[Adonthell-artwork] More gfx conventions

[Kai Sterker]

Today I wanted to continue preparing gfx for the Waste's Edge map, but
I am still not entirely happy with how everything lines up. I am
perfectly happy with floor tiles now (128x96 for your standard floor
tile or possibly a multiple thereof). But I am getting concerned about
wall tiles. If you look closely at the present WE map, I've assembled
the walls without use of corner tiles. So the look is a little rough,
where vertical meet horizontal wall pieces.

So here is a suggestion (see attached image). Naturally, I got the
proportions wrong, but assume for a moment those squares are 64x48
instead of square.

What I propose is the following:

* Walls are not lined up with floor tiles, but overlap the border of 2
floor tiles instead.
* With 4 corner tiles, 4 T pieces, one X and (not present) a vertical
and horizontal piece, we have all the pieces we need to tile wall
pieces in any way we want.

The net result is that those wall pieces will not fit nicely into the
64x48 floor grid, but they will still tile nicely with each other and
match the floor too.

I do propose a wall width of 10px (needs to be an even number). It's
debatable, if vertical wall would have to be thicker than horizontal
walls to match the proportion again, but not sure if it really matters
with those small sizes. The idea is to make walls wide enough, so that
we can indicate where there is a doorway in vertical walls, as the
perspective does not allow to show that directly.

Tile sizes would be as follows (assuming 10px wall width):

Corners: 69x53
T - Pieces 128x53 and 69x48
X - Piece 128x96
| - Piece 10x96
_ - Piece 128x10

One can see that 2 corner tiles and any number of other tiles in
between will always fit to 128x96 ground tiles.

Of course, in total we will need more than 11 tiles for each wall set,
as we'll have doorways, windows and other stuff that might require
additional tiles. But if they adhere to the standard size, they'll fit
in just fine.

Comments so far?

The biggest downside I see is that the auto-grid stuff in mapedit
would no longer work for placing walls. I guess I might have to come
up with a method of handling those conveniently, but for now it either
means manual placement or at least manual adjustment of the grid.


Now, here's something more to think about: wall height. Currently, the
walls in the WE map have a height of 128px (about 2,5m), which poses a
big problem: characters vanish behind those walls and need to move
quite a bit away from it to become visible. If you look at games with
similar perspective, you'd often find, that wall and character height
matched pretty well, so that at least the top of a character's head
would be visible when close to a wall. In v0.3, we got around this by
making the front walls transparent, but this is no easy option in
v0.4, as it would have to happen dynamically. So for a start, should
we make walls a bit less tall? 100px should still be fine (~ 2.0m) and
would leave room for doorways too.

Any comments or ideas regarding that?


Ideally, I'd like every wall set to follow these (or whatever better)
conventions. Sure, the engine allows to freely place stuff everywhere
on the map, but I guess there is some limit to this if we want to come
up with reusable gfx. And we still can place furnishings and generic
clutter freely inside our standard-sized rooms :-).

Kai

corner-tiles.png
Description: PNG image