10-01-2002 12:09									#91
	Hi again ! Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

Clearly I should have done more research before making assumptions about how things are done in this game. Your ideas are good and manageable, although from a "graphic" perspective not as good as "my" approach

But as Gary pointed out , there is the workload to consider. To manage 1500 tiles is not impossible if I "cheat" a bit, but agreeably is a lot of work. Overlays sounds like a great idea, although I hurts a bit to skip the corners. I might have to make them later on just to satisfy my ego

After reading your arguments about rivers, I agree with you. Bridges sounds like a good idea Gary, I hope we will be able to implement it. Considering the strategic importance of bridges in previous wars, we really should have it.

So to sum it up, I will first make coast from the tiles we already have with some exceptions were you will get some brand new ones instead. Is there some tiles we don't want next to water, like mountains ?

-Stian-

	10-01-2002 14:18									#92
	Tiles ! Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

I've made some tiles. They dont fit next to the old terrain (looks ugly). So i will only show eatch individual tile for now, untill the other ones is worked out.

Btw, i havent forgotten the oceans..

Hills:

-

Irrigation:



Swamp:



Tundra:



Water/Ocean:





Comments? ( be honest )

-Stian-

Last edited by sas on 19-01-2002 at 14:41

	10-01-2002 14:45									#93
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Can you make a try to turn the hill graphic to an overlay, which can be placed above the grass/dirt/snow/forest/jungle/whatever terrain? This has not been tested yet.

I tried to do this with some mock-up tiles myself, but I'm inexperienced with graphics and I am unable to overlay them to see the effect.

I don't like you hills and irrigation very much, but the others are cool.

	10-01-2002 16:40									#94
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Could you show a few of these files together (like 2x2 tiles or 3x3)? I have some doubts about the water tile, but maybe it is ok when seen as a bunch. Along with axi I so not like the irrigation tile because:
1)it looks like it comes from simcity
2)there are many colors
3)it is too "square"
I also feel the swamp is too light-colored. I'd rather have it dark green than yellow-green.

	10-01-2002 17:53									#95
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Hi sas:

Before I forget, we do have some coastal tiles from the demo 4 graphics set. If you download demo 4 and open the jar in winzip you should be able to grab them. They assume that coasts project beyond a land square as in civ, but they still might be of use to you.

I don't think we should skip corners for coast, we'll just need to think of a clever way to do it. It should be doable with some small number of "patchup" overlays applied after the "side" coast overlay.

Thanks for putting up the work, here are my first thoughts:

Hills:
I prefer the ones already in the demo. I'm not sure what Gary doesn't like about them, unless he wants to try to make the terrain to scale. My specific criticism of yours is that they dont grab attention, and will too easily IMO fade into the other tiles.

Irrigation:
Same as Axi and Laurent's opinions. Also things like irrigation and deforestation in clash don't happen all in one big step. So things like irrigation and forest will eventually require several little icons that can be added in steps to show at least 4-5 levels of irrigation or forestation. There has been discussion about this a ways back, but I don't expect you to have read everything yet!

Swamp and Tundra look pretty good to me, but I'd need to see them next to other things to be sure.

Ocean looks good, but again I'd have to see it next to the others. One idea is that if you make your tiles the same gif size as those in the demo, you can do a replacement of the existing ones, then run the demo and give us a screenshot!

Great to see your fast start!

-Mark

	10-01-2002 19:24									#96
	New/ Updated tiles Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

Thanks for all the feedback !

I agree with you comments, and have taken some measures to remedy some of it. I'm still not completely satisfied, but I hope they looked better. They are in the right size for the game 120*60, but still need some tweaking to fit perfectly.

I've also included a "screenshot" , not from the game, but where I have placed the tiles next to one another manually.

Here goes:

New Hills:



Rougher hills (i will remove or modify the river) :



Updated irrigation:



Darker swamp:



Tundra again unchanged:



Water unchanged:





Any comments ?


-Stian-

Last edited by sas on 18-01-2002 at 19:49

	10-01-2002 21:43									#97
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Your tile edges are not straight, that's why they don't fit well with eachother.

I have noticed that the demo tiles have "fuzzy" edges. Why is this Mark?

sas, to be honest, your new irrigation looks even worse that the previous.

I like the new hills, OTOH.

	10-01-2002 22:52									#98
	Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

I like the new hills and mountains a lot! The hills especially would be amenable to doing 3 or 4 different tiles, and using them randomly to give a less regular appearance.

New Irrigation I don't much like... We don't even necessarily need to show irrigation since the people and local governments will do it automatically in Clash without need for direct player intervention. So my suggestion is to forget irrigation for now.

Upon looking at the water all together, I think the image needs to be run through a filter to smooth out the bright strings into broader 'whitecaps'.

BTW I thought your roads were better than the quickie ones Gary did, in terms of contrast with other tiles. At some point if you could prepare a set of 8 tiles that could potentially replace the ones in demo 6, I'd like to give them a shot. But coastline and river demos are probably more urgent.

Axi:

I'm not sure about the fuzzy edges. It could be because they were resized at some point.

	11-01-2002 04:36									#99
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Ok, the terrible irrigation if buried and forgotten.

The reason the sides of the tiles are not straight is because I don't want to complete the small details before I get a positive or negative response. No need to labor unnecessary over something that wont get used anyway right ?

Just to emphasize; the graphics I'm showing you for comments and feedback is not the finished product. Its a "betaversion" of the graphics. Just enough to show how its going to look like.

I guess I was a bit eager to show my willingness to work on this project.

I will work more on the stuff you like and improve it, and make some new ones as well. I still need to balance the colors, because right now they look funny/unnatural next to each other.

Mark: I will take a look at the roads over the weekend, since I'm away until monday. They shouldn't take long to work out.
And 3 or 4 hill and mountain tiles ? Will do

quote: Can you make a try to turn the hill graphic to an overlay, which can be placed above the grass/dirt/snow/forest/jungle/whatever terrain?

That shouldn't be a problem. I know how to do it, so its just a matter of when I will do it.. Soon I hope.


Finally, I've updated the tiles "again" , and that will be the last until I have something more impressive to show you guys

Forest:



"updated" ocean:



Mountain without river:



Improved hills:



Well, that's it!

Have a nice weekend....

	11-01-2002 14:35									#100
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I like the new ocean and hills.
I also feel the darker swamp looks better than the previous one.
The forest looks hard to see to me. If it is to be an overlay, could you replace the green background by a transparant one? The trees might stick out better.

	11-01-2002 17:54									#101
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

quote: Originally posted by sas Just to emphasize; the graphics I'm showing you for comments and feedback is not the finished product. Its a "betaversion" of the graphics. Just enough to show how its going to look like. I guess I was a bit eager to show my willingness to work on this project.

No need to apologize Stian, I think the level of stuff you were putting out was just right. As you say, no point in refining something that just isn't going to work out.

Please don't accelerate things like 3-4 mountain tiles above coastlines and rivers. I think those are more important to get into the game. The 3-4 hills and mountains was just something to put at low priority and do eventually IMO.

The new forest, I don't like as well as what's in demo6, but then again your forest you can put a road through or a coastline on and it wouldn't look weird. Have to see what other think. The new ocean looks good, but we'll have to see what it looks like in a demo.

	12-01-2002 04:36									#102
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Wow, has this thread been active!

I really like your new tiles, Stian, particularly the hills and mountains.

The existing tiles are slightly oversize, and overlap each other from the north on down. This gets rid of the necessity of accurate edge matching. The present edges are actually quite fuzzy, and having them like that makes my life easier. So instead of going to a point at the middle of each side, they should be a little wider. Have look at the existing ones to get the idea.

We also need, urgently, a broken type of terrain, between hills and mountains.

Also I believe we do need agriculture and irrigation, but suggest that they be overlays, to allow progressive increase of these factors. Sililarly, the forest could be a series of overlays to allow deforestation.

I can't see how the hill tile can be an overlay without hiding the terrain underneath.

On the subject of coasts, I don't mind having 8 overlays, I just wasn't going to do it myself! The difficulty arises at the corners when two adjacent sides are sea, the coast on the last drawn edge square will cover the sea on the other one if the edges go right to the end. We may need seven corner overlays for each corner, corresponding to sea/sea/sea (for an edge, the diagonally adjacent tile, and the next edge), land/sea/sea, land/land/sea, land/sea/land, sea/land/land, sea/sea/land, and the isthmus one sea/land/sea. We don't need land/land/land. This will mean a total of 28 corner overlay tiles which is manageable.

Cheers

	12-01-2002 06:33									#103
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Gary, are you assuming that the coast overlays are inside the land tile or inside the sea tile?

Assuming that they are inside the land tile, we only need 4 overlays for the sides (1 for each) plus 8 overlays for the corners (2 for each).

However this assumption means that we can't have the tile graphics extend outside the boundaries of the tiles.



I checked civ2 out and it uses a table with 32 tiles, but they are covering all possible 3-tile combinations: 0.5*8^2
(8 combinations for each of the 2nd and 3rd tiles, divide by 2 for symmetry)

I have started creating some coast and river tiles myself, among other things, which are rather primitive but work well enough.

I did some primitive stuff with mountain, hills, trees and roads overlays too.

It's fun being an artist after all!

Attachment: axi_tiles.gif
This has been downloaded 216 time(s).

	12-01-2002 07:40									#104
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization: The Boardgame

The coasts overlay the land squares.

There is an ambiguity in the last few square in your picture. There is nothing to stop specifying that the land squares are joined (as opposed to separated by sea). Your picture assumes that they are islands. However, a land unit would be able to cross from one to another (the gap would be treated as a river).

I can't see how two corner overlays would be sufficient.

Cheers

	12-01-2002 18:12									#105
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

You mean that we can't have an isthmus, but we will always have a strait. However, unless there is a channel, we can't have both an isthmus and a strait, so the problem persists. In civ2 the boats are jumping above the isthmus, IIRC. This can only be solved if we specify if there is land/sea/bridge/channel on the spot, but this is a problem for you, the coders. We could suppose that a strait is the default and put a special overlay on top of the joint if we want anything else. In the sides of the squares, straits/or rivers can likewise be added after the basic map is generated.

	13-01-2002 05:50									#106
	Remove this text

The way it works at present is that both the strait and the isthmus exist - that is, land units can cross, as can sea units.

Cheers

	15-01-2002 02:29									#107
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Wow!

Great to see this thread coming alive. It's inspiring to work when the response it so good. Strait and the isthmus is in my opinion a minor problem that if we want can be addressed later.

I will post the roads tomorrow. I'm not sure what the point of making the hills/mountains into overlays, can anyone explain why we should use it ?

quote: We also need, urgently, a broken type of terrain, between hills and mountains

ok, I will make a "mixed" version of the current hills and mountains.

	15-01-2002 03:54									#108
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quote: I'm not sure what the point of making the hills/mountains into overlays, can anyone explain why we should use it ?

According to the ecology model (which may now be obsolete, of course, I am no expert on that) we would have too many types of vegetation which were to be combined with the various types of terrain. That means a great number of tiles and one solution is the use of overlays. If there is no problem with the number of tiles, we do not nedd the overlays.

Just a flashback of mine - don't pay too much attention.
This is up to Mark actually; he is the one who can best tell what our current policy is, I'm just speculating.

	15-01-2002 04:48									#109
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Hi Everybody:

My call at the moment is that we should just go with one type of each tile for the forseeable future. The ecology model won't be coded for quite some time, and we want to have some good tiles in the interim. At some point we need to look at the tradeoffs between how the ecology model works and what is shown in the tiles. But IMO that is months off at this point.

	18-01-2002 03:05									#110
	Major Update ! Support Apolyton, buy Call to Power 2

Well, this is what I call the end of phase one for me.

I've made roads (mudtrails) and coasts. I have also tweaked all the tiles I have made.

What I REALLY need now is everyone to download what I have made and take a look at it.

Last, I have made a screenshot of how it looks at the current stage. The coasts are laid on top after I captured the screen.



Feedback !

-Stian-

	18-01-2002 03:11									#111
	Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

BTW, the mountains in the picture are placed wrong. It was do to a mistake when I named the mountains. But in the .zip file they are named right.

	18-01-2002 05:56									#112
	Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

That looks really good. I certainly vote for putting it in the next demo.

Is there any way to remove individual trees form a tile, to make room for a road or building? That has been talked about that before. If we have little tree graphics placed on top of other terrain instead of a "forest" tile, the game will look more professional then civ3. It also allows us to show deforestation and other ecology effects.

I know that isn't coded yet, but I think it is the direction we'd like to move in for the ecolofy model. How hard would it be to make a ground layer and then a vegetation layer with trees and farmland?

	18-01-2002 06:22									#113
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Hi Stian:

Thanks so much for putting the work into a demo using the game!

I think the coastline at the bottom is Beautiful! I also really like the hills, and the mountains seem to work fairly well. I can't say I like the plains or forests that much compared to the other ones. But your forest should work better with roads and such. IMO the new sea is a bit too subdued.

Why didn't you put in the roads? It would have been good to see how they worked with your tiles.

A Very Solid effort for "phase one"!

Good Work,

Mark

PS I can tell you how to make it so the terrain is the same every time if that would be useful for demos like the one you just did, and comparison to the old graphics. Just let me know if you think it would be valuable.

One more point I hadn't noticed before. The coasts are added as small strips of extra land. I thought we had agreed that coasts would be overlays that have water going a small bit into the tile. I don't have time to double-check now...

Last edited by Mark_Everson on 18-01-2002 at 06:34

	18-01-2002 16:50									#114
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

I agree with Mark. Nice work, roads are OK, forests mingle with roads all right except the east-west one. I think the plains tiles are not right because of the black-edge squares. Lighter colour would be better. I like the sea, however.

	18-01-2002 18:06									#115
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Good work sas, only three comments:

1. Coasts: As Mark has pointed out, water is overlayed in a land tile, which should otherwise have space for anything else a land tile can have (roads, cities, etc). sas has the water cover half the square.

2. Cities: we need a city overlay that can blend well with this tileset. The code should be altered to have cities as overlays rather than separate tiles. It should be small enough to make other stuff in te tile visible too (coasts, roads, terrain).

3. We could use both ocean tiles for shallow vs. deep sea (we could have a series of boundary tiles where these two could blend. However this has to wiat for a later stage of graphical developpment.

I think that we should add a command in the next demo which will tell the game to use a different tileset outside the .jar file. This would be extra helpful for the developpment of our graphics.

How can I run the demo with the new tileset? I remember Mark mentioning something about it, before, can any body repeat?

	20-01-2002 14:13									#116
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Wonderful stuff!

The coasts should run along the edge of the land tile (in the land tile square), and not cut diagonally across the land tile (which might have a city on it.

quote: 2. Cities: we need a city overlay that can blend well with this tileset. The code should be altered to have cities as overlays rather than separate tiles. It should be small enough to make other stuff in te tile visible too (coasts, roads, terrain).

Fiera did a couple of nice city overlays, which I think are actually in the game, though not used. They are called town1 and town2.
They should be somewhere in this thread, late last year.

I certainly think that the idea of a debugging command to switch tile sets is a great idea. I will work on it.

Cheers

	21-01-2002 22:44									#117
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

The following post (and the one above it) by me in the Terrain thread is a proposal which relates to map graphics also, so I figure I should link it here for ease of cross-referencing:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthre...9769#post709769

	22-01-2002 18:01									#118
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Hey Plutarck:

I like the river tiles in your LWC Civ3 mod a fair bit. Do you think the artist would mind if we adapted them for Clash at least in the short run?

The screenshot is here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showt...9120#post166342

That is if the default tile size matches... What do others think?

	23-01-2002 05:07									#119
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They were done by "Sn00py" here at Apolyton. Here is the thread where his graphic modification is, including his other terrain mods (such as irrigation, mountain, forests, jungles, etC): http://apolyton.net/forums/showthre...&threadid=33637


The rivers were based upon the ones done by Firaxis, but were changed quite alot. The originals were basically the streaks of blue in the middle...and that's about it.

I doubt he'd have any problem with it, seing how as it was put out as a graphical improvement to Civ3. Which made the game look a whole lot better, actually. Though obviously asking is always the best policy...well, except with gold bouillon

	23-01-2002 07:14									#120
	Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

Thanks Plutarck, though now that I've heard its got Civ3 material that has been improved, I'm not nearly as interested... But he may be worth approaching later to see if we can suck him into the project