Hmm, never been this pleased with the responses from my modding activities...then again, my other major work was at the AOM Heaven forums, and if you ever frequented those when the game was big, the modding section was brutal. No one seemed to care for my...'unorthodox'? thoughts on texture and terrain design. Got worse at Wildfire Games and 0AD...my boss in the art department was color blind. XML-editing and hex-editing particle system files was much more lucrative, and my only real successes stemmed from that.
So thanks.
Anyway, things are rollin'. Finished converting all soils, minerals, and stones over to the new colors and tiles, and those are ready for tests. Added some things too:
The tree trick I mentioned. Basically, a tree sprite of the trunk is used for the ground level in a special color (essentially red) that extracts darker tones of brown from bright green, the foreground color. That colors the block pile sprite the appropriate greens and reds and yellows for the canopy. Holes in the trunk silhouette allow a background color of straight brown to pick up the highlights on the trunk, and add branches through holes in the silhouette mask of the block pile. End effect is a tree that, By Armok, looks like a freakin' tree from an aerial perspective. Tower cap and Glumprong tests are still needed, and sadly this kinda looses something for conifers, but it looks
intended so I won't complain.
A warehouse showing some of the furniture/item additions. Idols and chests have a sprite now, as do totems (tentative, I am unhappy with Idols the most and totems marginally). Mechanisms are in there too, looking spiffy with a worm gear. The chests sprite was carefully engineered to look either like a chest from above, the top of a fantasy style backpack with tie-down straps, or a ribbed quiver on its side.
Side note: since light magenta has been toned down, I changed Orthoclase to be
pink instead of yellow (see the stone stockpile), which it can be in reality. Thought it would be nice to have all the colors at least represented better.
Housing. Included to show the primary native metals tile ("nodules") and the grooviness of native copper with patina instead of light gray as its background. Turns out engraved walls use the background color of the material, and not light gray as I had assumed. Floor tiles had the black area increased to provide better contrast as per Solifuge's observation. It still needs work as some stones have issues on the contrast of their new colors (like this obsidian).
The mansion again, but chests are proper now. Added contrast to all furniture, too. The hall on the right shows the tweaked floor in a more typical color combination, providing pretty good depth.
The treasury vault, annexed to the Mayor's accommodations. Included simply for the coin vault so you get the idea of the sprite en mass and the lever right now. Pretty convincing, I think.
PTTG??: I was considering making a diagonals version, since that is like, fifteen minutes to whip up and everyone has their preference on the issue of corners in the tileset. A sharp version will also see it through, with no angles save 90 degrees.
Nice thing about these is that, as future screenies will show, the little details of the shape of each section interact in ways that add a lot of depth and variety. For instance, the corners are square on the inside, so a square smoothed room is indeed square, and the beveled exterior looks angular. But, smooth a 2x2 column and engrave and suddenly the same tiles are almost perfectly circular. The flutes at the ends of each section add ribbing in straightaways, but lead the eye into scalloped cutouts when a 1x1 column is added to the wall.
I should stop ranting...I like this set too much.
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Topic: What do you think ( a tileset )? (Read 8671 times)