Warzone 2100 Forums

-- Delphinio

I just wanted to outline one problem that all textures i've seen so far seem to possess. It's not showing cliffs obviously enough. Here's a couple of examples:



On this picture, you can go across the green arrow, but can't follow the red arrow. But this fact is fairly unobvious when you use new textures. The second screen looks like a total mess for me with Gerard's textures; it's impossible to play it!!

The other part of the problem is that cliff textures from different sides of a narrow canyon become merged, and it becomes unobvious if it's possible to pass through or not. Maybe cliff borders should be made fading out more rapidly?? On the screenshot below, you can move all along the green arrow, but the way looks like one big cliff face.



This problem seems to appear only on my maps ^_^ (tranquil on the first picture, outskirts on the second picture, nowhere on third picture).
I humbly ask anybody to find a way of fixing it.

hm. If you saw the last changes that Buginator has made to this patch, I believe that now can manually adjust this "fading" parameter in config file without recompiling the source each time.
see ticket 2013 tileset.zip

Is it possible to use Gerrard set as an additional areas? Or would Mangust like to create more textures for completely new areas? Warzone is having just 3 sets of textures and while they are very nice , it would benefit from more diversity. Just an example is this: all Alpha campaign is using Mangust textures, but 3 away missions are using Gerrard set. Another example: there is 4th area, like swamp with twisted radioactive plants and radiating areas which can be used for skirmish maps.

If you saw the last changes

Err ... i think i didn't (:
I don't have any experience with svn yet. What is the command (linux) to get the source with these changes included?

hao wrote:

If you saw the last changes

Err ... i think i didn't (:
I don't have any experience with svn yet. What is the command (linux) to get the source with these changes included?

It isn't in svn.
I am using git for this exercise, and the sync isn't online yet.

guciomir wrote:Is it possible to use Gerrard set as an additional areas? Or would Mangust like to create more textures for completely new areas? Warzone is having just 3 sets of textures and while they are very nice , it would benefit from more diversity. Just an example is this: all Alpha campaign is using Mangust textures, but 3 away missions are using Gerrard set. Another example: there is 4th area, like swamp with twisted radioactive plants and radiating areas which can be used for skirmish maps.

Anything is possible, if someone does it.

hao wrote:I just wanted to outline one problem that all textures i've seen so far seem to possess. It's not showing cliffs obviously enough.

SO SO TRUE.

This is the biggest problem with the new terrain engine, I think.

One thing that needs to be done is that the blending "width" between walkable and unwalkable terrain should be a lot narrower.

Like this:

MaNGusT wrote:hm. If you saw the last changes that Buginator has made to this patch, I believe that now can manually adjust this "fading" parameter in config file without recompiling the source each time.
see ticket 2013 tileset.zip

I haven't looked at it in detail, but I've looked at it, and from what I can tell, all you can adjust in there is texture resolution, not texture splatting width.

guciomir wrote:Is it possible to use Gerrard set as an additional areas? Or would Mangust like to create more textures for completely new areas? Warzone is having just 3 sets of textures and while they are very nice , it would benefit from more diversity. Just an example is this: all Alpha campaign is using Mangust textures, but 3 away missions are using Gerrard set. Another example: there is 4th area, like swamp with twisted radioactive plants and radiating areas which can be used for skirmish maps.

It would be usable as a mod. If you make it a music mod (we so need to rename that), you'll even be able to play with people who aren't using that mod.

I have another idea: Implement cliff textures as decals. This way, they'd be directional, and they wouldn't require modifying the existing terrain engine.

Mangust, what do you think?

Zarel wrote:Mangust, what do you think?

possible but it will be hard to do to me a lot of decals. I mean if cliffs will be decals then we need some (ie, 10) decals instead of 1 big texture that we have now.
yeah, It has some positives like they'd be directional, etc.
some questions..
how will they blend with terrain textures? we should exclude "hard edges".
now decals are 128x128(theoretically) textures which don't have "background"(transparent). so, what background will have cliff decals?

MaNGusT wrote:possible but it will be hard to do to me a lot of decals. I mean if cliffs will be decals then we need some (ie, 10) decals instead of 1 big texture that we have now.

The way I'm imagining it isn't that much work. You just use the same texture you have now, except they're no longer blended with neighboring tiles (or at least not as much), and they're rotated in some places.

MaNGusT wrote:some questions..
how will they blend with terrain textures? we should exclude "hard edges".

Decals are PNG files, and I believe we support alpha blending. We alpha it down over, say, 8 pixels in the 128x128 decal (scaling down accordingly), and it should be fine.

MaNGusT wrote:now decals are 128x128(theoretically) textures which don't have "background"(transparent). so, what background will have cliff decals?

The same texture as the tiles next to the cliff - for each cliff decal, there's usually only one texture it looks good next to.

For instance, see this image: http://wz2100.net/images/warzonescreenshot.png - there's a gray tile next to the cliff tiles - the corresponding terrain texture should be used for the background.

MaNGusT wrote:if cliffs will be decals then we need some (ie, 10) decals instead of 1 big texture that we have now.

Summarizing what Zarel just said, i think only 2 decals are needed: A "full" cliff and a "half" (split by diagonal) cliff.

Would semitransparent "cliff shading" decals be a good idea? (Assuming that an 8-bit alpha channel is supported)
I think they use this kind of system in american conquest.
It would essentially mean you paint a transparent/black (or dark colured) shadow texture with directional details on it and use as decal upon the cliffs, darkening the overall texture but giving two layers of detail

Jorzi wrote:Would semitransparent "cliff shading" decals be a good idea? (Assuming that an 8-bit alpha channel is supported)
I think they use this kind of system in american conquest.
It would essentially mean you paint a transparent/black (or dark colured) shadow texture with directional details on it and use as decal upon the cliffs, darkening the overall texture but giving two layers of detail

This could also work. As I've said, I'm not positive Warzone supports alpha blending, but it should.

what I can say... we should try!

MaNGusT wrote:what I can say... we should try!

Indeed. Then there is the tightly related matter of WYSIWYG out of flaME.

See last several posts HERE: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6237&start=45

- RV

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