Map Graphics Thread, Part II

[Simon Loverix]

Fiera: I'm posting here to let you know I tried to reorganize the ecology model, you might want to take a look at it in the ecology thread.

I'll give you a list of terrain types here:

* Terrain: Basin, Flat, Rolling, Hills, Mountainous
* Climate: Arctic, Sub-Arctic, Cold Temperate, Warm Temperate, Sub-Tropical, Tropical; Ice Cap, Ocean, Sea, Lake
* Vegetation: Wasteland, Desert, Low Cover, High Cover, Light Fores, Forest, Climax Forest

You would need different vegetation graphics only for old (conifer), temperate (decidous), hot (tropical) areas and the water vegetation, although this will most likely only be a few little, green, floating, things.
Do you know Transport Tycoon? Your latest tiles actually reminded me of that game, and there were also three sets of different trees. By the way those graphics are already very good. They look very tangible, in contrast to CivII, where the empires were founded on a moulded pancake . CivI looked better: the terrain was like a spunge that had teeth (mountains).

Can you do something like the three forest tiles with desert-low cover-high cover?

The model still needs to be discussed anyway and will probably be simplified.

[Mark_Everson]

Fiera:

I did a quickie thread on the topic of rivers. There was a reasonbly strong concensus for in-square rivers. So in-square is what you need to work on representations for. Rivers can go in the same basic 8 directions from the tile center that roads can, so we could even put in really contorted rivers some day if desired.

[Fiera]

Hi again, everybody!

I'm sorry, I've been a bit busy lately, but I've managed to put together a deciduous trees demo. They're over a Plains tile, but I can put them over Grassland or whatever you need, as I've made them as separate layers...

I will work on roads now, and then also on rivers now that I know that they'll be in-square...

You can take a look at the demo here:
http://www.geocities.com/fiera_com/demo.html


Simon,

hi, and thanks for your comments!

I started working on these trees before reading your post, however, I think that they might fit in your model.

One thing I need to know: I'm not quite sure about the difference between low-cover and high-cover...
[This message has been edited by Fiera (edited April 21, 2001).]
[This message has been edited by Fiera (edited April 22, 2001).]

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Fiera:

The new trees look a little too "pointy". I'm sure that's because of only having a few pixels at the edge to deal with... but getting the trees perfect is a lot lower priority than roads and rivers etc.

I just had an idea. How about showing amount of farmland on a tile using little squares of 'tilled land'. You could fit maybe 25 of them in a tile if it were filled with them. Then you could have a number of fields proportional to agricultural sites. This shouldn't be done anytime soon, but is just an idea that I wanted to see what others thought about.

[Richard Bruns]

That idea can be extended to other things. If each square has 25 tiles, then each tile can have one tree or one farm or one house representing a village or suburb.

Hmmm, with a 40x80 tile, each of the smaller tiles would have to be 8x16 pixels. Fiera, Can you draw a house icon that small?

Or to get really radical, each square could have multiple terrain types. The square could have 8 mini-squares of desert and 17 of plains This would turn a square into an ecological province, for all practical purposes. So we can use all the old ecological province plans that relied on a big batch of squares with fixed borders. Each province in the old model is now a square on the map. That is probably excessive, but I'd like it a lot and it could make the map look a lot better.

[Simon Loverix]

Fiera:

Low cover means low vegetation overall: grass, some bushes, no trees.
High cover means something between grassland and a forested area: grass, bushes and an occasional tree. I wanted to have a bigger difference between desert and forested than just 1 type. They almost look the same anyway.

On representing sites on the map:
I like details, but maybe we're going to far by giving every pixel on the map a meaning. But as long as the data don't get in each other's way on
the map, it's OK.

Treating the squares as provinces might prove the most simple solution. It would solve many problems regarding province size, overlap etc. But multi-square provinces were also a tool to keep the map unfragmented.

[Mark_Everson]

Things that make the map both look better, and give the player information are great. I don't know how much of that we can get away with, without the graphics looking too busy. Figuring that out is part of Fiera's job .

Rather than terrain micromanagement I think anything we put in the graphics needs to answer the questions that player will frequenly ask, and I don't think 'what ratio of desert to plains is here?' fits that bill... The number of farm sites will be very important economically to the player for at least the first half of the game, which is why I suggested it. But I don't claim to know the exact right answers to what the player will most want to know yet . That'll be best answered in playtesting.

I am strongly against pushing detailed ecological modeling down to within a tile. I don't think the player will get much out of it, and there are tens of thousands of tiles already! If you want that, then just redefine the tiles to be 10km across, and you can basically have a map with terrain governed on the finer scale you want. But for the whole world that'd be over a Million tiles . Only things that are really important like gradual deforestation, and drainage of swamps, are likely to be important enough to model for each tile IMO. And those only at a crude level.

[Fiera]

Hi all,

First off, a quick clarification that I should have made before: the tiles I've been using in my demos (the ones in the demo.html page) are not exactly 80x40 size, but rather 78x40, since that was the only way I managed to finally arrange a symmetrical diamond. Due to this symmetry, these tiles prove perfect for the division in 25 small diamond-sized tiles.

So I've put two small and quick demos implementing farm sites over both grassland and plains. I think they're selfexplanatory, and though I'm not quite satisfied with the way the fields look like, they serve their purpose well, so you can tell wether you like the idea or not.

The demos are here, at the end of the page:
http://www.geocities.com/fiera_com/demo.html

About taking this idea further, I think we should be careful. Showing the degree of deforestation and farming is taking place in a square may be enough. Having 25 different kinds of terrain inside a 78x40 square, when you'll probably have something like 120 visible squares in the map, would drive crazy even the most perfectionist player, IMO.

We have to bear with the fact that the map is just a conventional representation of the world (ie, trees will be always too big in comparison with mountains, as will be units when compared with cities, etc), so a good compromise will be keeping things informative as well as good looking. That's the way I see it.


Simon,

quote: Can you do something like the three forest tiles with desert-low cover-high cover?

So what you'd like me to do is to implement, in three stages, the "evolution" from high-cover to desert? I'm not sure wether I finally understood you...

[Richard Bruns]

The general isea looks good, but could you increase the contrast between the farms abd background? I had to squint to make them out.

I was relly only thinking of two terrin types in a square, like a border between plains/grassland.

[Mark_Everson]

Fiera:

Thanks for trying it out! I'm with Richard. It looks like the general idea will work ok, but the farm patches IMO, if we use them, will need several different colors in them so that they can be made out against different tiles.

[Fiera]

OK, I'll try putting different colors in.

I thought you'd probably be interested in what CIv3 will look like. PCGameplay has posted the first in-game screenshots. One of them shows the map view. You'll be very surprised to see that they're using something like our power circles! Grassland looks good, similar to what I'm working on but with softer colors. The forests and irrigations seem very ugly to me, however.

See it here: http://www.pcgameplay.co.uk/newscentre.htm

[Mark_Everson]

Man, are those graphics ugly and nonfunctional... There are several types of units represented, but you can barely tell them apart at first glance! And they seem to have picked at the uglier version of the power circle -- the one that we discounted as aesthetically lousy quite some time ago... Also it's not clear if they're using the most important function of the power circle, to show the actual military strength of the army.

I'm with you, the only things I think there really work in these images are the grassland, and the sea is not too bad. What a shame... but I'm sure they'll do better before it is released.

[Simon Loverix]

Fiera:
You did understand. The forest looks fine, you surely can do it for the other vegetation too.

Civ3:
Ugh.. Somebody dropped a box of pixels there. This barely qualifies for a 'fog of war' map. Clash at least has trees instead of green stuff.
If the mess on the roads was irrigation, nobody's ever going to irrigate, just for aesthetic reasons. Thank god it's only a preview.

multiple terrain:
If we want more terrain, why not just increase the number of squares a bit? I would also like a huge map with a square for every km² but, alas, that's not yet possible with common computers (I think).
[This message has been edited by Simon Loverix (edited April 27, 2001).]

[Fiera]

quote: Originally posted by Simon Loverix on 04-27-2001 06:47 AM Fiera: You did understand. The forest looks fine, you surely can do it for the other vegetation too.

OK, will try it...

Regarding Civ3, there's a a new map view screenshot, posted by MarkG here:
http://www.apolyton.net/civ3/images/...-incaesar2.jpg

It's clear that they're still making important changes. The irrigations look better now now, and the ocean is blue in this one, plus the PCs seem to be gone. However, there's a big circle around a Horse unit (or is it around a city? - could be a new representation of the City radius).

Some lessons I think we can extract from these screenshots for Clash:

- Colors are very important. The player instantaneously decides whether he likes the game colors and look or not. We have to be careful with that.

- Units must clearly stand off the background, and there must be remarkable differences among them at a glance, so you can quickly tell which unit is which in the map view.

- The new interface they're trying to implement just don't look right. But that just may be a matter of nostalgy.

Anything else?

[Simon Loverix]

- They still lay their roads on top of the trees. Nice overlook for travellers, but a little expensive in upkeep. Fiera, could you leave space between the trees for roads and/or rivers, so there's always room to draw a road? Laying a road in climax vegetation will downgrade it to normal forest.

- Those guys don't come outside anymore these days, do they? If they did, they would know water does NOT look blue, only the sea. I'd say, don't draw irrigation explicitly, only indicate farmed/not farmed for the small tiles on the square.

We can do a lot with those tiny tiles. We could draw a little building for 4% of the land occupied by infrastructure, a little field for agriculture, a pool for partial wetland,..

[This message has been edited by Simon Loverix (edited April 29, 2001).]