04-11-2002 22:38									#1
	High(er) Resolution Tilesets Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

Hi Folks,

Having recently bought a new monitor, I am now running at a resolution of 1280x1024 pixels.

Personally I think that the existing tilesets (both trident and isotrident) look too small at this resolution.

I prefer the non-isometric view, and also the isometric tileset looked more scary, so:

I have made my own enlarged version of the trident tileset by scaling up the trident set from 30x30 sprites to 60x60 sprites, and edited the spec files to match. This new bigtrident tileset works fine.

However, it doesn't look nearly as good as it could do. I have started tinkering with the terrain file by hand - given a few more evenings work that should look much better.

Its the units that need the most work.

So, does anyone have access to the "original" artwork for the units (or anything else)?
i.e. before they were scaled down to 30x30 pixels

Peter

Edited to remove some of the spelling mistakes

Last edited by maubp on 05-11-2002 at 03:59

	05-11-2002 02:10									#2
	Remove this text

Guess, I'll have to settle for 1024x768.

Maubp, could you include the spec end graphics file in an attachment here? I don't have the originals but I would like to have a look. Are they in the XPM or in the PNG format?

	05-11-2002 03:56									#3
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There should be a file called bigtrident.zip attached to this post. The images are in PNG fortmat and have only been tested on Windows 2000, freeciv 1.13.0 and 1.14.0 beta 1.

The graphics files were copies of the trident set, enlarged to twice the height and width. Similarly the spec files were copies of the trident set, edited to change the tiles from 30x30 to be 60x60.

The terrain image has been edited by hand. I think the transaparency color messed up - black is now transaparent. This makes the oil tile and the "fog" tiles useless. This should be easy to fix, if I can find a better image editor than Microsoft Paint Brush.

I have tried to touch up some of the "specials".

Regarding the terrain itself, so far I have only touched up the plains and the ocean tiles. I have essentially taken four of the trident tiles to make each of the bigtrident tiles.

I am wondering if the new coast lines are too smooth.

For future reference, this can be called the bigtrident tileset v0.0.1

Peter

Attachment: bigtrident.zip
This has been downloaded 31 time(s).

	09-11-2002 01:49									#4
	Increase the size of your Attachments

Thanks, I'll play around with them this weekend.

	09-11-2002 16:44									#5
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CapTVK, I have done some more work on the terrain. Only the hills, mountains and rivers need work now.

I am wondering about doing the hills and mountains with more than three tiles each - at the moment they do not attempt to join up vertically, just horizontally. Read the tiles.spec file

So far I have only changed the tiles - due to the limited functionality of the tools I have been using, I have switch to using a nasty yellow as the transaparency colour, rather than having two sorts of black as described in this thread.

I also grabbed the the Walrus from the HiRes/Lexxy tileset to use for "Artic Ivory" because I think it looks better than some tusks (white tusks on white artic terrain doesn't stand out). I have added this to a free spot in tiles.png and edited the tiles.spec to use the new walrus rather than the tusks.

There are still a few things on tiles.png that need to be touched up - the rivers, the "specials" and the text.

That still leaves PNG files for the cities and roads, and most importantly now, the units.

In the case of the units, I really need some high resolution sources. Does anyone know who did the original tile sets? Should I be asking on the mailing list rather than this forum - which seems rather quite?

Peter

Edited to expand on the changes in version 0.0.2 of bigtrident

Attachment: bigtrident_v0_0_2.zip
This has been downloaded 13 time(s).

Last edited by maubp on 09-11-2002 at 16:54

	10-11-2002 00:40									#6
	Increase the size of your Attachments

Well, here's the first view. I've got a 2nd Freeciv session running on the left with the original trident set. The bigtrident is on the right. I'm playing on 1024x768, so the bigtrident appears a little 'bigger' than on 1280x1024.

Attachment: screenshot-bigsmalltrident.jpg
This has been downloaded 412 time(s).

	10-11-2002 18:14									#7
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

Thanks for posting your screenshots CapTVK - I will do some myself once I'm happy with the revised terrain.

Now a slight diversion to railways with the trident tileset.

I have edited this because the forum seems to only let me do one pitcure per post.

Reading the roads.spec and looking at the roads.png file, there are actually two sorts of railways in in the trident tileset.

This is with the original trident railways (no longer the default):

Attachment: trident_r2.png
This has been downloaded 405 time(s).

Last edited by maubp on 10-11-2002 at 18:21

	10-11-2002 18:17									#8
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This screenshot shows the default, dwp style railways in the trident tileset.

(Anyone know what dwp style means? Was DWP the artist's initials?)

Attachment: trident_r1.png
This has been downloaded 392 time(s).

Last edited by maubp on 10-11-2002 at 18:26

	10-11-2002 18:19									#9
	Inflate your Upload Space

In this third screen shot I have anotated the dwp-style trident railways screenshot with some "problems"

• Bad bends - where a railway goes from diagonal to cardinal. This can be improved by tweaking the tileset images.
  
• Bad junctions - where things overlap to much or not enough. This can be improved by tweaking the tileset images.
  
• Diagonal railways - The there is a "neck" because the neighbouring two tiles do not have a tiny bit of railway in their corners.
  

Attachment: trident_r1_notes.png
This has been downloaded 385 time(s).

	10-11-2002 18:31									#10
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And finally, for today, this screenshot is the current version of my bigtrident tileset, with dwp-style railways.

The roads and railways are just enlargements of the trident version - If I feel like it I will go in and touch them up by hand...

I have edited the railway tiles in roads.png to try and fix the Bad Bends problem (as shown in my previous post).

P.S. I have replaced the pheasant with the one from the HiRes/Lexxy tileset. Good or bad choice?

Attachment: bigtrident_r1_afterfix.png
This has been downloaded 385 time(s).

	11-11-2002 18:49									#11
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dwp is David Pfitzner, a former freeciv admin.

Yes, the diagonals would require coding changes. To make the bends and junctions look real nice you would probably also need to draw all the possible combinations by hand, which would then require (a simple) code change to use.

There are similar problems in the isometric tilesets where the roads need a few more pixels to be completely connected. That one would require more code.

	11-11-2002 19:06									#12
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Thanks Thue,

I haven't looked at the code (I'm not sure I want to) but I assume that the code that renders the map is "modular" so changes here shouldn't have too many side effects.

At the moment there are only about twenty railway tiles (guessing - I don't have the tiles to look at right now). Doing this "properly" would take 2^8 = 256 tiles.

Do you think having all these extra bitmaps would have memory problems?

i.e. Define 256 tiles with names like "railway00100100" where the eight numbers mean: If there a railway going north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-west, west, north-west.

Peter

	11-11-2002 19:19									#13
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256 tiles would take about 230kb (#*width*height*bits for color=256 * 30*30 *8) RAM, which is much but not catastrofic. A solution would be to only draw tiles for the middle where the rail meet and then draw the ends of the rails seperately and paste them on later (easy to code).
Or some other smart system where you could compose the final picture, like the current one, except that it should look good in all cases. The coding changes for all this will be simple no matter the solution.
It is possible that you can find a solution that would not involve drawing 256 tiles. Please try if you think you can.

	11-11-2002 19:22									#14
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On second though the change to make the diagonal rails look good would be easy too .

	12-11-2002 01:15									#15
	Got spare money?

For the trident size tiles, as you say (number of tiles * width * height * bytes for color) gives just over 200kb, but bigtrident size tiles, this comes to just over 900kb - Which does seem excessive!

I still think that the existing tilesets could be tweaked to solve Bad bends (where a railway goes from diagonal to cardinal) and Bad junctions (see image in earlier posting).


In order to deal with diagonal railways, we need just four new tiles - all transparent except for a little bit of railway in a corner. The existing code already makes a railway tiles by overlaying multiple railway tiles - so adding up to four more images shouldn't hurt.

i.e. add four tiles:

• rail_passing_ne_corner
  
• rail_passing_se_corner
  
• rail_passing_sw_corner
  
• rail_passing_nw_corner
  

Attachment: rails_example.png
This has been downloaded 348 time(s).

	12-11-2002 01:16									#16
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quote: On second though the change to make the diagonal rails look good would be easy too .

Are we thinking along the same lines here Thue?

	12-11-2002 03:49									#17
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quote: Originally posted by maubp Are we thinking along the same lines here Thue?

Yes. I was just being lazy .

	25-11-2002 11:46									#18
	report these bugs Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

maudp, you should go to http://rt.freeciv.org/ and report these bugs. There are really two bugs here: the bad bends/bad junctions is a bug in the tileset, and the bad diagonals is a bug in the code.

	25-11-2002 15:13									#19
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Good idea jdorje

See Incident 2408

I had used that twice before - back in Jan 2002 - but had forgotten about it.

Peter

	29-11-2002 20:10									#20
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This is an implementation of the rail corners:

Attachment: railcorners.diff.zip
This has been downloaded 4 time(s).

Last edited by Thue on 29-11-2002 at 21:25

	29-11-2002 20:12									#21
	Got spare money?

And modified roads.png

Attachment: roads.png
This has been downloaded 133 time(s).

	29-11-2002 20:40									#22
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Thanks True

When would this appear in a binary? The next beta?

I am currently running freeciv on windows.

Also, I notice you have only done this for railways. I think it should be done for roads as well. Even if it make very little difference for the trident tileset, it could be needed on larger tilesets like my bigtrident. Up to you.

P.S. Is your change for non-isometric tiles only?

	29-11-2002 21:01									#23
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quote: Originally posted by maubp Thanks True When would this appear in a binary? The next beta?

I don't know (I am not very active right now). in the final 1.14.0 or in the next major release.

quote: I am currently running freeciv on windows.

Nobody's perfect

quote: Also, I notice you have only done this for railways. I think it should be done for roads as well. Even if it make very little difference for the trident tileset, it could be needed on larger tilesets like my bigtrident. Up to you.

Yes. I should implement it for roads too I agree, but not right now. (feeling lazy)

quote: P.S. Is your change for non-isometric tiles only?

Yes. To implement it for isometric tiles is just as easy, but a seperate fix.

	30-11-2002 00:42									#24
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And another bug squashed...with luck just in time for 1.14 too!

Kudos to Maubp and Thue

	30-11-2002 00:51									#25
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Thats excellent news CapTVK

It means I will be able to see and use Thru's mod pretty soon - and take advantage of it for the bigtrident tileset...

(I'm running FreeCiv on Windows 2000, and have no desire to compile/build FreeCiv on Windows just yet )

Thanks again Thru.

	19-12-2002 02:16									#26
	fixed... Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

This is fixed in the CVS version, along the lines of Thue's original patch. It will not be in 1.14, but it will be in the next version. You can also use the daily snapshots (although maybe not until tomorrow).

	19-12-2002 15:43									#27
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Thanks jdorje - I have been watching this (Incident 2408) on the freeciv dev email list.

Do you mean it won't be in 1.14.0, but would be in 1.14.1 ?

Might have to reinstall linux again to try the nightly CSV build... hopefully windows 2002 won't kill it this time round!

Peter

	19-12-2002 16:38									#28
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quote: Originally posted by maubp Do you mean it won't be in 1.14.0, but would be in 1.14.1 ? Might have to reinstall linux again to try the nightly CSV build... hopefully windows 2002 won't kill it this time round!

It won't be in 1.14.0, or 1.14.x if there is one (at this point this would just be a bugfix release based on the old code, if there are enough bugs or new translations to justify it). It will be in 1.15.0.

I believe Andreas (win32 maintainer) provides periodic binary builds of the win32 client from CVS.

jason

	19-12-2002 20:33									#29
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hi guys how do I chang tridents sos I can try this one out

	19-12-2002 20:55									#30
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Geoffrey - see this thread for changing tilesets.

To try this one, you will need to download the most recent ZIP file I posted, and extract the files in the right place. i.e. bigtrident_v0_0_2.zip on the first page of this thread.

If you are running on windows (or using version 1.14), then PNG files are fine.

If you are using linux (before version 1.14) then you will need to convert the PNG files into XPM files.

Peter