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New Tileset and some questions



Hi,
Due to the great demand of help in the art area I started a new tileset.
The first tiles are attached for first review and comments. I removed
most of the other tiles to keep the tileset size small.

There are some new ground tiles after the buildings and four water tiles
near the end. I compiled it with the default settings for now, but this
will changes when it's more complete and some questions have been
clarified.

Some basic questions:
1. Is there a documentation of the *.tsrc file out there?
2. I saw there is one section for each tile but the class is defined
   globally. The calls seems to me a property of the tile. Why don't you
   define class inside the tile section?
3. It seems that some tiles need a well defined position in the tile
   map. Which rules do I have to observe?
4. Which tiles are necessary (functional) and which are optional (only
   to beautify maps)? May I choose this on my own?

Some engine questions:
5. Are we limited to 256 colors or may tilesets have more? How about
   alphablending? Currently you use only transparency but libSDL_image
   also supports PNG which have full alpha channel support.
6. How about tile size? Currently all tiles have the size 32x28. I draw
   all tiles with size 64x56 amd scale them down. Would it be possible
   to support larger tiles and scale them inside the program if
   necessary. This would allow map scaling in future. On high
   resolutions the tiles are quite small.
7. Would it be possible to create the hexagon form (with a mask
   operation) inside the program and use square tiles as source? This
   will make tileset generation more easy and avoid gaps between tiles
   due to scaling. Currently a tileset designer has to perform this mask
   operation on each tile (and for each size).

And last but not least an feature request :-)
Please add an additional layer for buildings, streets, rails, cannals
and other things built by humans. Divide the ground from the buildings.
This will have following advantages:
- Tiles for buildings, streets, rails and cannals could be used on any
  ground without having a special tile for it. This will decrease the
  count of necessary tiles for this elements dramatically.
- Map designer have much more freedom where to build roads and rails.
- Pioneer units could be able to build and destroy streets, rails
  and cannals in the future.
- Streets, rails could be shot at to disturb the enemies supply lines

 That's it for now ;-)

   Best Regards
     Matthias





Attachment: grimm.tiles
Description: GNU Zip compressed data