[b40] Simple tileset (beta)

[lukep]

This terrain tileset aims to be a clear and clutter-free as possible, while still distinguishing between any relevant differences. It uses ASCII for items and monsters.

This is currently in alpha, and is still missing some tiles.

Alpha 1 Screenshots: (sorry for not embedding), newer ones are in a later post.
Arena
Infinite Dungeon
Trollmire

Download link

[daftigod]

nice start luke! looking pretty smooth so far...

the only nitpick i have is the gradient fill at that angle makes the ground tiles look a little too distinct. you might be going for that grid look for tactical calculations while playing, so disregard if that's the case.

but a straight up/down or left/right gradient with less colors involved (no white, more like light brown to dark brown) would blend together a little easier. it would also remove the grid look, so if that's what you're going for ignore this!

good luck and if you have any questions feel free to ask!

[bricks]

I agree, the gradient is strange. I think the tiles need gridlines, and a more minor gradient within. The implied lines of the gradient alone seem too jarring.

[faustgeist]

Looking forward to trying it out... thanks for the work!

~R

[lukep]

I'm not satisfied with the way that the gradient looks for the floor tiles either.

I added the gradient in the middle of the tile to give items (and monsters?) with a similar/identical colour as the floor more visibility. It was very irritating to me to not be able to see bows (or quivers, shot pouches, slings, cloaks, wands, copper jewellery, etc.) in the crystal caves, and I wanted to avoid that issue as much as possible (though steel amulets on marble floor are still difficult to see).

If anyone has ideas on how to avoid that issue without resorting to complex patterns, it would be greatly appreciated.

I'm ambivalent about grid lines. I'm designing this to be as low-resolution-friendly as possible, so a tile on 16x16 mode scales one pixel to four (at 64x64, which I create the tiles at). This means that the grid lines would be thick at high resolution if they are to show up at all at low resolution. Again, if anyone has a good idea for including this, I'm all ears.

(PS, I tried out the simple tileset vs. Shockbolt at the minimum resolution of 10x10. Simple tileset was still playable, if you squinted enough and/or had a low resolution/large dot pitch screen. Shockbolt was outside of its intended range, and unplayable.)

Thanks for the feedback.

EDIT: I just discovered how to create/paste partially transparent layers in GIMP. Tile creation should be much faster now that I can add the floor gradient/wall fade to tiles as well as the wall/door etc. masks.

[lukep]

Version A2 is out:

- redid all tiles, they are now more consistent.
- Fixed slight error in the wall mask, it is even now.
- Changed the gradient effect to a checkerboard effect (5% white and 5% black)
- added all tiles needed for the worldmap (some should get more polish though, such as Dreadfell)
- shouldn't invalidate game anymore.

The northern ice still looks like water, the only way to fix that would be to change the grids.lua file in the wilderness folder, which I'm trying to avoid.

Screenshots:
Derth
Worldmap

Download:
http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/simple ... et-alpha-3

EDIT: more progress, look out for a new version, and the beta release coming soon.

EDIT 2: Alpha 3 out, recoloured sand, several fixes, several additions. Download link above.

[lukep]

Beta release! (More details through the link)

(mostly) finished the tiles in the "general" folder.

I'm having trouble with class:makeTrees as well as some tile definitions not being where I expected them to be (dungeon entrances), but other than that, it should be >95% complete.

EDIT: huh, apparently the overload I did of game.lua was unnecessary. It will be removed in the next version.

[daftigod]

Hey luke, nice progress!

One thing that makes everything a TON easier is to use shockbolt's tiles as a base. By that, I mean extract the .team file and navigate to the gfx/shockbolt folder. Everything will be named properly here, obviously. The tile naming scheme often conflicts with the actual terrain names as you've seen already. There are some 5,000+ individually named tiles and bouncing back and forth between the lua files and photoshop will drive you crazy after awhile! Also, there are many folders within the shockbolt directory (about 12 or so) for things like "slime" "cave" "sand" and whatnot. If your tile isn't in the right directory it won't show up in game.

/gfx/shockbolt/cave_entrance_closed01.png
cave_entrance_closed02.png
cave_entrance_open01.png
cave_entrance_open01.png

dungeon_entrance_open01.png
etc.

tree_alpha01.png
...
tree_alpha13.png

tree_dark_alpha01.png
etc.

/gfx/shockbolt/cave/cave_floor_1_01.png
etc.

All of these names would be pretty difficult to find digging through lua files, but by using shockbolt's properly named tiles as a base you can skip all of that work. As far as i can tell, everything was in the base gfx/shockbolt folder until about beta28. Then, he tried to start organizing things by using sub directories, which would be a very difficult job especially for all of the pre-existing tiles at this point. If too much stuff was re-organized it would have been a nightmare for DG to re-do all the map files, and also would have broken support for the few other sets that were available at the time (gervais and altefcat). So it looks like every tile after beta28 was organized with a proper sub directory

Hope this helps!

[daftigod]

It was very irritating to me to not be able to see bows (or quivers, shot pouches, slings, cloaks, wands, copper jewellery, etc.) in the crystal caves

If anyone has ideas on how to avoid that issue without resorting to complex patterns, it would be greatly appreciated.

Re-do all of the objects and don't use the same colors that you've used for the floor tiles. Seriously though, it's a matter of palettes. You need to take a look at shockbolt's object tiles and figure out which colors he hasn't used in them. Those colors are the one's you use on the floor.

I also had this problem when starting oldrpg. In the end, I decided that all terrain would be a 16x16 tile. All objects and players 32x32. All npc's 64x64. This leaves a little room for separation when your eyes look closer. Big block pixels in the back, medium sized pixels in the middle, small in teh front.

1 pixel dark borders around objects (and npcs) also helps to separate things (think a black outline). But I don't think you plan on redo-ing objects so that is probably not feasible. If you wanted to use ascii for objects, I guess I'd just ask DG to add an outline to the font!

I'm ambivalent about grid lines. I'm designing this to be as low-resolution-friendly as possible, so a tile on 16x16 mode scales one pixel to four (at 64x64, which I create the tiles at). This means that the grid lines would be thick at high resolution if they are to show up at all at low resolution. Again, if anyone has a good idea for including this, I'm all ears.

Try to stay away from grid patterns. Or at least drawing them within a box. Keep in mind that the edges of the tile are where one ends, and the next begins. If you have a straight line down on the first pixel, and a straight line down on the 16th pixel... you're going to end up with a bunch of 2 pixel-thick lines on your screen.

Instead, try to find ways to "blend" your tiles together. Think a brick pattern or something. Maybe waves or grass. 16x16 is the perfect resolution to experiment with this. Just use black and white at first, and try to design something that is literally going to "tile" next to itself well, on the top and bottom as well. Then create a blank 64x64 new picture and paste it next to each other. Hope this helps!

Offsetting can help with this too. Here are two offset box patterns. (And some DQ/oldrpg tiles for examples)

grid2.png (3.57 KiB) Viewed 3808 times

Tile creation should be much faster now that I can add the floor gradient/wall fade to tiles as well as the wall/door etc. masks.

You can also change the "opacity" of your paint brush and eraser (and many other tools) to achieve the same thing. Erasing something at 50% opacity will make it 50% transparent. If you're using GIMP, remember that layers might have to be merged before you can do this effectively. The background layer must be transparent and not white.

[lukep]

Beta 2 is out (Download)

This is very near 100% complete. I ran a character through the game, noting and fixing all missing/bad tiles.

Additions:
Town maps/grids, Shertul fortress, coffins/graves in graveyard, scintillating cave entrances/exits, swl/briagh/grushnash worldmap exit, swl/briagh/breeding pits stairs up, ruined dungeon lore/orbs, temporal rift entrance, Temporal rift stairs down/spider lair portal, Tannen's Tower exit, slimy pit sealed door, farportals, slime pit orb pedestals, portal to final bosses, invocation portals.

To Do:
-irkkk tiles*, glass wall tiles*, slime next level (?), Slime Doors, Tempest Peak door colour, ring of blood orb image, temporal rift next level background, slimy pit entrance colour, slimy pit sealed door alignment, Golem Graveyard entrance, Ruined Dungeon entrance
- Fix makeTrees
- Fix tiles being used for multiple things
- Fix off-size tiles

Daftigod: Thanks for all the advice. I had been checking shockbolt (and oldRPG) file names at the start, but since I'm not using the nicer_tiles option, about 80-90% of those tiles would not be used. I have 181 files in the terrain folder, which is nearly complete, while shockbolt has just over 1200 (eg. for "floating rocks", I have one file, shockbolt has 21).

Good ideas on visibility as well. Although I will probably stick with my current system, it's very good advice.