruns]

The ecology model in its current form requires more map art than current games because there are many more terrain types. I think this will help the game go beyond the current ones, but it will take more work to finish.

The most important thing is that the geography (physical features) has been differentiated from the vegetation on the tile. So instead of just "hills" or "grassland" we have hills with desert, flatlands with evergreen forest, rolling terrain with grassland, etc. This vegetation will change pretty frequently, but the geography probably will not change.

Another big issue is that the game plan calls for turns of as little as a month. As a consequence, the ecology model will model seasonal variation in the vegetation. The art will also have to reflect this seasonal variation.

There are two ways to deal with this:

1) Create a different .gif (or whatever we use) for every combination of geography, vegetation, and season.

2) Define the geography as a "background" and the vegatation as a textured "skin" that is superimposed onto the background. Additionally, the seasonal changes are a "skin" put on the base vegetation art.

I think option 2 would work better. It should give us more flexibility and should be easier to draw for the art team and mod makers. Instead of drawing over a dozen tile graphics for every set of vegetation, they only have to draw one base vegetation texture and a few seasonal textures.

Also, it would make the game look a bit better. If the hills in "hills with forest" and "hills with grassland" have a different shape, then the physical shape of the land would appear to change whenever the vegetation changes. Or even worse, if there was a discrepancy in the seasonal graphics, the shape of the land would appear to change every season. But if only the vegetation skins are changed, the shape of the land will remain constant.

Here is the geography list:

Mountainous
Hilly
Rolling
Flat
Sunken (wetland vegetation only)

The preliminary vegetation list for non-sunken terrain:

Deciduous Forest
Desert (with life)
Grassland
Ice
Plains
Scrubland
Taiga
Tropical Forest
Tundra
Wasteland (no life)

It would be good if the art could represent partial forest cover. For example, an ecological province might be 1/4 taiga and 3/4 plains.

The preliminary sunken terrain vegetation list:

Bog (few plants)
Forested
Lifeless
Swamp (mixed plant cover)

Questions? Comments? Cuss Words?

[Mark_Everson]

Richard:

I think your proposal is probably too expensive in terms of artist time. I think we can afford a complicated ecological model so long as it doesn't inordinately make the rest of the project more difficult. We have to consider that we may well never have the artistic support we'd like. And creating a tileset even for standard civ-type static simple terrain is already very time consuming. So at least my vote on this is that unless we get several artists who are committed long-term And very interested in your concept, its not worth it.