Map Graphics Thread part III

[alms66]

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
I do not belive that we need a wasteland different from a desert, at the present stage of development of the game. I would rank a forested hill much higher in priority.

Cheers

1. To me wasteland is just another name for a desert, so I was a bit taken by the request. But I would agree that a forested hill would be more important.

2. I still have the transparency issue. I can't continue until that is resolved. If I'm not mistaken, Gary, you did some tiles didn't you? What editor did you use? Maybe it's just my editor causing the problem.

3. I can agree that perhaps the irrigation would cover most of the tile, but there will be some of the underlying tile showing through, so I think it needs to be an overlay. I guess I could always fill in the open spots though, I assume this is what you want.

And while I'm on graphics.....

4. Why is Forest not an overlay? Jungle? Swamp? All of these can be cut down/drained and while I can see just swaping the whole tile if it was an all or nothing thing, such as is the case with Swamp, how do you know what to swap it to? It may be predetermined, so I'll drop the Swamp.

But, I can't agree with Jungle and Forest not being overlays. Do you really want to draw Forest on tundra, Forest on flat, Forest on plains, etc.? Also, Clash will have deforestation, eventually, so wouldn't it be nice if we had these tiles:
Forest5.gif
Forest10.gif
Forest15.gif
...
Forest95.gif
with the numbers representing the percentage of deforestation? Also if you want a little variety, just throw a number in front of "Forest" for each different version of overlay... for that matter do it with all tiles to add variety to the map.

5. Why are the coasts encroaching on the land tiles? IMO it would be much better to go the other way... into the coastal tiles. This would allow for a more natural-looking coast line (more room to work with), and it wouldn't cause the narrowing of land tiles, which will look really bad when we have city graphics in place IMO.

6. I know it's a bit of work, but I think the graphics should be set up this way now instead of going back and redoing it later. I'll redraw the whole darn tile set if I have to in order to get it this way. And while I'm on the subject of redrawing, I really wish the tiles were larger in order to get more detail into them. A different format with more colors would be nice too.

I'll stop the rant now.

[Simon Loverix]

We should make all vegetation, water, etc. an overlay. That way it is consistent with the ecology model.
By the way, instead of the possible-confusing terms BM and PBM an "ecological infrastructure" class could be used if it is more consistent with the rest of the models. I just need a numerical quantification of the actual and potential ecological complexity.

[LDiCesare]

All vegetation should be overlays, but it's hard to have an overlay work the same on a mountain or on plains. We might need different overlays, which kind of ruins the point.

About transparency: In gif's you have a transparency option. For instance you can open any image with Irfanview (freeware), when saving you have save as, pick gif or jpg, options in the lower right corner, and JPEG/GIF: Save transparent color, and pick the palette entry.

[alms66]

Thanks Laurent. That will allow me to finish up the tiles.

[alms66]

Gary,
I'm just posting to give you an update on the graphics.

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
The irrigation won't be an overlay, largely because the irrigation itself will pretty much cover the underlying terrain with nice green crops.

I've been thinking about this irrigation. Personally, I'd rather not see irrigation/mines and roads/railroads on every tile as was done in Civ. I'd rather these things be handled as infrastructure within the tile, and not shown on the map at all. The exceptions to no infrastructure shown on the map, IMO, would be:

A. Roads the player builds, which would be a sort of Roman road network/modern interstate system. Though, and option to turn these off would be nice.
B. Military installations Naval, Air and Army bases. The only reason for this, is to make it easier on the player when searching for his bases in other civ's territory and to hit the enemy's bases during war. Also, all unit creation should be done in bases as well IMO, rather than pop up in the provincial capital. These bases can still be built on city tiles, though the city graphic would show instead of the base graphic, with small icons indicating if a base existed there. It would be nice if the bases flew a flag showing the owner's color, to make them easier to identify.
C. There may be a few more items that I'm not thinking of right now that may be worth putting on the map, but I think we should really try to keep it to a minimum.

With that said, I do have an irrigation tile ready for critiques. It looks a little off in game because I had to make the base brown like dirt due to the fact that there is so much green above and it kind of just blended together when the base was green.

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
Rivers need six varieties:

1. right along the north-west edge
2. right along the north-east edge
3. halfway along the north-west edge from the north end
4. halfway along the north-west edge from the west end
5. halfway along the north-east edge from the north end
6. halfway along the north-east edge from the east end

I've also added the following for when the river meets the coast:
7. Delta running north to west
8. Delta running west to north
9. Delta running north to east
10. Delta running east to north

I should have these to you by tomorrow or the day after. They are really simple to do, being so small, that I've made 3 variations for each tile. I can't see how they look in game currently, though, so there may be some mis-alignments or the colors may not be quite right.

[Max Sinister]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
All vegetation should be overlays, but it's hard to have an overlay work the same on a mountain or on plains. We might need different overlays, which kind of ruins the point.

I'm no graphics programmer myself (at least, no professional), but does Java have classes for translation, shearing and so on of graphics? That might work...

[Gary Thomas]

In general, overlays cause problems. Potentially one could have half a dozen overlays in the same square, so the order of overlay becomes important.

From the coding point of view a single tile for the square is hugely simpler, so until a coder shows up who is willing to produce the necessary complexities, we will probably be stuck with a single tile per square. This is the reason that we want separate tiles for forested and irrigated squares.

Another point about overlays is that relatively few of the possible combinations actually make sense: a swampy desert, or mountain? A forested city?

That said, the roads and coastlines are overlays, as will the rivers be.

The main reason that coastlines are on the land is that land units cannot go onto the sea without transport, but sea units can go "onto" the land, that is, into port, or in earlier days, beached. But if the coastlines are on the sea square, we would expect land units to be able to go onto those squares. Another reason is that the sea tiles with coastline will necessarily show a bit of the land, so we would need coast pieces for every possible type of land.

I would point out that all these issues have been extensively discussed before any action was taken.

As long as someone doesn't bring up the old chestnut of in square or on edge rivers...

I am rather unhappy about the way roads are handled, but haven't got a better idea. With rivers, we will have to think about bridges.

On the subject of irrigation, it doesn't matter what kind of flat land is under the irrigation - the appearance will be the same. There is an argument for having a separate tile for terraced and irrigated hillsides. That would be a nice one to have.

I look forward to seeing the deltas.

Cheers

[Gary Thomas]

alms66:
What graphics program are you using? The main ones (PhotoShop or CorelPaint) have an option, when you save as a gif file, of setting the colour which is to be regarded as transparent. I tend to use pure magenta, but each to his or her own.

Cheers

[alms66]

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
alms66:
What graphics program are you using? The main ones (PhotoShop or CorelPaint) have an option, when you save as a gif file, of setting the colour which is to be regarded as transparent. I tend to use pure magenta, but each to his or her own.

Cheers

I'm using a mixture of MS Paint (the only program that has a line feature set up the way I like it) to draw the tile outline and Paintshop Pro to fill in the details. I just found the transparentcy bit in Paintshop after Laurent mentioned the name of the feature I was looking for.

[alms66]

So I still need to do:

a Jungle (current one is way off color-wise)
Forested Hill (requested by Gary)
Bridges
Glacier
Rocky Desert

Also, Gary, you said you aren't happy with the way roads work, could you elaborate and I can take a crack at fixing it.

Any other urgent needs?

Edit:
After searching around I found a few more and added them.

[Gary Thomas]

You understand that this has been discussed at great length...

Roads can be uderstood at two levels - the concept that the square has roads (an infrastucture concept), and the equivalent of Roman military roads (a specific road object). We have never really sorted out how to handle this distinction. As far as a square is concerned, both reduce the time for units to move through the square. I have a vague personal notion that these concepts should be split in some way. However, the way it works now is the same as Civ3etc (my generic name for a swarm of games) does - once a square has roads, it connects with all adjacent squares with roads. It was not always thus. Originally one had to build specific roads from a designated square to an adjacent designated square. Unfortunately this meant that a three by three grid required 21 different roads. This drove me mad, so the system was changed to one that only requires 9 roads. I actually did a fair bit of research on the Roman road system, and they were far more pervasive, at least in Italy, than we suppose. Essentially every square that had Roman roads at all was connected to every other such square.

So, we wound up with the Civ3etc system.

I still don't know of a better idea.

In passing, when I said PhotoShop (the Corel product), I actually meant PaintShop.

Cheers

[Gary Thomas]

The background
I have been having some correspondence with Adam (alms66) on the subject of rivers. This eventually led me to the realization that there is a "graphics error" in the existing system (which would have carried over to rivers). Because my solution to the problem is a little sweeping, I thought it better to have some discussion on the forum.

As a bit of background, the tiles are designed so that each slightly overlaps the ones above and below. This prevents any black background peeping through.

When the map is drawn, the tiles are drawn in rows from the top down. This means that where tiles are adjacent, the southern tile very slightly overlaps the northern tile. The effect is that terrain features that project vertically (mountains, hills or cities) will lie on top of the northern (upper) tile. This works quite well until water enters the picture.

At present coastlines are drawn afterwards, as an overlay on top of the land part of the tile that has the coastline. It was intended that rivers would be drawn in the same way, and Adam has done some preliminary, winding, rivers for this purpose.

The problem
This brought me to realize that there is a problem. A coastline or river along the north-east or north-west edge of a tile will lie on top of any projecting terrain such as mountains, hills or cities. This looks rather odd and unprofessional.

I had a fair bit of agonizing about this, and eventually came to the conclusion that there were only two possible solutions.

Solution 1, layering
The first solution I came up with was to split tiles with a vertical dimension into two - a low level part and a high level part. Then the map could be drawn in order: low level part, water overlay to the north-east and north-west, then the high level layer.

Solution 2 - move the water north
The other way of doing it is to put all water (coastline or river) on the south-east or south-west edges of the northern tile. That is, the overlay will run along the bottom edges of a tile only, and hence will not conflict with any vertical projection of that tile. Any northern coastline will then be an overlay onto the sea to the north-east or north-west.

Pros and cons
Layering will require much more coding, and mean that some tiles will need two gifs to draw. However, it will look better, I think.

Moving the water north will take minimal coding changes, and need fewer overlay tiles (I think, I haven't counted). It will also make possible a new kind of terrain feature - an escarpment.

Summary
I welcome (sensible) comments on this. I am keen to add rivers (in particular the Tigris and Euphrates) to implement a new scenario (Eridu) that I have in mind.

One hope I have is that we might get a comment from someone who has worked on a commercial game and could tell us how they do it.

Cheers

[Gary Thomas]

If I am to be fiddling with the map, I might as well add a fairly simple modification that allows the player to rotate the map view to any of the cardinal points of the compass, so it can be viewed from the North, East or West, instead of only from the South.

Any interest in this small improvement?

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Gary:

I don't have any particular interest in map rotation at this point. On the bigger issue of layering or not. . . I have a suspicion that we will have to go to layering at some point anyway as more and more things are added to the map. For that reason I'm mildly in favor of the layering approach. However, you're much closer to the job, and I have no problem with your picking whatever seems best from your perspective.

On Roads:

We can just show major roads, and have a "transportation infrastructure" class in the economic model handle local roads. The local movement rate could be modified by the infra class value as a continuous function if we wanted it to. I've been toying with that idea for quite a while. An approach like the major-or-infra one might give better looking maps, but could be tougher for the player to guess expected movement rates for the areas not covered by major roads.

[Gary Thomas]

I am, I admit, slowly edging toward the layer option. It may surprise you to realise that I am thinking ahead to polygons here - the move water north option will not work for polygons.

With layering, we could experiment with terrain that is larger than one square in size, and hence looks better.

On the subject of roads, the present roads are merely a marker to show that a square is "roaded". Personally I don't think that roads should be built as a government option. To my knowledge this has never been the way it worked.

The Roman roads were driven by the military. When this stopped, at the collapse of the Empire, roads deteriorated under local control. Even in recent times roading tends to be driven by local needs, with perhaps some, normally earmarked, government finance. This would put, at least in the ancient era, roads into the automatic infrastructure class, except that, as a military engineering option, military roads could be built in areas that would not ordinarily be roaded.

Cheers