Size of Tiles

[Tellius]

Hi,

It seems that the source coders are working towards finalizing their efforts (or so I read in one of the latest posts on this forum).

I have looked into the source code, but it is just beyond my capabilities at this time. I do have the necessary skills though to do some photoshopping to create better looking cities, units etc.

My main frustration with this is, that CtP2 just doesn't give much room to add detail. If it would be possible to make tiles 'bigger', that problem would be solved.
Of course, you can set the resolution yourself within the game, but take for instance, the game running at 1024x768. All squares, and the various units, cities etc look pretty damn small. Now imagine that I'd combine four of those squares into one, and make that the new standard size of a square, you'd get squares the size you normally see at resolution 640x480 (pretty big) but with the detail of a resolution of 1024x768. Imagine the level of detail you'd be able to put in cities, units, goods etc etc.

E told me that the 'tile size' can be set in the tilesys section of the source code, but that it makes the game crash. Is there any chance, before this product reaches its final stages, that anyone could have a look at this? I know chances are slim (the source code project is a titanic effort as it is already), but the pay-off would be worth the effort I think.

Thanks

Tellius

[Ekmek]

Re: Size of Tiles

Originally posted by Tellius
E told me that the 'tile size' can be set in the tilesys section of the source code, but that it makes the game crash. Is there any chance, before this product reaches its final stages, that anyone could have a look at this? I know chances are slim (the source code project is a titanic effort as it is already), but the pay-off would be worth the effort I think.

Tellius, I think the game will crash because currently the tilefiles are all in the current 96x72 size. you would have to change the sourcecode pixel size then redo ALL of the tiles before you could start a game and see how they look.

And something I just thought of is that Martin Dane's tileedit might not allow for importation of bigger tile tgas. that might be an even bigger problem.


EDIT: This is all a best guess on my part and I don't mean to discourage you. If I get some time I'll try and compile a xtp2.exe with the bigger tile size and see what happens. the files in the code you are looking for I think is tiledraw.h or tilemap.h in the the tilesys folder. you'll see a code line with size. or easier just do a search for the size of tiles (you can see the size by checking your tga image size, i think its 96x72) search for 96 or 72 in that folder and it should show you what you need.

[Tellius]

Tile Size

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I already asked if making tileedit accept other sizes would be at all possible, here's what Martin wrote:

Good to hear that the source code project is still alive, I have not been on the forums for quite some time, so I have not been following the development. Unfortunately bigger tiles will not work with tileedit, the tile-file does not contain any information about tile dimensions, and no version identifier either.

As to how much work it will be to program a new version of tileedit that will allow for bigger sized tiles I do not know, it has been so long since I worked on the code that I don't remember if I made it easily modifiable for image size. A verry optimistic estimate is arround 100 hours of work, provided the code can be adapted without any changes to the basic structure and no major recoding is needed. After that there will be a lot of debugging to be done. So my guess is that we are looking at something like 3-6 months, for a reasonable stable program.

Martin

I had of course, no idea something that seemed simple would in fact entail so much work. All I can do, is some 'wood chopping' (for instance going through all the code in the appropriate section to look for tile sizes to be changed) and the graphical part of the process. I was thinking of using Bryce 4 (a nice nature rendering program) to create very realistic landscape tiles. But after Martin's response, I'm guessing this will all remain wishfull thinking.

Greetz

Tellius