Would be cool if instead of the game's current "there's mountains here" field of tiles, there was something that represented mountains according to their contour and elevation, which can be
quite dramatic.Yeah, good/evil isn't done yet.
not sure if ya can do particles... but maybe add some particles going up from the ground at them areas on the worldmap or such...some colorfull ones for good (white, yellow, green, blue) and maybe darker evil ones (red/black/purple?) or maybe ravens or bats flying over the evil area or such... colorfull parrots flying over good areas? like such worldmap deco stuff.
(one thing that comes to my mind is the particles the game "rise to ruins" does with their corruption areas) (that game does pretty good pixel rain too, with puddles and dripping down roofs and such)
https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/256721713/movie480.webm?t=1588368685
at 0.40 in the video.
When you're assigning meanings like good and evil, real life moral concerns ought to be considered. For one thing, colors don't have the same meaning everywhere, but for another, assigning direct moral meaning to real life animals demonizes them unfairly. Ravens are associated with battlefields because they scavenge, but this doesn't make them evil creatures; they are not any more likely to be assholes than a parrot is, and yet you deem the parrot a good creature. Bats are most definitely good creatures, in the sense that they are beneficial, because they kill huge numbers of pests, including mosquitos which kill more people per year than any other animal (depending on how you do your numbers, possibly even more than humans). Having ravens around, which like to play and do all kinds of things, if anything increases the whimsy and fun of the area. A high population of bats is a good and beneficial thing, reducing deaths under normal conditions (coronavirus demonization aside – it's not like they meant for humans to trap them, take them to market, and catch it off of them, and unlike the humans who spread it, they can't be expected to have known better) so both of these animals basically convey the opposite of what goes down in an evil zone.
For what it's worth, I'd like to backup Deergirl's opinion that the colors are too bright/cheery. I realize that's a popular look based on the tilesets/color schemes I see people using on YouTube. Will there be a way to do custom colors in steam version like we can on classic? I prefer a more muted look too.
Customization won't be taken out of the game, it will always be moddable. Only difference is that all of the new stuff being added to make this tileset possible will be available for other tileset makers without having to resort to TWBT and such.
This thread is mainly for discussions on that:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=173473.0
Although this is true, it's also not true. ASCII will work exactly as it did, but the new sprites will have only part of them dynamically recolorable. In fact, to the best of my knowledge no specifically recolorable content has been shown thus far; they seem to be using a workflow where they do it "wrong" first and then wait to make it recolorable until after. Naturally, Meph and Mike can correct me if this is a false deduction, but it's consistent with what they've shown so far and isn't contradicted by anything they've said while discussing the sprites.
This means that to update colors across the board, you'll have to do a not insignificant process of going through all sprite images, applying a darkening or other layer, making touchups as needed, or possibly even recoloring tons of stuff manually if you can't figure out the math to make all of them do what you want.
I imagine the first person to do this and make a good quality darker version of the base tileset will have the most subscribed mod on the Steam workshop for at least a few years.