Okay, I had some more ideas, but I notice I am having trouble concentrating(doing too much and too warm :D)
stream_v2_outlines_faded_center is a continuation on the blended stuff with the centers faded. The downside here is that these tiles are not possible if you're using rpgmaker mv, as the centers there work differently. It also now feels a lot deeper.
stream_v5 is with the water instead of expanding/contracting, it now undulates, going up, left, down, right, this would keep the surface level the same.
Stream_v5_undulate_inside only affects the inner outline, but not the actual water level, to make the water a little more subtle.
The latter two don't look very polished as I was running out of concentration.
MedicineStorm, yeah, it seems that fading out and in doesn't really give the feeling the water is moving, and thus you end up needing to animate the ridges. I have seen the brighter/darker color used in the rpgmaker 2k tiles.
Bluecarrot:
Very neat work, and glad to see you back! You always make very thoughtful and thorough contributions.
D'aww thanks. I just handed in my bachelor thesis this friday, so I have time to poke at stuff again :) Of course, my time will recede as I go back working on Krita. Too many things to do :)
How to handle waves onto the shore; my current strategy for the terrain mapping is to make a giant tsx with every sensible combination of overlapping tiles; then I can use the terrain tool in Tiled to draw overlapping terrains, without having to manage multiple layers to smoothly transition between different terrains. This strategy is not really feasible with animated water (even if the shores were animated separately from the "bulk" of the water), because the tool to make the giant tsx file doesn't support animation.
I have been thinking that we should probably make the water tiles a seperate tileset. This would also work better for Godot, where animated tiles can't handle atlas textures(that is, animated tiles need to be on a seperated file that represents the tileset instead of one big tileset). Tiled's animation setup also ended up being a bit too much manual labour last time I used it, so maybe we'll need to modify that tool to also setup the animation for us :p
How to handle different depths of water; right now I have two shallows, a "normal," and a "deep" water, with smooth transitions between each. To animate all of them, I would need somehow allow the animated water to smoothly transition between different depths. The best idea I came up with was to make new tiles for the "floor" of the water and put those on a new layer, then to make the animated water semi-transparent, then to put the land/terrain on top.
We have 2(3) options here:
Overlaid water.
Limit the amount of water tiles and accept that we cannot make transitions between them all the time :)
Waterfalls are the transition :D
Evert:
What makes it tricky is that waves in a pond and waves in flowing water don't look the same in reality. In a pool of water, the water is mostly static, with the waves just causing a sparkle in the water. These sparkles are also more-or-less static, but they "blink". Flowing water has the same, but now the sparkles also move. To convey depth, the water becomes more or less transparent, with shallow water showing the bottom quite clearly and very deep water not showing the bottom at all. This is the sort of thing I would want to handle using code in my engine rather than depending on the artwork directly. It also allows for nifty things like fish that move in the water, or sunken treasure chests that must be recovered.
Yeah, proper water is basically 3 parts:
Water the foggy volume, this is greenish for clear water, black for brackish and greyish for sediment carrying water.
Waves on the surface.
reflection of the sky.
And all of this also depends on how fast the water will flow.
For the volume stuff, the isometric Dwarf Fortress visualizer StoneSense currently uses little semi-transparent blocks that are denser on the inside. Then when stacked over several layers it gives a foggy effect of deeper getting water. You can see an example at the bottom-right here. When searching for pictures that show the water, I also found these two examples by solifuge on the forums there. Example 1. Example 2.
Of course, isometric tiles behave quite differently from oblique tiles like the LPC graphics are, but it's worth considering.
Bluecarrot:
How to handle flow, like in a stream or river; I have no idea how to deal with this; the number of transition tiles would be crazy between standing and flowing water.
Evert:
I suspect the "correct" way to do this is to have an animated texture that is blended over water tiles and gets moved around in the direction of the water flow. You then use something like a stencil buffer to blend in the water texture where it's needed. Of course, you can then go and do that, and capture the result for an animated tileset.
I think you might want to look at the Valve flowmap paper from 2010, it uses a vector describing texture to distort the texture in a given direction. It's basically how all the big modern 3d video games handle water flow. I guess for a tile based system you'd want to have a per-tile. Here's another tutorial covering flowmaps for unity.
I guess I'll go and play with flow maps in Godot coming week. At the same time, we'll need to be careful that we won't make the water too dependant on advanced engine effects because it'll make live really hard on people who are new to game design, for example people who are messing about in rpgmaker or gamemaker.
I spend some time today actually going to the river and streams in my hometown and doing some observations there. To my surprise, we have fish ladders here, so I was able to look at rapid moving water here as well. Other observations:
Water is moved in the big river mainly by boats and the wind, causes small waves
Reflection is always visible, but refraction only when the sun was shining directly on the water
The refraction was yellow. Rocks in the water were brown/grey, the water itself green and the sky blue, so lots of colors
Also saw a lot of big(30cm) fish, they must be really mature now it's summer :)
Water in the smooth flowing areas did have waves near the sides, but they were bouncing away from those surfaces.
The completely still pond that the waterfowl was frolicking in had a ton of water plants in it as well.
Also went looking for those 'wet stuff is more contrast blog posts'. Found a white paper, and also the blogpost I remember skimming(you can tell I skimmed because I thought it was actually for beyond: two souls, and not remember me :D).
I think with clumping trees you'd ideally first generate some paths and then use trees to fill up the empty spots. Maybe leave one or two spots unfilled for clearings. This will ensure players will be able to navigate forests. You'd also want to make sure there's some areas of interest, such as the clearings, or particularly funny looking trees to make it easier to navigate.
I, a Krita developer, use zip files myself. I also add a little readme with what I did, credits and pre-rendered pngs to the zip.
For the anyone who is looking into it, ora(openraster) and kra files are both zip files with an xml inside. For previews, all that is needed is to extract the top-level mergedimage.png from either to display.
True, but I think having the base animations out there will help, the animation itself is often the biggest hurdle to people starting out with pixel art.
Gonna make some hairdos and clothes myself, of course ;)
Anyway, thanks! Hopefully people will make cool stuff with it!
Why not use the LPC graphics? They have a styleguide and thanks to the original contest there's tons of related resources on OGA. No matter what you go for in the end, it should at the least be sufficient for prototyping.
If you read around, it seems CC already has an 'no access control allowed' clause. Mostly known because it seems to disallow Apple's iOS drm.
Looking at it as a layperson, I wonder what the difference is between this license and CC-BY-SA? Outside of the 'no DRM' bit being more blatantly obvious?
You should tell people about the shiny new title-search system and feature row too :3
Anyway, really cool to see reports on the actual changes. It may seem awkward to make these posts, but for us end-users it is really nice to hear from you guys once in a while :)
In general, maybe it would be an idea for the mods in general to post a little update post once in a while. It wouldn't have to be anything complicated, from personal experience(as a Krita dev/community manager person), people generally appreciate updates as it's an indication work is being done. You could have something incredibly simple like "amount of spam cleaned this week", or "cool resources submitted this week, and here's why they're so useful". Or perhaps articles about what makes CC 4.0 different from 3.0 for the game designer. Or that you would like more people to report spam.
Hell, not every fix needs to be a deep lying architectural fix. Making the css a bit more responsive would be super useful already.
Right now, OGA has a bit of a 'lights on but noone's home'-vibe, which I don't think is fair to anyone, and having an update once a week, once a month, would really help to dispel that feeling.
Anyway, I hope this isn't too intense of a feedback, but communication when things are uncertain is really important. :(
Okay, I had some more ideas, but I notice I am having trouble concentrating(doing too much and too warm :D)
stream_v2_outlines_faded_center is a continuation on the blended stuff with the centers faded. The downside here is that these tiles are not possible if you're using rpgmaker mv, as the centers there work differently. It also now feels a lot deeper.
stream_v5 is with the water instead of expanding/contracting, it now undulates, going up, left, down, right, this would keep the surface level the same.
Stream_v5_undulate_inside only affects the inner outline, but not the actual water level, to make the water a little more subtle.
The latter two don't look very polished as I was running out of concentration.
MedicineStorm, yeah, it seems that fading out and in doesn't really give the feeling the water is moving, and thus you end up needing to animate the ridges. I have seen the brighter/darker color used in the rpgmaker 2k tiles.
Bluecarrot:
D'aww thanks. I just handed in my bachelor thesis this friday, so I have time to poke at stuff again :) Of course, my time will recede as I go back working on Krita. Too many things to do :)
I have been thinking that we should probably make the water tiles a seperate tileset. This would also work better for Godot, where animated tiles can't handle atlas textures(that is, animated tiles need to be on a seperated file that represents the tileset instead of one big tileset). Tiled's animation setup also ended up being a bit too much manual labour last time I used it, so maybe we'll need to modify that tool to also setup the animation for us :p
We have 2(3) options here:
Evert:
Yeah, proper water is basically 3 parts:
And all of this also depends on how fast the water will flow.
For the volume stuff, the isometric Dwarf Fortress visualizer StoneSense currently uses little semi-transparent blocks that are denser on the inside. Then when stacked over several layers it gives a foggy effect of deeper getting water. You can see an example at the bottom-right here. When searching for pictures that show the water, I also found these two examples by solifuge on the forums there. Example 1. Example 2.
Of course, isometric tiles behave quite differently from oblique tiles like the LPC graphics are, but it's worth considering.
Bluecarrot:
Evert:
I think you might want to look at the Valve flowmap paper from 2010, it uses a vector describing texture to distort the texture in a given direction. It's basically how all the big modern 3d video games handle water flow. I guess for a tile based system you'd want to have a per-tile. Here's another tutorial covering flowmaps for unity.
I guess I'll go and play with flow maps in Godot coming week. At the same time, we'll need to be careful that we won't make the water too dependant on advanced engine effects because it'll make live really hard on people who are new to game design, for example people who are messing about in rpgmaker or gamemaker.
I spend some time today actually going to the river and streams in my hometown and doing some observations there. To my surprise, we have fish ladders here, so I was able to look at rapid moving water here as well. Other observations:
Also went looking for those 'wet stuff is more contrast blog posts'. Found a white paper, and also the blogpost I remember skimming(you can tell I skimmed because I thought it was actually for beyond: two souls, and not remember me :D).
Will post some further experiments later.
Neat indeed!
I think with clumping trees you'd ideally first generate some paths and then use trees to fill up the empty spots. Maybe leave one or two spots unfilled for clearings. This will ensure players will be able to navigate forests. You'd also want to make sure there's some areas of interest, such as the clearings, or particularly funny looking trees to make it easier to navigate.
/me runs off to read devlogs.
I, a Krita developer, use zip files myself. I also add a little readme with what I did, credits and pre-rendered pngs to the zip.
For the anyone who is looking into it, ora(openraster) and kra files are both zip files with an xml inside. For previews, all that is needed is to extract the top-level mergedimage.png from either to display.
True, but I think having the base animations out there will help, the animation itself is often the biggest hurdle to people starting out with pixel art.
Gonna make some hairdos and clothes myself, of course ;)
Anyway, thanks! Hopefully people will make cool stuff with it!
Why not use the LPC graphics? They have a styleguide and thanks to the original contest there's tons of related resources on OGA. No matter what you go for in the end, it should at the least be sufficient for prototyping.
Thanks! I am happy to hear that!
If you read around, it seems CC already has an 'no access control allowed' clause. Mostly known because it seems to disallow Apple's iOS drm.
Looking at it as a layperson, I wonder what the difference is between this license and CC-BY-SA? Outside of the 'no DRM' bit being more blatantly obvious?
You should tell people about the shiny new title-search system and feature row too :3
Anyway, really cool to see reports on the actual changes. It may seem awkward to make these posts, but for us end-users it is really nice to hear from you guys once in a while :)
In general, maybe it would be an idea for the mods in general to post a little update post once in a while. It wouldn't have to be anything complicated, from personal experience(as a Krita dev/community manager person), people generally appreciate updates as it's an indication work is being done. You could have something incredibly simple like "amount of spam cleaned this week", or "cool resources submitted this week, and here's why they're so useful". Or perhaps articles about what makes CC 4.0 different from 3.0 for the game designer. Or that you would like more people to report spam.
Hell, not every fix needs to be a deep lying architectural fix. Making the css a bit more responsive would be super useful already.
Right now, OGA has a bit of a 'lights on but noone's home'-vibe, which I don't think is fair to anyone, and having an update once a week, once a month, would really help to dispel that feeling.
Anyway, I hope this isn't too intense of a feedback, but communication when things are uncertain is really important. :(
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