I really like the cotton field most from all the tiles so far. It's like from far away but it has this distinct parcel of land - feeling.
I am not sure if we would need the cotton, orchard tiles as overlays. Surely both (all as tiles) or tiles plus overlays are viable options. It depends if the same resource (cotton, coal, ore, ...) can be present on different terrain (plains, hills, mountains, ...). If so, we would need to separate resources and terrain and store resources as overlays.
Yes that is how Imp1 functioned: resource overlays representing coal, iron, gold, gems, and oil only. Tiles like ranches, grain fields, and cotton fields, that only produce one kind of product, only used ranch house or silo overlays to represent the level of work that has been done on the tile using civilian workers.
I'm beginning to notice that these tiles still obviously look like CG art. They will work for now, but I am definitely going to have to do them again.
Desert, Swamp and Tundra are very similar to Plains. They would probably need to be more different, but I think the best is to wait how they look as a map together before changing them.
New tile: Buffalo Range. I know it's not cows, but cows are difficult to make pretty when shrunk down. I will work on it some more and see what happens.
The buffalos (big fan of buffalos) look good when scaled down. I like them. For european style cattles one probably would have to change the colors to grayish and the shape of the head, maybe with horns left and right from the head.
I'm having a really hard time with getting decent trees going... Go figure, but watercolor tutorials aren't helping me here for some reason. Anyway, this tile can be a placeholder for now.
Veneteaou wrote:
When I figure out how that was done, I will draw another infographic. In other cases, it looks like the tiles are being cut by the game in non-square shapes, or possibly very small squares.
...
I'm painfully determined to figure out how Imp1 achieved their terrain.
I have studied Imp 1 tiles and tried to think out how the game map was generated. For example forest was made with 2 tiles, maybe they divided tile with diagonals in to 4 triangular tiles (masking-transparency?) and combined with these to creat edges for forest areas (and other areas)? Was back then possible to operate with bmp-files like that?
My English sucks, sry.
I've looked at several different options, and I've yet to see any pattern as to how they did it. If they used square or triangles, it was at least 16 of them in a single tile - there is no way to do what they did with less.
It was possible at that time to display a range of pixels (from [X1,Y1] to [X2,Y2]) that were pulled from an image, so I'm assuming that what they did was specifically sculpt each tile relationship this way. If Trilarion wants to do it this way, he can show me how to format these rules in Java I can write this stuff as I paint. I think it's probably the best way to go in terms of simplicity vs. quality.
