CaretFarmer

Join Date 10/2004

A Trek Through the Desert

Well, the planet surface is shaping up nicely. After taking a bit of a detour to deal with some underlying non-graphical stuff (yes, there's more to games than graphics), I've been working on ways of blending different terrain types so that they look reasonably 'natural' but are still easily identified for what they are. Water and snow-capped mountains were easy because they're colored based strictly on elevation, but other features have proven to be a bit trickier. I messed around with some texture blending and wasn't quite satisfied with the results--there wasn't enough contrast between usable and non-usable tiles even when I used very contrasting textures. Also, everything tended to blur into a muddy, fuzzy mess and the frame rate took a hit to boot. So, I decided to revisit my terrain coloring technique to see if I could modify it to take the terrain type into account when it's coloring the tile. After some thought and a few false starts, I settled upon an approach that seems to work pretty well. So far, I've only got it working for deserts, but it's easily expanded to accomodate other terrain types--the hard work was getting it to this stage. There's a detail shot below which demonstrates this blending technique quite nicely. In it, you can see how the desert blends into the surrounding non-desert tiles--but don't take my word for it. If you think it's not clear which tiles are the desert tiles, let me know! Now it's time for me to do some last-minute Christmas preparations, so I'm outta here!

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Four desert tiles? Two to the right of the white thing (mountain?), one above, and one to the left? If that's the case then I'd say it's rather clear. If not, then back to the drawing board with you

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d? More likely, it is simply the texture blending with the forest/grasslland area(s) adjacent?

Wulfer

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I have to agree, its not that clear to me what I'm looking at. Could you perhaps give us a tile legend to refer to? is the white snow or cloud cover?

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Could you perhaps give us a tile legend to refer to?

I agree, that with a tile legend, this tile map would be easy to read. I think you are on the right track.

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t though, the desert tiles do blend in too well, its hard to tell which squares they encompass.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2411

I think the mountains need to be a bit more clear. I.e. see actual peaks or something but I'm visually impaired.

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Thanks for the great comments! My main objective was to make the desert tiles stand out from other (usable) tiles and, from the responses above, it sounds like that objective was met. I agree that it's unclear what some of the other tiles are and the mountains do look a little too cloud-like, so I'll need to address those issues, but I'm glad to hear that the deserts 'read'.

mrodgers, cloud cover is something we've discussed as a way of obscuring a planet's surface before you gain control of it (thereby making it difficult or even impossible to tell exactly how many 'good' tiles are on the planet's surface), but once you control a planet there won't be any atmospheric obstructions. For a more detailed discussion of that feature, check out Link.

As for the light green blending on the borders, that's actually a bug in my blending algorithm that I discovered after I posted this article (sheepish grin).

Finally, the resolution issue: for better or worse, the tiles are probably going to stay at about 45x45 pixels. The screen shot I posted with this article was only a section of the entire 12x6 tile map; without resorting to some sort of zooming/scrolling mechanism, the full map takes up 540x270 pixels of screen real estate. Since the map is only a part of a larger planet screen with a lot of information and controls, it's tough to make it much bigger. Here's a screen shot of the planet window so that you can get an idea of the context:

As you can see, the map window only gets about 18% of the screen because there's a lot of other stuff that needs to appear with it (the large, empty areas actually will have information in them--they just haven't been hooked up yet). [As a side note, this screenie also shows the color overlays which indicate which tiles are usable--these only appear on planets the player controls, though] So, yeah it'd be nice to have larger tiles, but that probably isn't going to happen.

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nt?

Paul.

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All planets will have 120 tiles, but only a fraction of them will be usable. That's why it's important for the player to be able to visibly identify usable tile before they control the planet (since they won't have the overlays at that point). You assume correctly that red and yellow overlays indicate tiles that could be improved to the point of usability, with red indicating more improvement needed than yellow.

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game with variable planet size (both in different sized planets on the main screen and different number of total tiles). Would add to the visual appeal and the strategy, but obviously not something needed now.

Paul.

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ably make a reasonable guess.

Same here. It'd probably get easier with experience though.

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