Terrain

[alms66]

I was going to make a copy of the tiles and draw a gray line for the grid. It would be on all the time though. Unless you felt compelled to code something for it. I can live without the grid, but I know some people can't play civ without it, that's why I asked.

[LDiCesare]

I often use Ctrl-G while playing civ, but I don't want it on at all times, so I'd rather not have it. Coding something for it should go on our to do list (buried somewhere...)

[alms66]

I'll add it to my list of comments in the D8 thread. That's pretty much a to do list by itself.

[Mark_Everson]

Looks ok to me. The only thing I don't like is that the spillover of land gfx into the water for coastal squares seems even worse than it was before. One request, could you do a before and after image next time you propose changes so that it's easy to compare?

I don't know about others, but I'd also like the roads to be a bit more noticeable. I often have to squint at the map to see the roads clearly, especially while they are starting to be built. If nobody else has this issue, then it's not that important.

[alms66]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Looks ok to me. The only thing I don't like is that the spillover of land gfx into the water for coastal squares seems even worse than it was before. One request, could you do a before and after image next time you propose changes so that it's easy to compare?

I haven't gone back and fixed that yet. I plan to before uploading it though. It's just such a pain to do 46 tiles in a row. You really don't need 46 coastal tiles. Most of them can be compiled from smaller components, probably cutting the number in half. Sure, it might require drawing 3 overlays where you could have drawn one, but it puts those precious artist resources to good use when you economize things like this. I'll have to add this to the request list too.

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
I don't know about others, but I'd also like the roads to be a bit more noticeable. I often have to squint at the map to see the roads clearly, especially while they are starting to be built. If nobody else has this issue, then it's not that important.

I can brighten the roads a bit. That should make them more noticeable.

[Mark_Everson]

Happy New Year to everyone!

Hi Alms:

The coastal stuff looks really good now!

I do have a few gripes about the new tileset though. The hills tiles have lines that appear at the upper left join between tiles. when there are several in a row, it looks pretty bad with a venetian blinding effect. The old tileset had some small problems it that regard, but it's much worse now. See the clump of hills just a little south of the center in the big image about 10 posts above for an example. If you could vary the pixels a little bit in that key area like was done previously, that would be good.

I also prefer the old flat and plains tiles. They looked a bit more textured, rather than like a flat sheet.

Neither of these are big issues, but especially if others feel the same I think it'd be worth the changes.

[alms66]

I agree, the hills are a bit off. Partly from the origional artist, partly from my changes. I did too much cut N' pasting on the rugged hills, for example. I think I'll just redraw them to match the flat tile's texture a bit better, something they didn't do very well in the first place, IMO. I'll see if I can get a temporary fix on it though. The rolling hills have no changes what so ever, except to make them perfect fitting, as all the other tiles are now (I removed all the black edges to the tiles). I suspect this is your issue with the flat and plains tiles as well, though I do want to add some 'stalks' of grass rising out of the plains tile..

Hills, Mountains and Trees - the elevated stuff, takes quite a bit longer to do than the flat tiles (plains, flat, tundra, etc.), which is why I changed my approach, and saved them for last. If you think you can live with it until then (with the temporary fix), I'll just finish getting the flat tiles cleaned up and then do the hills as the very first thing once I start on the elevated tiles again.

[LDiCesare]

(Posted in wrong thread...)
One coast tile seems wrong:

[alms66]

That's the price we have to pay to get rid of trees in water, unless we change coastal tiles to extend into water, not land as they currently do.

[alms66]

If I were to insert a new terrain type called “Sea”, would this work in the terrain.xml file?

  <Image>
    <Default>Coastal</Default>
    <technology>
      <name>Water Transportation</name>
      <knowledge>2.0</knowledge>
      <image>Sea</image>
    </technology>
  </Image>

The intended effect is that all water tiles look the same (and for all intents and purposes are the same from the player’s perspective) until you reach Water Transportation level 2.0, then the Sea tiles look like sea (ocean tiles will be affected in a similar way though they change much later). While the code isn’t there yet AFAIK, later we’re supposed to have attrition affect certain units in certain terrain, and I’m hoping that this will force players to be cautious with sea exploration, otherwise they’ll end up on a sea square and just might loose the entire fleet (though that should be an extreme case of attrition). I don’t want to physically block certain units from moving into certain tiles (as in CTP2, galleys couldn’t enter deep ocean) as that is too easy and no fun as there is no risk involved, and I don’t want an arbitrary chance of the unit sinking (as in Civ), though attrition is good as has been described around here before. I’m not really sure if this approach would be better though. It opens up a realm of unknown for the player, but I don’t know if it would be any fun. Like I said, not being able to tell if that coastal tile you’re moving to is really a coastal tile or a sea tile in disguise would force players to be cautious. But it could force them to be too cautious and feel as though this is something they have to micromanage. Personally, I feel that if we only use attrition, then all the player has to do is avoid the tiles that cause it, which is easy (too easy) but again I don’t know if this will be fun or micromanagement hell. What do you guys think? Should we give it a try?

Also, note that the name would have to change in a similar manner, otherwise the player could simply select all the tiles on the desired path to see if they are really coastal or not, and that’s a bunch of micromanagement.

[Mark_Everson]

There could be something to this. We could have an attrition warning come up automatically once a movement path is selected (say a colored bar that goes red when destruction becomes likely). You could even have the AI select an alternative safer path automatically so that no micromanagement would be needed. Lets see what others think on this. It's probably a ways away anyway.

[alms66]

Or, we could change the movement line paths from red (currently) to green and have them turn yellow as a warning (only those segments affected) and red when no movement is suggested (again, only those segments). There can be varying degrees of intensity between the green->yellow->red. If no movement were allowed at all (such as no wheels on mountains), the path could be blue, white, or some other equally distinct color.

I think that could work well. We'll see what Laurent, and others, think about it.

[LDiCesare]

There's not too much needed to change the image of the terrain that way.
Handling shown paths is another matter. First if you want safe/unsafe modes, then it needs some specifics which would go into the pathfinding. The real thing pathfinding needs now is to NOT know the nature of black tiles. That's more important, but not planned now. As for drawing green/yellow/red, it's even further since it requires the safe/unsafe info first.

[LDiCesare]

I added an overlay of a "capital" image to the terrain when the tile holds a capital. I reused a city graphics for now, which is not really good for two reasons:
1) There isn't really a city there
2) If there is one with a different image, it will look ugly.
We already have many things shown on a tile, most of them in the same place:
- Terrain.
- Rivers/coasts/borders on the sides.
- Units in the middle, with a power circle.
- City graphics in the middle.
- Fortifications graphics in the lower middle.
- Specials, usually on the left of the tile.
I added recently an icon to show a combat occurred. This icon is currently a pair of crossed swords in the lower middle part of the tile.
The capital overlay has been suggested as a star, but where should it be put? The only place left is the right of the tile, since the top is hidden by the units there.
Is there anything else we want to show on a tile, and where?

[LDiCesare]

Here's an example of the result putting a star on the right of the tile (walls are not ok as they are drawn afterwards, but I'm not sure it would be nicer if the walls were under the star).