Is there any desire for a new LPC terrain repack?
Sunday, February 12, 2017 - 11:08
So, first of all, I love this community, and I'd like to try to find a way to give back to you guys for all the great work you do.
While I've been working with the LPC art and Tiled, I've been slowly repacking a lot of the various LPC terrain submissions into a new tileset with animations and terrain information built in (as a .TSX file). It's far from complete, but would ideally include any of the tileable tiles and various transitions between them, water animations, and maybe even the floor tiles (or any other tileable inside tiles). As I said, this is simply something I've been doing to make my life easier, but the question stands:
Is this something you guys would like to see?
I'm developing a game with the LPC set. My first try at procedurally generated terrain was... well, a long, frustrating waste of time, because I was trying to mix terrain types in photoshop and save them as a grass-to-water pack, a grass-to-sand pack, a sand-to-water pack. Then I'd try to use the pre-blended things in my game engine.
The thing is, LPC has two colors of grass, two sand colors, three dirts, three stones, lava, ice, snow, water... even if you only use one shade of each, the possible combinations really add up. Even if you make blended modes for all of that, you're still going to end up with three-way tiles, and the file sizes will start being ridiculous.
In the end, I did much better keeping the terrains as transparent .png files and layering them with code. That technique also ensured that I could mix and match the colors for unique, fun, varied biomes. (I have a description of how I did that on my blog-- it's not hard.)
Ideally, I'd like to see an in-depth LPC glossary / Wiki / Git / website thing showing the elements, their authors, licenses, and example usage of said elements (since sometimes I'll be going through my LPC packs and squinting at things going, "What's that? It's some kind of block. ... Why is it shaped like that? I have no idea."). It'd need to be thorough and very organized, with community help to get that going though.
I love the CC3-by-SA license, but tracking down who did what and what name / site to link them to can get tricky, and I'm always worried that I made a mistake somewhere.
One of the things that may make it simpler is that a lot of the LPC tiles (like dirt, grass, and sand) and meant to be used as an overlay, aren't they? There are obviously ones that have transitions from sand <-> water, for example, but those tiles don't exist for every combination.
I may get around to fixing that, but for now, I've got one set with all (?) the water variants, with animations :) It doesn't include transitions between the different water variations, since I have six variants so far, and that's 30 transitions, plus animations... That's a lot.
Are you talking about an updated Tile Atlas: http://opengameart.org/content/lpc-tile-atlas2?
That's always nice, but I would rather see tile presets -- i.e. combinations of two or more existing LPC assets in a coordinated set (maybe even a sample map/room?).
Sometimes all the options can be a bit overwhelming and it's helpful to see how others put the assets together. If nothing else, it gives you new ideas of how to uses them.
I'd be interested in seeing it!
Ha. You could make a game that's nothing but LPC showrooms, and the only game functions are room changes, room asset lists, and a select drag-and-drop that would bring up a list of all the assets in the selection field, download buttons, author names, links, contributor history, license info. :D
Might not even be that hard to make... :hums elevator music: