Map Graphics Thread, Part II

[Fiera]

Hi there!

Here's the new thread for Clash of Cuivilizations Map Graphics and graphics art as a whole. To find previous discussions on this issue, go here:
http://www.apolyton.net/forums/Forum21/HTML/000188.html

As a brief update, I'll let you know that I'm currently playing around with new color palettes -the idea is to make them less bright- for the Map Graphics, with the hope of including a new and modfified palette for Demo 5. I will probably bring some new graphics as well, like new Forests and city icons. You can see some of my cities at my homepage and in my "Graphics Demo page": http://www.geocities.com/fiera_com/graphics.html

For the long run, I think that it will be sensible to build a whole new Terrain graphics set.

[Fiera]

Lord God Jinnai,

here are the replies to your comments on the previous thread:

quote: I guess it really depends on the unit. For human character units, i'd say go with bright colors for some things, but when using things made from metal or wood, only make the highlights bright.

Aha, sorry, I guess I didn't express myself clear when I said that the units should have bright colors. It's quite clear that the units can't be "just" bright, they need also dark parts, so I think the right concept it's to show the units with a great contrast, as opposed to the terrain graphics, which will have low contrast. That will make the terrain stay as background, and the units "come" to the foreground, which is my original idea.

quote: For ships, no (although highlights are good). They should still be moderate to contrast with both the shallow and deep sea areas. For modern units, it will depend on what they are. Planes I'd say bright/moderate and tanks and stuff. dark with highlights in moderate colors.

Well, I'd say that ships should be highlighted to be told apart from the sea too, but all those are things that need to be tested.

quote: Also something you may want to consider is putting differnt layers for some things so that say there is a forest, it might cover a little of the unit in the front part instead of it looking like the unit is more or less floating above the forest. Same thing with cities...its just a thought.

Yes, that's a very interesting idea indeed, but I'm afraid that the different scale between man figures and other objects such as buildings or trees would make things look a bit weird. Rather than hiding in a forest, it would look like the horde unit is walking through a bonsais garden, if you know what I mean.


Edit: damn spelling!

[This message has been edited by Fiera (edited April 08, 2001).]

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks Fiera

I've just handed off the code to Eric. Hopefully he'll be able to make more rapid progress than Me!

[One]

This is just a quick introduction. My name is Eric Armstrong, I'm the new graphics and UI coder. I'm a professional Java developer living in Denver Colorado. I'm not sure what else to say at this point other than get ready for my to inundate you with various questions about how things work. If anyone has any specific questions for me, kick them my way. I look forward to working with you all.

Thanks,
One

[Richard Bruns]

Thanks for joining the project, Eric.

I'll bump the Demo 5 Interface thread, which contains our most recent discussions about the interface. We haven't yet considered the interface in detail, and could certainly use some professional input.

[Mark_Everson]

Hey One:

Welcome to the Clash Project! Inundate away, we'll enjoy it

I should mention that right now One is working on getting the stuff ready for demo 5. Basically this is for the moment implementing the stuff Fiera and I have been talking about. For simplicity, much of it will be similar to things in demo 4, just to get the #$#%^ thing out the door...

[Fiera]

Hi, Eric, welcome to Clash!

I've got some new graphics, if the people like it, this will probably mean even more work for you!

Well, the truth is that I've got some radically new stuff. After hours and hours of work, I found out that it was impossible to replace the old palette with a new one without totally modifying the look of the tiles. Thus, I made up a new set of terrain tiles, with the colors that I would like our Map Graphics to have (both the Mountains and Hills tiles are very much like the old ones, but softened and with new colors).

I am generally confident with the final result, however, if you don't like the new terrain, at least tell me if you think that the new colors are better. With those the units and other objects such as cities will always "come" to the foreground at the player's view.

Look at the new demo here:
www.geocities.com/fiera_com/demo.html

It's a large file, sorry if it takes too long to load. Furthermore, I think you need to view it with IE, for Netscape won't load bmp files (I think).

You can see Grassland, Plains, Forest, Hills, Mountains and Ocean there. I think you'll be able to tell which tile is each of them. I've also put some units with their PCs. I took the ship graphic from Bernd Brossing's units. It was the smallest of his units I could find, and yet it's probably too big for the PCs.

Please note that the blue PC is hard to tell from the Ocean square. I think that we should use bright colors for each civ (ie, red, yellow, orange, purple, etc).

For a quick comparison, you can see my previous demos, with the old terrain graphics, here:
www.geocities.com/fiera_com/graphics.html


So now you know how I'd like Clash to look like.
[This message has been edited by Fiera (edited April 09, 2001).]

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Fiera:

Thanks for all the hard work you put into this! Although the new terrain demo clearly does make the units stand out better, I at least don't really like the overall impact. The very low contrast within the tiles gives me the impression for the flat land areas that the units are standing on a big pool table with the appropriate colored felt... kind of boring. Personally I like a lot better your units on the old terrain. And I think the contrast was plenty good already. I won't comment further at the moment because I would like to hear what the others think also.

I think the fur forest is cool, although again the contrast on it is a little too low for me. But I'd certainly like to see what a version of that one with the same contrast as the previous tiles looks like.

On the blue PCs having trouble on the water, I think it might work if we just put a black edging around the power circle (PC). I really don't want to tell players they can't be blue if that's their favorite color Anyways we can try something as a temporary fix and see how it works. We may find something better than the PCs that makes the issue unimportant.

Anyway, sorry to be disappointing on your concept... Lets see what the others think!

[Richard Bruns]

I rather like the look of the new tiles. The only problem is that they appear too squarish, leading to a checkerboard look. Is it possible to soften the borders between the tiles?

I have an idea for doing this. Perhaps the tiles don't have to be exact diamonds. We can round the edges and still make a shape that can tesselate the plane. Look here for an example of this idea. I think it does a pretty good job of dealing with the "checkerboard" effect.

[Lord God Jinnai]

For a first run, much better! I think you should do what Rich suggests as well as make the mountains bigger or hills smaller since the hills currently look larger than the mountains.

[hendrr]

This all looks very good compared to the text version. Good job Fiera. Game graphics is baby steps towards the final goal.

[One]

The new tiles look fantastic!!! I'm still trying to wrap my head around how all the various pieces of this project fit together. I haven't had a chance to look at anything yet today, as I am stuck running 600 SQL statements on a single database table, only so I can not convert over 50% of it to a new table. I'm sure none of you want to hear about that though. I don't. Hopefully I'll have some time this evening before my wife gets home.

Keep up the excellent art work!

One

[Mark_Everson]

Well, it looks like I'm seriously outvoted Fiera, you have a ringing endorsement to move forward...

Before it gets too far along, you might want to think about how roads and rivers should look.

Richard: Thanks for the demo! It's not really much of a problem to make the tiles irregular. It can easily be made to look not very regular at all with a series of masks with different outlines that extend a little bit beyond the diamond boundary. It's especially easy with low-contrast tiles like Fiera's example. But I think implementing that is an issue for when we are a bit further along...

[Richard Bruns]

I think that rivers should definitely go on the borders between tiles instead of through them. Most hex-based wargames do this and it works very well. The rivers are small, so they look more realistic and do not obscure the terrain.

[Fiera]

quote: Fiera, you have a ringing endorsement to move forward...

Thanks, Mark, I think you'll end up liking this terrain graphics set if we are able to effectively improve it. Please note that I'm not yet 100% satisfied with it either. Furthermore, I think that the demo I managed to build doesn't necesarilly look as a real screenshot made with the separate Gif files for each terrain square would look like.

quote: The very low contrast within the tiles gives me the impression for the flat land areas that the units are standing on a big pool table with the appropriate colored felt... kind of boring.

I really think that we can blame my demo for producing that "pool table" effect. In fact, I must confess that I thought it looked slightly like a fitted carpet. But, as Richard, LGJ and you Mark have suggested, it would be easy to implement a softening or irregular effect, so I didn't bother too much about that. I may get some demos ready if you want anyway.

LGJ,

quote: I think you should do what Rich suggests as well as make the mountains bigger or hills smaller since the hills currently look larger than the mountains.

Yes, they do, don't they? Well, I've shrinked the Hills graphic a bit. You can take a look here for a comparison with the old Hills tile:
www.geocities.com/fiera_com/demo.html

Well, thanks everyone for your comments!


PS: Mark, before working on roads and rivers I'd like to know about how they're going to work. Are they both going to give the units extended movement as in Civ2? A weird thing in Civ2 is that rivers didn't link tiles from right to left and from up to down, just in diagonal. Is this going to happen also in Clash? (I hope my questions actually make sense).