Ben's Custom Tiles

[Ben]

Hello all,

After reading some of The Dark Lord's posts on his latest project and from talking to To the other night, I really started thinking that the Remake needs support for tiles with snow&stone mixed. I'm a novice with Photoshop, but I really didn't think that it would be very hard to do this. Here is what I put together in lab today:



The top picture is flat to show detail, but the bottom one is elevated so it is more like what you would see in an actual game. As you can see, they are rather rough, but I think that they are okay. Someone else could probably do better, but nobody has tired this yet, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

What do you guys think?

[sado1]

Looks nice, I tried myself and making new transition tiles seems really easy (just modifying the other transitions) although I wasn't sure how to put them into the game (I saw your clue, so I'll read the snowy buildings topic later to find out) so I didn't know if the result is actually good. What you did looks cool for me, you might want to fix (add?) the corner tile cause now it looks a bit strange.

[Ben]

...you might want to fix (add?) the corner tile cause now it looks a bit strange.

There are no corner tiles for stone mountains in KaM.

P.S., Sado, jsut make a folder called "Sprites" in the mian KaM Remake folder, and place your tiles into the folder. They have to have the same name as the tiles that you want to replace, but you must have a "7_" before them.

[Jeronimo]

Another tile that is needed is stone/coal connection directly to "yellow green grass".
Sometimes the green areas ruin the total scheme of pure snow/desert the designer has in mind.

Ben's Custom Tiles have great potential. I foresee it.

[Lewin]

We would like to extend the tileset in the future, but it requires some fundamental changes to map format and the way it is stored/processed internally. The "terrain type" of a tile is stored in 1 byte, which means the current limit is 256 tiles and all of them are used by TPR. We can extend this to 2 bytes which gives us 65,536 different tiles allowed, but we'd like to fit that into the map format without breaking KaM compatibility if possible. There are unused bytes we could possibly use, but we might need to make our own map format that won't be compatible with KaM and KaM editors. So we'd like to make sure the KaM Remake editor is good enough that people won't want to use other editors to make their maps.

It won't be available in the next release but we'll hopefully add it eventually

[Ben]

Another tile that is needed is stone/coal connection directly to "yellow green grass".
Sometimes the green areas ruin the total scheme of pure snow/desert the designer has in mind.

Ben's Custom Tiles have great potential. I foresee it.

After I get these stone tiles looking good, I was planing on moving on to deserts.

[Krom]

Before extending tileset I was also thinking about making it a little smarter.

We are open to changing the concept of fixed tiles transitions into more flexible overpainting, that can take advantage of alpha masking. E.g. like these dirt tiles are made: http://pics.gameparadigm.org/mallet/dirt_tiles.jpg

See this topic: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=784

[Ben]

Before extending tileset I was also thinking about making it a little smarter.

We are open to changing the concept of fixed tiles transitions into more flexible overpainting, that can take advantage of alpha masking. E.g. like these dirt tiles are made: http://pics.gameparadigm.org/mallet/dirt_tiles.jpg

See this topic: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=784

I don't like this idea. One thing I like about KaM maps is that a lot of the terrain mixing makes sense. I hate seeing games like Age of Kings where snow mixes with desert or grass. It makes no sense to me (well, I suppose grass could be with snow if the snow was melting, but you see my point). Therefore, if we do use masks, I think that there should still be limitations. In addition, you'll need to redraw all the tiles in order to separate them.

[Krom]

@Ben: Snow/sand and other obscure mixes are entirely on mapmakers conscience However I see your point and it is a good argument, because many tiles should not be adjusted (e.g. stone/water), but some others could benefit (e.g. gold/iron mountains, abyss), you would not need to draw that many transitions by hand.

Also masks allow greater variation of transitions, see in pic that there are 3-6 versions of each.

[Siegfried]

I like the tiles.

A question comes to my mind: if you remove the stone and it immediately reveals a snowy ground - where does the snow come from? Was it under the stone?

[Lewin]

@Krom: IMO masks won't give as good results in many cases. If you look at the KaM tile transitions a lot of them are not just masked, there are different colors/objects in the transition area. For example gold hill to grass, there are little rocks around the edge of the hill. The same with water to grass, the shoreline looks completely different to grass or water. I don't think it's possible to make it look as good using masks, and we'll end up with terrain edging more like in games like Age of Empires. However, masking would probably be fine for "simple" transitions like green grass to yellow grass. This is just my guess and I'd need to see examples to judge it properly

@Siegfried: The code that removes the stone will need to be updated to cope with snow and other terrain types, right now it's hard coded to use grass. It would look kind of odd if snow just appears when the stone is removed. I guess it could change to dirt instead, since dirt connects nicely with the "dirty snow" terrain that Ben used.

[Krom]

@Lewin: Masks could have generic transitions and specific ones for certain tile types (toWater, toGrass, etc). So that's not really an issue. Original tiles were made in "Photoshop" using same masks, but were flatten then. We could look into doing it dynamically. If for example we take original tileset and split transitions apart and assign all of them to be "specific transitions" then the end result in-game will be identical to original.

The benefit of masks is possibility to add new tiletypes without need to draw all the transitions. However drawing replacement masks for existing tile transitions (or a tool that would split transitions apart automatically) could take a lot of work.

[Da Revolution]

A question comes to my mind: if you remove the stone and it immediately reveals a snowy ground - where does the snow come from? Was it under the stone?

Grass is actually stranger I think. It takes longer for grass to grow than for snow to cover the ground.

Anyway Ben looks nice already and I hope it will be added one day

[Ben]

@Ben: Snow/sand and other obscure mixes are entirely on mapmakers conscience However I see your point and it is a good argument, because many tiles should not be adjusted (e.g. stone/water), but some others could benefit (e.g. gold/iron mountains, abyss), you would not need to draw that many transitions by hand.

I hate seeing ugly maps in Age of Kings where the terrain has been generated to have a desert right next to snow. You see this a lot in Minecraft, too. I really don't think that this has any place in KaM.
If we have an understanding, it is that some terrains should be universal (mountains) and others should now (desert, grass, snow). Honestly, I think that the only ones that need adjusting are coal, stone, mountains, and "voids." All others are fine imo.

@Revo
Thanks

[Krom]

KaM has ~20 tile types (resources excluded). Let's assume each of these types need to have ~10 transitions (grass needs more, abyss needs few). That is roughly 20 * 10 / 2 (divide by 2 because transitions are bidirectional) = 100 transitions. Each transition needs 3 ways (2 corners and half), that means theoretical tileset amount should be 100 * 3 + 25 + 30 (25 tiletypes, 30 special tiles) = 355 tiles. We currently have 247 tiles (roads/debri excluded). So .. to sum up this calculus we would need ~100 tiles to be drawn if we use traditional way. Sounds like not that impossible amount.

If we do masked approach we need 20 * 3 transitions drawn, plus another 15 for those with intermediary features (water-grass, water-sand). But tenfolds more programming work.

Both ways would demand to change map format.