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[Mike Mayday]

The hard edges are actually intentional to show where one tile ends and the other begins.
In the long run there shouldn't be a problem with smoothing them. For the first version I wanted to focus on the part that is simpler to code, which would be used anyway for constructed ramps.

[Meph]

Hey Meph - I'm super into the Egyptian themed tileset you posted a while, and I'm wondering if such things as greco-roman, egyptian, nordic, celtic, and so on would be available in the new tiles? Or if there's any plan to have such themes selectable by default?

That would be a ton of extra work. ^^ I don't know if the code will support stuff like that, but for now you can have your cake and eat it at the Meph tileset.

There are no plans to add those themes in the official tileset. Very unlikely in fact, since they are so clearly RL-race inspired.

[IlFedaykin]

I don't think this is going anywhere.

What exactly was negative about the directionless top-lit ramps? Did anyone misunderstand those; did anyone mis-read them as walls or confuse up with down?

We'll add the nice cyan/blue fog shading, and that's it. I even made a version that simply uses a shading overlay, without any new sprites. Mike I know you are putting a lot of work into the ramps, but I don't think they'll ever work with the directional shading, next to top-down terrain.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

They actually look the best in my opinion. You'd need to check how the look with the rest of the shaded sprites, tho. On a different note, Japa's solution is indeed the most eye-pleasing. It would make sense to have ALL the ramps with a piece of the lower level floor (since while you stand on the ramp tile, you are on the lower floor). This would also solve the problem with canyon-like ramps (wall-ramp-wall), which you didn't consider, up to now!
 In the case of inner corners something like Death Dragon's and Vince's solutions would be best: they look way more natural and if the top-floor flat is narrow enough, it won't confuse anybody.

Kinda like this?

It does sorta make the inside corner tile look higher up than it actually is though.

What about this, that would add a slight curve:

EDIT: I just realized basically any configuration of walls and ramps with opposing walls would be pretty hard to draw... and there's a ton of possibilities! If math doesn't fail me, there should be 256 possible configurations. Considering rotations, you'll need less. But still a lot.

[Cruxador]

Because the smoothing needs to be extended to neighbouring tiles, which means extra coding and lots of extra considerations. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm trying to keep things minimal for the first release.

Because of how Steam release hype tends to work, I reckon that the first release should be as complete and polished as possible. Maybe Kitfox have some knowledge of this that's more specific to indie games than my experience, but I don't reckon that this is a time to err on the side of conservatism.

In particular, a generalized conditional tile override system (whether based on the existing one for smoothed walls or not) with adjacency triggers would be a super powerful aesthetic tool with vastly wide reaching applications for improving the appearance of the game.
I know it may feel like a big ask from Toady, but I'd also like to point out that he's a grown man and it's his project in the first place. He's perfectly capable of being given a potential task and then deciding whether it would be worth it, and it's reasonable based on that to push for more features or otherwise convey how useful things could be. It could even be considered part of the job.

Hey Meph - I'm super into the Egyptian themed tileset you posted a while, and I'm wondering if such things as greco-roman, egyptian, nordic, celtic, and so on would be available in the new tiles? Or if there's any plan to have such themes selectable by default?

This, on the other hand, is something that definitely isn't needed at release.

The main problem I have with this is that it still looks like walls to me.
Yes, the perspective wouldn't make sense, but my brain still screams "walls".

I don't really think there's a way around this without switching from geometric to a more painted rolling hills type look, which would also require adjacency awareness.

What exactly was negative about the directionless top-lit ramps?

Not as pretty. It may be a worthwhile tradeoff from a game design perspective, but this is meant to sell copies largely on looks as well.

[IlFedaykin]

I forgot... Along the way Toady will need to fix the longstanding bug with ramps-against-nothing, or you'll end up with broken graphics every time you channel out a large part of terrain!

[Meph]

Bit of both?

I added my shading on top of Mikes shading (only for the current zlvl, not the one above or below):

[Bumber]

What exactly was negative about the directionless top-lit ramps? Did anyone misunderstand those; did anyone mis-read them as walls or confuse up with down?
[...]

The grass near the underground just looks like a lighter shade of grass that's flat. Maybe with a different gradient it would look better.
Maybe sort of non-linear like: ██████
Or maybe just go a little bit darker than the flat tiles at the bottom of the ramp?

The brick version looks okay because the bricks face a different direction from the flat tiles.
Obviously the defined edges in your most recent post fixes the issue, but if smoothed edges remain an option, it might work.

[Manveru Taurënér]

The shadows definitely help with telling what's up and down, but yeah, those hard lines feel pretty off for "natural" terrain. Should make sure that other shadows on object are shadowed roughly in the same direction though (like the rocks you had in one image being shadowed on the left side rather than right). Meph's version look better in that respect, but less clear both on direction and the fact that it's ramps at all, not enough 3D feel to it.

And as for needing additional coding to make further changes, I'd say ramps are probably one of the things most worth improving with how much it informs the topside scenery, depending of course on how large a rewrite it would be? But I'd assume since further updates on the graphics front would be many years off one could make a good case for trying to unlock as many new tools as possible now so they're available for tinkering around with during the big wait, both for the official set and modders?

Also in favor of the Japa suggested version (if that's a possibility), it's the only way afaik to have a hill like that look like an actual hill.

Edit: Then again, it's obviously easy for us to sit here and argue for all the possibilities we're teased with, since we're not the ones who have to put the work in. What's the plan for future updates like if that's okay to ask, as in after the steam release is out? Are regular graphics tinkering during future updates planned or will it be a spur of the moment thing like a lot of other stuff? Are you guys aiming at staying the official tileset makers/updaters for subsequent updates too or is that too far in the future to have been discussed?

[Oab]

Painting ramps for this type of perspective will never look good and will most likely end up confusing new players.

My question is do they even need to be visible? The inclusion of multi-layer rendering should provide enough perception of the layers by itself.

This is a 5 minute mock up of what I had in mind for a solution.



The tile on the grass is a channeled hole.

Technically the bottom of the ramp is on the current level so this makes the most sense to me. Just imagine the ramp itself being between the tiles.

This approach would also make it a lot easier to comprehend complex wall layouts and things like tracks between layers. Multi-layer rendering will indicate height to provide context when there isn't a ramp.

[Cruxador]

Bit of both?

Looks great honestly, it keeps Mayday's aesthetic but really helps with the "looks like a wall" problem. Only thing is that the bottom of the ramp has too distinct of an edge against the ground, but I think that's a problem that can be addressed if it's not just overlayed on an existing mockup.

My question is do they even need to be visible?

Well... Yeah. You definitely need to be able to tell where your dwarves (and every other thing that walks) can go up a z-level and where they can't.

[Superdorf]

Bit of both?

Woah.

I... uh. Wow. That's bold.

Personally I liked the atmosphere of the last better... but it sounds like this has better visibility for some people? It's a good compromise, I suppose-- but the bottom edge does need a smoothing out of some kind.

How does the inside corner tile look with this new shading?

[Death Dragon]

Bit of both?

Yeah, I agree. Though the latest Mayday mockup did already have a bit of that additional shading.
I also made a similar mockup some pages ago:

I just made a 5 second mockup of what the Mayday directional shading ramps would look like with an additional shading gradient:

I think this is the direction to go in.

I don't think this is going anywhere.

What exactly was negative about the directionless top-lit ramps? Did anyone misunderstand those; did anyone mis-read them as walls or confuse up with down?

We'll add the nice cyan/blue fog shading, and that's it. I even made a version that simply uses a shading overlay, without any new sprites. Mike I know you are putting a lot of work into the ramps, but I don't think they'll ever work with the directional shading, next to top-down terrain.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The problem with these directional-shading lacking ramps is that they don't look plastic enough. They look more like differently coloured, flat ground to me.

[Starver]

EDIT: I just realized basically any configuration of walls and ramps with opposing walls would be pretty hard to draw... and there's a ton of possibilities! If math doesn't fail me, there should be 256 possible configurations. Considering rotations, you'll need less. But still a lot.

There are 'only' 51 ramp combinations, if you boil all rotations and reflections down to one ur-example that can cover each set.

Spoiler: Going into more depth, but mainly musing and not that useful to M&MM (click to show/hide)

Some (4) are uniquely used (a 'rampless' ramp, the intermediate leftover from digging an area flat, and the all-ramp ramp, where you've just channelled your initial hole into a plane, and the Z-1 floor revealed can be gotten out in any direction),

Some (4) cater for two examples (perpendicular versions of self-reflecting, such as N/S ramps that can be E/W ramps, or NE/SW that can be NW/SE.

Quite a few (25) have 4 rotations (with self-reflection as part of the package), like N=E=S=W, but most more complicated than that.

Most represented in the end result (but only 18 in ur-number) have four distinct rotations plus four more distinct reflections. Like N+NW begats N+NW,  E+NE, E+SE, W+NW, W+SW, S+SW and S+SE. It's in this group that there are some of the oddest "required ramps" layouts, for whatever contrived reasons, perhaps you could (in this and the prior group) fudge lower numbers such that a N+E ramped tile looks the same as a N+NE+E ramped one, for all it's worth, and reduce the actual number somewhat. The N+E+S+W version might possibly be assumed to be the same as the 8-ramp standard that services the diagonals as well. Maybe the NE+SE+SW+NW only-diagonals one (applies where N, S, E, W exits are same-Z, rather than undefined because they're no-exits in the cardinal directions) might still need a 'solution' to not look odd or misleading.

If you have an orientation-sensitive tile you want to premorph to give the impression of ramps, though, this is not much good. You can't take a nice "grass-stalk" image for a North ramp and rotate it to serve an East ramp without the grass growing sideways. Depending upon the image, perhaps even a South version would look odd.

But I assume from the mockups that it's more an overlay process. Apply a particular partially-transparent HSL 'filter' onto the basic tile image. Rotate the HSL overlay/modifier but keep the base art of the tile the same.

And if you're developing such a graphics system from scratch, you could of course just either apply a bumpmap-style '3d' rendering or at least work with 'subtile ligaturing' so that the edges of a tile are intelligently replaced with prepared partial-images in eight (or, in another version, 16) regions within the region of the tile of edge to ?mid-way-to-centre? where a given neighbour(s) holds most sway.  Or the HSL filtering is just applied (cross-border) on-the-fly.  Which is how I think I see the artists' examples as indicating, or emulating at least.

PS,  I do like the 5-second mockup in Death Dragon's post although I wouldn''t know how much of the mocking up was not easily replicable by an automated renderer, in lieu of an artistic eye. And M@MM have plenty of other things to worry about, I assume.

[Mike Mayday]

I'm taking a break from the ramps for now and doing some creatures and other stuff. You guys feel free to continue but bear in mind I might get a bit overwhelmed if there's 3 pages of discussion on ramps to go through XD

[Rekov]

Mike taking a break aside, I thought I would help clarify the geometry situation a little by using actual 3D models. All of this applies equally whether you're using the top-down shading Meph has suggested or the directional shading that Mike has been using so far.

There are five different possibly configurations I've come up with. I will be using the same exact same landscape for each one to make the differences more obvious. The tiles are checkered so you can see which faces belong to each tile.


1. I'm starting with this one because it does not work.


This is what that would look like in 3D, and obviously it's nonsense.


2. The geometry on this one actually works. It has smooth slopes along the horizontal, but jagged slopes along the vertical. The disadvantage is that it makes half of the corner ramp tile solid wall, which would look weird with a sprite on top of it. I've converted Death Dragon's mock-up into a gif that shows what it would have to look like one z-level down.


Here is the 3D:


3. This the option that most of Mike and Meph's demos have used so far. It is the opposite of option 2 in the sense that it has smooth vertical slopes but jagged horizontal slopes.

Mike's v3:


Meph's v3:


3D model of v3:


4. This is a hybrid. It uses the convex corners from v2 and the concave corners from v3.


5. This is the opposite hybrid, using the convex corners from v3 and the concave corners from v2.




Bonus Version 6:
If you don't care about keeping things planar, you could go for a series of saddle shapes. The problem though is I think it's hard for the human mind to get a good grip on this just based on shadows and light, and it wouldn't work very well in 2D because of this.



In conclusion, I think version 3 has to be the way to go. Version 2 works equally well in 3D, but it doesn't work in 2D tiles because those concave corners put half of the sprite 'in the wall'