Terrain Tiles

[Veneteaou]

Yeah shouldn't be a problem at all.

[Veneteaou]

It's funny how quickly my painting improves when I'm working on the project trying to find solutions. I've started working on Scrub Forest, and I already have several new methods of generating trees that I need to go back and implement into the Forest tile as well (let's face it: those old trees look like green soft-serve ice cream). I'm realizing that I'm probably going to redo all of them when it comes time to make continuous tiles, just to make sure there is a consistency in the art style.

Live and learn I guess.

[Trilarion]

Hm, yummy soft-serve ice cream.

I think it's great that you improve and with the mountain tile one can actually see it. So I can say that I got better at programming while doing it in the last time. However I will not recode the game once it's finished.

[Veneteaou]

Scrub Forest is finally here. It's faded and doesn't look good next to the other tiles.

When the tiles get redone I clearly need to unify my color palette.

[Trilarion]

Just realized that the original historical scenario doesn't have any scrub forest. For reason of showing I will convert 1/10th of the normal forest randomly into scrub forest.

[Trilarion]

Hi Ven, I hope you don't mind (I liked your terrain tiles so much) that I bundled them in the high resolution and released them as a separate package, so others might download them and use them. See the download page. They are the same as contained in the game download but with the original high resolution. In the game folders I also added license and author information for all artwork. So you probably will become famous now.

The reason was that if we are doing something for free we as well can do it properly and maximize the chance for others to use our work. Provided your consent (?) I will continue publishing new bundles of your terrain work.

[Xylander]

If you keep on having problems with special tiles (e.g. horses) let me know - maybe I can help with that.

[Veneteaou]

Thank you. If you end up reading over my post history, you will see that I am not an artist and I've been forcing myself to learn how to draw largely through trial and error. I'm sure I will figure horses out, but at some point we do need to have the team discuss the rest of the game art - there is a lot more to go (even if we discount military units and tactical battles for the time being). As far as I've heard, we don't really have anyone working on the big four screens, and we don't have anyone polishing up a GUI for the game yet.

[Veneteaou]

First off, fuck horses.

Here is my first attempt at a continuous tile - Continuous Tundra. I know Tundra isn't the easiest thing to see, but it was the easiest thing to draw for the test run. The process is a little painstaking, largely because I'm drawing in triangles and Tiled only allows me to work in squares or diamonds. Unfortunately, this also means I can't checkout a finished product without slicing the tile by hand (which I'm waaaay too tired to do). When you have a tile overlay system up and running Tril, let us know how this looks.

The reason was that if we are doing something for free we as well can do it properly and maximize the chance for others to use our work. Provided your consent (?) I will continue publishing new bundles of your terrain work.

Of course. Directly from my New Imperialism site: "All artwork and music that I have created and posted here are free to use under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license." I'm probably going to post that set to Reddit's Game Assets subforum, which is dedicated to open source and Creative Commons assets.

Also on the subject of sharing our work with others, I've struck upon a way in which I think we can recruit some extra workers to help this project along once the continuous tiles are all setup. Basically, I want to write an article detailing all of our good design choices with tile art. Show using geometry why staggered orthogonal is superior to hex, isometric, and orthogonal for breaking up tile repetitiveness, and walkthrough how our tiles are created and implemented. You've done research on tile creation, so you know how limited the rest of the internet is in terms of helpful tutorials.

Besides, I will need to write one eventually anyway in order to support more artists using our engine. May as well do it sooner rather than later, if there's a chance that it could get more people involved.

Ven

[Trilarion]

...The process is a little painstaking, largely because I'm drawing in triangles and Tiled only allows me to work in squares or diamonds. Unfortunately, this also means I can't checkout a finished product without slicing the tile by hand (which I'm waaaay too tired to do). When you have a tile overlay system up and running Tril, let us know how this looks....

I write that on the todo list until next release. I will test the continuous tile system in a separate tool first and I hope I can give it to you much before the next release. So please don't check by hand.

Also on the subject of sharing our work with others, I've struck upon a way in which I think we can recruit some extra workers to help this project along once the continuous tiles are all setup. Basically, I want to write an article detailing all of our good design choices with tile art. Show using geometry why staggered orthogonal is superior to hex, isometric, and orthogonal for breaking up tile repetitiveness, and walkthrough how our tiles are created and implemented. You've done research on tile creation, so you know how limited the rest of the internet is in terms of helpful tutorials....

I think that's brilliant. I know that there aren't many (good) tutorials out and the demand for tile based drawing is still there. On the other hand it would take some time for you to prepare it...