Map Graphics Thread, Part II

[Gary Thomas]

The way it works at present is that both the strait and the isthmus exist - that is, land units can cross, as can sea units.

Cheers

[sas]

Wow!

Great to see this thread coming alive. It's inspiring to work when the response it so good. Strait and the isthmus is in my opinion a minor problem that if we want can be addressed later.

I will post the roads tomorrow. I'm not sure what the point of making the hills/mountains into overlays, can anyone explain why we should use it ?

We also need, urgently, a broken type of terrain, between hills and mountains

ok, I will make a "mixed" version of the current hills and mountains.

[axi]

I'm not sure what the point of making the hills/mountains into overlays, can anyone explain why we should use it ?

According to the ecology model (which may now be obsolete, of course, I am no expert on that) we would have too many types of vegetation which were to be combined with the various types of terrain. That means a great number of tiles and one solution is the use of overlays. If there is no problem with the number of tiles, we do not nedd the overlays.

Just a flashback of mine - don't pay too much attention.
This is up to Mark actually; he is the one who can best tell what our current policy is, I'm just speculating.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Everybody:

My call at the moment is that we should just go with one type of each tile for the forseeable future. The ecology model won't be coded for quite some time, and we want to have some good tiles in the interim. At some point we need to look at the tradeoffs between how the ecology model works and what is shown in the tiles. But IMO that is months off at this point.

[sas]

Major Update !

Well, this is what I call the end of phase one for me.

I've made roads (mudtrails) and coasts. I have also tweaked all the tiles I have made.

What I REALLY need now is everyone to download what I have made and take a look at it.

Last, I have made a screenshot of how it looks at the current stage. The coasts are laid on top after I captured the screen.



Feedback !

-Stian-

[sas]

BTW, the mountains in the picture are placed wrong. It was do to a mistake when I named the mountains. But in the .zip file they are named right.

[Richard Bruns]

That looks really good. I certainly vote for putting it in the next demo.

Is there any way to remove individual trees form a tile, to make room for a road or building? That has been talked about that before. If we have little tree graphics placed on top of other terrain instead of a "forest" tile, the game will look more professional then civ3. It also allows us to show deforestation and other ecology effects.

I know that isn't coded yet, but I think it is the direction we'd like to move in for the ecolofy model. How hard would it be to make a ground layer and then a vegetation layer with trees and farmland?

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Stian:

Thanks so much for putting the work into a demo using the game!

I think the coastline at the bottom is Beautiful! I also really like the hills, and the mountains seem to work fairly well. I can't say I like the plains or forests that much compared to the other ones. But your forest should work better with roads and such. IMO the new sea is a bit too subdued.

Why didn't you put in the roads? It would have been good to see how they worked with your tiles.

A Very Solid effort for "phase one"!

Good Work,

Mark

PS I can tell you how to make it so the terrain is the same every time if that would be useful for demos like the one you just did, and comparison to the old graphics. Just let me know if you think it would be valuable.

One more point I hadn't noticed before. The coasts are added as small strips of extra land. I thought we had agreed that coasts would be overlays that have water going a small bit into the tile. I don't have time to double-check now...

[LDiCesare]

I agree with Mark. Nice work, roads are OK, forests mingle with roads all right except the east-west one. I think the plains tiles are not right because of the black-edge squares. Lighter colour would be better. I like the sea, however.

[axi]

Good work sas, only three comments:

1. Coasts: As Mark has pointed out, water is overlayed in a land tile, which should otherwise have space for anything else a land tile can have (roads, cities, etc). sas has the water cover half the square.

2. Cities: we need a city overlay that can blend well with this tileset. The code should be altered to have cities as overlays rather than separate tiles. It should be small enough to make other stuff in te tile visible too (coasts, roads, terrain).

3. We could use both ocean tiles for shallow vs. deep sea (we could have a series of boundary tiles where these two could blend. However this has to wiat for a later stage of graphical developpment.

I think that we should add a command in the next demo which will tell the game to use a different tileset outside the .jar file. This would be extra helpful for the developpment of our graphics.

How can I run the demo with the new tileset? I remember Mark mentioning something about it, before, can any body repeat?

[Gary Thomas]

Wonderful stuff!

The coasts should run along the edge of the land tile (in the land tile square), and not cut diagonally across the land tile (which might have a city on it.

2. Cities: we need a city overlay that can blend well with this tileset. The code should be altered to have cities as overlays rather than separate tiles. It should be small enough to make other stuff in te tile visible too (coasts, roads, terrain).

Fiera did a couple of nice city overlays, which I think are actually in the game, though not used. They are called town1 and town2.
They should be somewhere in this thread, late last year.

I certainly think that the idea of a debugging command to switch tile sets is a great idea. I will work on it.

Cheers

[Plutarck]

The following post (and the one above it) by me in the Terrain thread is a proposal which relates to map graphics also, so I figure I should link it here for ease of cross-referencing:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=709769#post709769

[Mark_Everson]

Hey Plutarck:

I like the river tiles in your LWC Civ3 mod a fair bit. Do you think the artist would mind if we adapted them for Clash at least in the short run?

The screenshot is here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showth...120#post166342

That is if the default tile size matches... What do others think?

[Plutarck]

They were done by "Sn00py" here at Apolyton. Here is the thread where his graphic modification is, including his other terrain mods (such as irrigation, mountain, forests, jungles, etC): http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=33637


The rivers were based upon the ones done by Firaxis, but were changed quite alot. The originals were basically the streaks of blue in the middle...and that's about it.

I doubt he'd have any problem with it, seing how as it was put out as a graphical improvement to Civ3. Which made the game look a whole lot better, actually. Though obviously asking is always the best policy...well, except with gold bouillon

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks Plutarck, though now that I've heard its got Civ3 material that has been improved, I'm not nearly as interested... But he may be worth approaching later to see if we can suck him into the project