Unit Graphics

[shaunfletcher]

cant believe its three weeks since I posted here. you guys must have thought Id bailed on you. I havent, was just up to eyeballs in work and 'real life' stuff and pretty much lost track of how long it had been.

Ill post before bed something Ive been grabbing bits of time to work on..

for now what are your priorities for the graphics front, I would like to concentrate my efforts on whats important to you

I fiera around at all? he was going to prepare some images for me to work from?

Shaun

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Shaun, good to hear from ya'. I'd already started putting up "All our artists have gone AWOL" posts up! Haven't heard at all from Fiera either. I think we have to just leave him out of the plan until he (hopefully) shows up again.

AFAIK the top priorities are an ancient archer unit icon, and roads. We already have placeholders for both, so taking the time to do reasonably good ones would be worth it. Road graphics will be in eight segments for now, going from the center of the tile to each vertex and edge center. The files can be named NE (for northeast) etc. There has been a fair amount of discussion about how to do roads, and you can find it by searching for road by posts in the art threads.

Glad to have you back!

-Mark

[shaunfletcher]

well just before I go to bed, here is the archer figure as he stands now.. not posed and has no bow as yet but I thought youd like a look!

tomorrow I will finish him up and look into your roads stuff

Shaun

[Mark_Everson]

Very cool so far! My only worry is on a desert tile he'll blend in too much. But the bow will help with that too.

[shaunfletcher]

okay Im thick but I cant find anything actually detailing how the road tile overlays are to be done much discussion but not a definitive statement!.. I presume transparent gifs, but are they to be the same size as a terrain tile but with only a small amount of visible road, or each one smaller?

can you send me the placeholder graphics you have for the road overlay and maybe a basic terrain tile just so I get the sizing etc right?

shaun

[Mark_Everson]

Hey Shaun:

Same size as a tile. I am going to just post a zip with all the tiles plus the road ones (roadNE, etc) here. You can see how the map tiles are used in Demo 5. There may be some wrinkles getting the roads to look good on all terrain images. Just list the issues, and we'll make decisions based on what the problems are. For now I think its adequate for the road segments to look decent on flat ground.

[Gary Thomas]

I just rushed out those road tiles so we would at least have something. I haven't even seen them in action yet.

Shaun: I have a contract in Christchurch until Christmas, so am operating on a laptop - no art tablet, so no more pictures from me. What I REALLY want is a roman merchantman, but it will probably be better if I send you some scanned pictures when I get back home.

Cheers

[shaunfletcher]

not forgotten you guys, just had a busy few days! will have some stuff within 2 days.

Shaun

[Gary Thomas]

Another moribund thread!

I am having a bit of trouble accepting the present system. Each stack of units is represented by the image for the element that has the greatest cumulative attack strength. In the case where the stack has a single unit, the image can change as the unit takes casualties (the heavies get killed until the skirmishers outnumber them). It is disconcerting to see a spearman turn into an archer.

There must be a better way.

Cheers

[axi]

We could adopt the system proposed by Richard Bruns in his webpage. It looks reasonable enough.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
It is disconcerting to see a spearman turn into an archer.

There must be a better way.

I think that the archer is a good depiction of what is left of the unit. It tells the player that he had best not let that unit wander around alone or it will get slaughtered. There may be a better way, but what currently happens doesn't really bother me since it reflects 'game reality'. Now there's an oxymoronic term for you

Richard's thing was too busy to contemplate if I'm thinking of the same one as you Axi... The one with little medallions to show unit compositions above a central image is what I'm thinking of.

BTW an aspiring artist just contacted me earlier today. Hopefully he'll show up to Save the Thread...

[sas]

Hi !

I guess i'm the "aspiring artist" I'm still trying to catch up on what is done an what needs to be done. shaunfletcher is currently on the team ?

I could start out with "upgrading" the units, but would really like some imput as to what you think is the most pressing.

-Stian-

[Plutarck]

Speaking on palletes, I would reccommend that some of the places in the pallete be reserved and used by the game only. The game will ignore any colors in those places, and will replace them with what it wants to use.

In line with my suggestion that "Fuscia" (HTML #FF00FF) and "Neon Green" (HTML #38FE35) be used for transparency, they should probably hold the last 2 positions in the pallette. Or better yet, whatever the last 2 colors in the pallettes are should be used for transparency.

But some other places on the pallette should be used for: Team Colors!

It's the way Civ3 does it, and I think it works REALLY well. Graphics are one thing Civ3 did well...nearly the only thing, but still. Their implementation of the concepts were bad, but the concepts underlying the graphics were actually quite good.

So take for instance the robe color on that spearman/bowman type guy. Instead of doing it in a creamish color, you'd instead do it with "Team Colors". If the team color of your civilization in the game was Yellow, then the robe on the bowman would be Yellow.

This is probably already done to some extent, but I think for the greatest flexibility and bug-freeness that team colors should be dedicated to a certain range of numbers on the pallette.

All other colors not reserved could differ for each and every unit, so no problem there.


And in drawing units the background should be drawn in the dedicated color slot in the pallete for transparency, if this is not already being done. Civ3 also uses gradient transparency and shadowing, which is really quite excellant, but I would think that such a feature wouldn't be needed anytime soon, and thus is good to note but not worth worrying about.



Also, has there been any decisions/models deciding what graphic formats should be used, or what will be currently used?

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Plutarck
Also, has there been any decisions/models deciding what graphic formats should be used, or what will be currently used?

So far we are using the transparent gif format (either 87a or 89a, can't remember the number).

[Plutarck]

Will that cause any problems in the future due to the whole licensing stunt that's being pulled with .gif files?

Personally I make it a point to avoid using .gif whenever possible (Burn your .Gifs!), but as a short-term thing I don't see a problem with it. But it would be prudent to go ahead and figure out what file type to use, allowing the minimum possible pains for future file-type conversions.

I would propose .png as the logical choice, being a superior format and featuring lossless compression and designed as a Portable Network Graphics format. Perfect for Java, and I believe JIMI comes with classes for manipulating .png graphics.

Here's the official PNG page, which comes with a features list and all kinds of good stuff: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/



EDIT: And heck, why not go with .MNG for animations? It's the brother of .PNG, and was designed for replacing animated GIFs (and is approved by the W3 organization, if that helps). The W3 has also approved .PNG as the replacement for .jpg and .gif images.

Get on the cutting edge with .PNG and .MNG