[Adonthell-artwork] Graphics questions

[James Nash]

Hi guys,

I've been browsing the wiki and docs because I'd like to get back  
into doing some game graphics.

Some of it looks a little out-of-date (I suppose updating and  
extending the documentation might be a good place for me to start)  
and since I've been mostly out of the loop for the past ...umm...  
years (sorry!) I have a few questions:

- Transparency and Translucency.
The docs (http://adonthell.berlios.de/doc/index.php/ 
Graphics:Conventions) begin by describing our old way of doing  
things: PNM gfx with magenta pixels that get rendered transparent by  
the engine and the additional option of setting a translucency (aka  
alpha) level for the whole image. However the top of the page says  
that images must be RGB or RGBA PNG (not PNM) images. Surely if we  
can have RGBA PNGs we have per-pixel alpha support so the old way of  
doing stuff is completely redundant. Is this assumption correct?

- Tiles
IIRC we were moving away from the tile-based engine and graphics  
could be any size we wanted. Is this the case? Are there any  
restrictions artists need to know about? (I mean engine restrictions  
here, not conventions like "doors in Adonthell must be at least X x Y  
pixels big")

- Map objects
I vaguely remember map objects could be composed of several PNG files  
and could have animated parts too. Is this correct or am I  
dreaming? :-P Any info detail on how these things work now would be  
great!

- The new pseudo-3D stuff
As far as I can tell from the 0.4 demo with NG, we now have the basic  
3D world with 2D graphics thing working. This raises lots of  
questions...

	- How do the 3D models of map objects work and how detailed are  
they? Are they basically cubes that define the bounding box of the  
object or something else?

	- When designing a map can objects intersect? Could I take a house  
and build it into the slope of a hill for example?

        - Again any details would be useful.


- Tools.
Has there been any discussion and/or work on tools to create map  
objects, maps, etc.? I know developing these kind of things is  
tedious (since it usually involves GUI programming) and sort of  
distracts from work on the actual game engine however Dun Barethsol  
is quite an ambitious project in terms of the amount of graphics and  
maps it will need so having a robust and (reasonably) easy-to-use  
tool chain will really help in the long run.


Regards,
                        - James

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