Snowy buildings (yes i have something to show)

[Ben]

Sorry, a badly written post for me. I indeed meant to say that the buildings are rather pointless to implement while the building set is not completely finished.

[T*AnTi-V!RuZz]

Sorry, a badly written post for me. I indeed meant to say that the buildings are rather pointless to implement while the building set is not completely finished.

Go harass KillingB so he can get it done

[Ben]

I think learning how to do it myself would be the easier option

[Ben]

So actually I thought I'd try my hand at it. Here was the result:





It's not perfect, and it's not great. It wasn't a teribly complicated process but it does take time to get it looking decent. I don't plan on actually making a set, because I don't normally find myself bored enough to be making Photoshop edits.

For those interested (and potentially for my own future reference ), this was made with Photoshop CC 2015. My primary method was the following:
1) fiSelect the areas of the building that would have snow.
2) Copy those selected areas into new layers. Hide all other layers to make it easier to work with the "snow areas"
3) Use color selection to grab a selection of pixels (you don't want every pixel selected. Not sure exactly why, but having this extra step preserved the "3D" depth.)
4) Make a new mask with this layer
5) Use a hue adjustment layer with 100% lightness (makes snow. Yay!)
6) Snow will appear jagged, click the mask edge button to adjust the selection. Give it a little feather, smooth, etc. until it looks light and fluffy.

Also, I added a cooling filter to the image. This is very important to tone down the intense warm/cozy look of KaM graphics.

[thunder]

Hi,
I made these long time ago because I thought not only the houses would be covered by snow.

[Ben]

What software and method are you using? I'm happy to get all the advice I can get.

[thunder]

the free Paint.Net is enough to create them.

[Ben]

Here is another. It turned out slightly better I think. I shadow above the door looks a bit strange in contrast, but at least the roof isn't overly white. Still trying to get a good technique down.

I think I'll try painting on some objects later. I imagine pine trees to be the hardest: They have multiple images as they bend in the wind.

[Rey]

One guy on Russian forum - Malin - added several new snow houses recently. Here is a link to his work: https://yadi.sk/d/liaqjScf3DEJbd

I think we need some place, where we can add links / attach sprites for snow buildings. Kind of repository.

We have github, for developing purposes. Also I use trello board.

Any ideas where can we make such a repository ? New topic here on kem.net with attached first post with links ?

If we will be able to draw all of them we could add snow houses to next release, most of code is ready AFAIK.

Also its important that all houses have same snow "style" (Malin's houses have icicles and color is a bit bluish, not sure what is better)

[Lewin]

Snow houses would be a nice addition to the next release of KaM Remake IMO. The original snow houses from KillingB can be found here in our repository:
https://github.com/Kromster80/kam_remak ... er/Sprites

Ben, your bakery looks good! You might need a bit more blue in your snow, since KaM snow has a lot of blue in it. However, we already have the fisherman's hut and bakery. Here's a list of the ones we are missing:
weapons smithy
coal mine
stables
market
metalurgist - Now done by Malin
gold mine
armour smithy
barracks
tannery

If others will make the remaining houses I can look at fixing the graphical issues with overlaid work/idle sprites. Removing the background pixels can be automated easily enough.

Rey, a new topic is probably a good way to coordinate the work. As each house is finished we can add them to Github. Afterwards someone can do a pass on all of the houses to make sure the style is consistent.

[Rey]

Good!

What about thunder's tree's and other objects?

Thunder added some of them, but full list is about 255 objects (Trees.rxx) and about 1000 trees animations (btw - where do we store animations?). Many of them are very similar, but still its A LOT of work.
Also we will probably need new rxx packages if we are going to add them.

Or we can add just some of them at least.

[thunder]

The moving objects are fine, we can say the wind helps to shake the snow down, but the static ground objects are cooler if have some snow on the top of them. Basicly the objects are added at the map editing phase.( ofc Normaly, most of the time) So these should be avaiable when somebody creating new map/-s. The built houses are checking the type of the grounds in the game, true?
My idea was that removing some not used or duplicated objects and adding some of this snow covered one, but it would be overcomplicated because many maps would need a systematic overchecking and it would huge work. (There are several objects like the big mushroom, flower etc... which are duplicated, these are at the end of the list and the main difference is only those object are not walkable and not buildable?)
If I know well the object list is full (255pcs) and not expandable. And my objects maybe has different shape of the snow than the tileset. The priority be the houses, the object overchecking and new objects be secondary. There are many objects ideas and many ready objects are waiting for implementation. So maybe a new block of 255 pcs set could be openable also;)
New objects, new tiles and many missing parts are out there(many of them has already prototypes). That new 255new block really would have sense. (Stone-sand,stone-snow, uncuttable trees etc...)
Lots of graphical issues.

[Rey]

but it would be overcomplicated because many maps would need a systematic overchecking and it would huge work

We have Batcher utility where we can execute some automated features over all of the maps/files etc. So we can add some function, that check over all of the maps (at least which are in kam remake repository - about ~300 maps, including campaigns).
If you provide full list of duplicate objects, we will be able to replace them over all maps.

But expanding tiles and objects from Byte (255) to Word (65,535) could be also a good idea. Is there any problems with it, except lots of refactoring and testing ?

[Ben]

I might edit KillingB's buildings to have icicles. He never liked doing that part, but I don't have too much trouble with it (my work may not meet his quality standards; though, who knows)
I was having a lot of trouble getting Photoshop to decrease the brightness of whites, as well as adding blue tones to them (I think due to my method of making "white" which was just putting lightness at 100%). I was able to get both figured out, here is bakery with blue tones:

Do you guys think more blue is needed, or is this enough?

Also, thank you for the link to the buildings that are done. That's very helpful.


Here is a coal mine. I have a few concerns about this building. Coalmines have lots of animation, including the mechanical wheel, elevator, and the miner. Will these be a problem to "automate out" as you say, Lewin?
Also, how will the game detect if the coal mine is located on snow? We will need a new algorithm for this.

[Ben]

Not too sure I like this one. I had some difficulty with it, probably because I paused half way through it for work