09-04-2001 03:42									#1
	Map Graphics Thread, Part II Support Apolyton, buy Call to Power 2

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.

	09-04-2001 03:53									#2
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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).]

	09-04-2001 04:59									#3
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Thanks Fiera

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

	10-04-2001 02:31									#4
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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

	10-04-2001 03:28									#5
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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.

	10-04-2001 03:44									#6
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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...

	10-04-2001 05:29									#7
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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).]

	10-04-2001 06:00									#8
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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!

	10-04-2001 08:36									#9
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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.

	10-04-2001 19:23									#10
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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.

	10-04-2001 20:38									#11
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This all looks very good compared to the text version. Good job Fiera. Game graphics is baby steps towards the final goal.

	11-04-2001 02:36									#12
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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

	11-04-2001 06:35									#13
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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...

	11-04-2001 06:49									#14
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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.

	11-04-2001 07:28									#16
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Hi Fiera:

Lets wait on rivers... there are many details involved in that choice (FE if a ship steams up a river and the rivers are between tiles, then what tile is it In?) I also need to look up the old posts on the subject so we don't reinvent the wheel, but I may not get the chance for a bit. We can look at the pros and cons when everyone has had a chance to speak, and then decide.

Roads are easier. In the current spec they go from the tile center (where a city would be) and radiate outward towards the center of all 8 adjacent tiles.

If you have more time than I, you can do a search on roads or rivers and see what has gone before in our discussions.

	11-04-2001 07:32									#17
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The hill still looks a bit funny. Instead of one big hill, could you draw a range like you did with the mountains?

There is one thing I'd like to ask you to keep in mind, if possible. In our ecology model, there isn't a unique "forest" terrain. We would like to split the map into geography and vegetation, with different possible combinations, like hills with forest or rolling terrain with desert. Would it be possible to make vegetation something that gets put on top of a basic structure like a hill?

For more information, look in the Ecology Model Thread.

Of course, if it's too time-consuming to do terain this way, let me know and I can rework the model.

	11-04-2001 18:31									#18
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Richard,

I've read the Ecology Thread. I take it that the Ecology system is not yet at a final stage, but if I'm not wrong, last posts showed a trend towards a simplifying of your Version 2 of the Ecology model, which I think it's a great work, but probably too complex.

It seems that there is an agreement to use a few terrain types and combine them with the appropriate vegetation types. That's a good idea and, to answer to your question, I think it can be easily done on the graphic side, at least for flat types (my Desert, Plains, Grassland and Forest tiles already adjust to this idea). For Hills and Mountains I could try to make similar differences using mainly different colors. I can give a try to this if you agree.

If there's something I've missed about how you planned to implement your Ecology model on the game map, please tell me so. I want to fully understand your model before we speak about making any modifications to it.

But for the record, I'd like to say that I don't mind working on, say, 25 terrain tiles instead of 10, if that makes the game better.

	11-04-2001 22:14									#19
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations

One thought for deforestation was this:

Have one graphic each for:
1. completely forested tile
2. a 'copse' of trees (like 3 toghether)
3. a single tree

Having these three type you can go down gracefully from completely forested (1), to mostly forested (array of 2, missing one copse), to partly forested, to barely at all (one of #3).

I think this basic approach can work with any terrain, just need to give offsets so the trees go in the right place on the hills etc.

	13-04-2001 08:21									#20
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Hi again!

I've been having some problems and I need help to restore some of my files so I can work again on them. Does any of you have/use Paint Shop Pro 6 or PSP 7?

	13-04-2001 23:32									#21
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Only at school

	14-04-2001 00:00									#22
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It could help... what I need you to do is to convert some graphic files from PSP format to BMP, which is the only I can currently work with. Shall I mail them to you?

Is there anybody with PSP 6 or 7 at home?

	14-04-2001 05:44									#23
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I have PSP5, will it do?

------------------
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell

	14-04-2001 09:17									#24
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Thanks, Axi, but I've managed to restore the files myself and to get a new terrain demo ready.

I've implemented the deforestation idea as Mark explained it over some grassland tiles. I've put there three types of deforested squares, I think you'll easily distinquish them. I like very much the result, in fact I think we may have "accidentally" found a suitable solution to the excessive flatness of my terrain graphics.

Take a look at it here, and tell me how you like it:
www.geocities.com/fiera_com/demo.html

This may be much more difficult to do for Hills and Mountains. At least, I haven't yet been able to make anything that looked even slightly good.


I have some ideas for roads too. Will discuss them later, for I've gotta go to bed now.


[This message has been edited by Fiera (edited April 14, 2001).]

	14-04-2001 15:32									#25
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Congratulations! Perfect result! It slightly reminds me of the empty areas in SimCity 3000, where you could plant trees at five different levels of density.

------------------
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell

	14-04-2001 18:06									#26
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

The trees look really good. But I'm wondering: why limit it to three tiles? We can show up to fifteen or so different layers of forestation by putting down one tree at a time. We can also show a road cut through the terrain by remiving a swatch of trees where the road is. For a small settlement, we can remove a few trees and replace then with small house graphics. That would look really good.

It looks like this would also work on the plains and desert as well. The fir trees might look a little funny on those tiles, but other types of tree would do great. Could you try this with other plants, like a deciduous tree, a jungle tree, and some kind of desert vegetation? Could you make a taiga/arctic tile in addition to the existing ones? Also, we will eventually need a wetlands graphic, and some wetlands vegetation that works like those trees.

Thanks for the good work!

	14-04-2001 18:21									#28
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Hey Fiera:

The new stuff looks good!

On roads being in all 8 directions... Roads Can be in all 8 directions, but for most squares Won't. It won't be like civ where you push 'r' and all possible roads in a square are automatically built. Players will draw the roads they want (or the AI could do it) and only what they want will be built and show up in the graphics. Only a major city would have more than a few major roads going into it. Minor local roads wouldn't be shown. Most squares will just have one major road running through in some direction.

[edit]
Richard, I agree with what you say, and that's the plan I thought I outlined. Fiera, I think, was just doing something easy as a first approximation.
[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited April 14, 2001).]

	15-04-2001 09:34									#29
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That's great to hear, Mark, 'cause one thing I didn't like about civ2 at all was how roads appeared in the map. It's ugly and I wouldn't like to do it that way for Clash. I was thinking more of a single and thin line, with no "strange" bends. What do you think of it?

Richard,

I am, of course, no ecology expert, but I was thinking that the fir trees would probably go better with Hills or Mountains rather than with Grassland. I'll probably use deciduous trees for Grassland.

Edit: I wasn't able to spell "deciduous".
[This message has been edited by Fiera (edited April 14, 2001).]

	15-04-2001 09:40									#30
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Well, I personally was thinking of some bends in the roads just so they have a little more character . And bends in the roads are I think critical for hills and mountains, or they would look odd. But why don't you just try a few different approaches as samples and see what everyone thinks?