I've been away without internet, but I wanted to share a quick prototype I created to demonstrate the idea of having more flow in the middle, and an in/out pattern on the edges. All I did was choose some random chunks of Zabin/zookeeper's water https://opengameart.org/content/the-battle-for-wesnoth-water-animation and move each frame of the animation a few pixels at a time. No attempt was made to allow the animations to actually tile together, although I masked out the boundary of each tile so that waves don't move directly from one tile into an adjacent tile. You can see the grid a bit, especially on the south- and east-flowing parts (where there is only one tile), but I think the effect is pretty good on the diagonal-flowing parts (where I made two tiles). It could probably be improved a lot more. Here are two versions, one where there is extra masking around the shores.
(Also sorry for the terrible image quality; I had trouble finding a free program that would let me capture Tiled maps as GIFs without doing awful compression or ruining the framerate).
I pretty much completely agree with MedicineStorm: I like the expand/contract better than the undulating, and I don't think the "conservation of mass" issue is a big deal, especially for large bodies of water (think an ocean or lake, or even a pond). There are lots of convenient fictions in this art style (the orthographic projection, single overhead light source, etc), and like Sharm said, it's stylized---not photorealistic. I think for the most part the subtler animations are better, but the effect is almost too subtle in MedicineStorm's second image IMO. I definitely like the variants where the center is faded. Might be interesting to combine this with the blended "Circling flickers" refraction effect. I like Sharm's suggestion to have some "shine against the shadows;" I think she was talking about an effect like this https://i.pinimg.com/originals/74/80/14/748014438881f95ad487d7f2cfe65160... where there is some very light color right against the shore, then a darker color, then the medium color in the middle. Reflection is interesting too, although seems like it could be a lot of work.
I still don't really like the "flow" animations where the edges are animated. I think a better way to represent flow will be an an expand/contract or shimmering animation on the sides and a more dramatic flowing effect in the middle tiles. I'll try and put together an example at some point and see how it looks.
A few other comments about the presentation: it might be helpful to draw some simple scenes; especially for the flow. It's hard for me to visualize flowing around the abstract wang pattern, especially when there's no real source of the water and it's just flowing in and out of a shore. Also, I'm personally not the biggest fan of the river pebble texture you have in most of the examples; it might be helpful to try the pattern/overlay on some other textures, like the sand or the dirt.
I realize this message sounds kind of negative, but I am really excited about the work you are doing! Keep it up; I'm just trying to be constructive!
Excellent work! You've done a great job improving on your previous set. I really love seeing these types of submissions where you can see the artist grow. (I'm revisiting some of my own older submissions now as well, and it's sometimes painful!)
A few things I really like: careful palette work and shading increased the contrast across the board; makes everything look like it has a bit more depth, and also makes many parts of the scene much easier to visually parse (edges of the roof, boundaries between trees/bushes and grass). Windows and the little red awnings add lots of personality to the building, and the bricks look great. Animation of the water wheel and windmill are very smooth and clean.
On the other hand, I am not a big fan of the dithering in otherwise solid-color spaces (like the walls of the building, the stone tiles, the sand, etc. Unless you're working in color palette restrictions such that the specific tones you're looking for are unavailable, why not just choose a tone to fill that area that matches your desired color? I also think the perspective on the conifer tree looks wrong---it looks very flat to me, in contrast to the otherwise orthographic perspective.
Otherwise, really nice work! Can't wait to see what you do next!
I think it works ok for a first pass. A few issues I couldn't figure out how to address with this strategy:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
I like your "stream v3 anim" best, or v2 for standing/non-flowing water. Maybe it's just because of the pebble background, but I feel like the v4 blended version is a little visually confusing. The larger size of the moving wave blobs makes it seem more apparent (to me) that the little waves are coming out of nowhere.
One thing I had considered to handle movement was to have looping animated versions of the current water "accent tiles" in 4-8 different directions, to be scattered around in the middle (non-edge) of the water. These could represent little waves or eddies (as if there were a rock or other disturbance under the surface, creating turbulence). These animated tiles wouldn't connect to one another, but the overall effect would hopefully suggest movement. The effect might be enhanced if there were a few rocks with animated eddies around them. Then the shores could be animated separately and just move in and out (like in Zabin's waves here https://opengameart.org/content/animated-ocean-tileset or in Curt's). This is sort of how rivers look anyway; the water moves fastest in the middle and slowest at the shores/edges. In your current examples, the opposite is indicated---all the motion is at the shore/edges, and the middle stands still. Maybe this is why it looks a little strange.
Anyway, great stuff! Hope we can some up with something.
There are some examples in the Source of Tales map, starting about half-way up: http://www.sourceoftales.org/talesworld/ . I'm hoping to make an example map at some point which shows all the tiles in use.
They should! Although I admit they are kinda confusing... Which tiles are you having trouble with specifically (can you post an image showing which ones)? Have you looked at the example map in tiled.zip from the original submission?
Wow, this is really neat you guys!! pvigier, I enjoyed reading your dev diaries and I can't wait to see where this goes.
I agree with Sharm that the trees look better when clumped. Even if all the trees are the same, like in Evert's example, it looks a little more natural. This also reminds me I would like to revisit my trees repack, because some of the trees are really stylistically just way too different. I started tweaking Skorpio's tree (the one in Evert's example) a while ago to make it look more like Sharm's tree from the base assets, but never got back to it.
Great work with the cliffs, Evert. I feel your pain... even putting together the mountains set, I realized how many combinations there are and how kind of non-intuitive it is. I'm not sure how to make it simpler though without drastically changing the art style. East/west/north waterfalls shouldn't be too hard to hack together from the terrain and mountain tiles, since most of the waterfall itself will be obscured by the cliff.
Both examples remind me is that we could use some more filler/variant types for the ground. The simple, flat terrain shapes of the LPC base assets are excellent when there's enough other visual interest in the scene---they are easy to parse and they let other things pop. But when they're just in a big open space by themselves, they look really barren and repetitive. I've been working on a "grassland" or "savanna" set for a while that operates on the same principle as the bricks---to be overlayed on top of the terrain tiles on a separate layer; you can see a few diferent ideas for that in the example I attached (uses tiles from Sharm, Hyptosis, Jetrel, Daniel Cook, and Zabin). Maybe something like that could be incorporated as a "sub-biome," or mapped to an intermediate level of the elevation profile in pviger's example.
Finally, tou guys should also hook up with macmanmatty; he's interested in procedurally generating trees, and had me draw some leaves to be assembled into trees and stuck on different trunks. The results turned out better than I expected (see the apple/peach/walnut/oak and maple examples), although I'm not sure they'll ultimately really look consistent with the LPC style, since those trees don't show every single leaf.
Anyway, didn't mean to hijack your threat and turn it into my own personal WIP showcase :p I'll be watching to see how things develop!
MedicineStorm is correct; this is addressed on the site FAQ as well https://opengameart.org/content/faq#q-proprietary .
Hello,
I've been away without internet, but I wanted to share a quick prototype I created to demonstrate the idea of having more flow in the middle, and an in/out pattern on the edges. All I did was choose some random chunks of Zabin/zookeeper's water https://opengameart.org/content/the-battle-for-wesnoth-water-animation and move each frame of the animation a few pixels at a time. No attempt was made to allow the animations to actually tile together, although I masked out the boundary of each tile so that waves don't move directly from one tile into an adjacent tile. You can see the grid a bit, especially on the south- and east-flowing parts (where there is only one tile), but I think the effect is pretty good on the diagonal-flowing parts (where I made two tiles). It could probably be improved a lot more. Here are two versions, one where there is extra masking around the shores.
(Also sorry for the terrible image quality; I had trouble finding a free program that would let me capture Tiled maps as GIFs without doing awful compression or ruining the framerate).
I pretty much completely agree with MedicineStorm: I like the expand/contract better than the undulating, and I don't think the "conservation of mass" issue is a big deal, especially for large bodies of water (think an ocean or lake, or even a pond). There are lots of convenient fictions in this art style (the orthographic projection, single overhead light source, etc), and like Sharm said, it's stylized---not photorealistic. I think for the most part the subtler animations are better, but the effect is almost too subtle in MedicineStorm's second image IMO. I definitely like the variants where the center is faded. Might be interesting to combine this with the blended "Circling flickers" refraction effect. I like Sharm's suggestion to have some "shine against the shadows;" I think she was talking about an effect like this https://i.pinimg.com/originals/74/80/14/748014438881f95ad487d7f2cfe65160... where there is some very light color right against the shore, then a darker color, then the medium color in the middle. Reflection is interesting too, although seems like it could be a lot of work.
I still don't really like the "flow" animations where the edges are animated. I think a better way to represent flow will be an an expand/contract or shimmering animation on the sides and a more dramatic flowing effect in the middle tiles. I'll try and put together an example at some point and see how it looks.
A few other comments about the presentation: it might be helpful to draw some simple scenes; especially for the flow. It's hard for me to visualize flowing around the abstract wang pattern, especially when there's no real source of the water and it's just flowing in and out of a shore. Also, I'm personally not the biggest fan of the river pebble texture you have in most of the examples; it might be helpful to try the pattern/overlay on some other textures, like the sand or the dirt.
I realize this message sounds kind of negative, but I am really excited about the work you are doing! Keep it up; I'm just trying to be constructive!
Excellent work! You've done a great job improving on your previous set. I really love seeing these types of submissions where you can see the artist grow. (I'm revisiting some of my own older submissions now as well, and it's sometimes painful!)
A few things I really like: careful palette work and shading increased the contrast across the board; makes everything look like it has a bit more depth, and also makes many parts of the scene much easier to visually parse (edges of the roof, boundaries between trees/bushes and grass). Windows and the little red awnings add lots of personality to the building, and the bricks look great. Animation of the water wheel and windmill are very smooth and clean.
On the other hand, I am not a big fan of the dithering in otherwise solid-color spaces (like the walls of the building, the stone tiles, the sand, etc. Unless you're working in color palette restrictions such that the specific tones you're looking for are unavailable, why not just choose a tone to fill that area that matches your desired color? I also think the perspective on the conifer tree looks wrong---it looks very flat to me, in contrast to the otherwise orthographic perspective.
Otherwise, really nice work! Can't wait to see what you do next!
Very neat work, and glad to see you back! You always make very thoughtful and thorough contributions.
I experimented a while ago with adapting Zabin/zookeeper's water here https://opengameart.org/content/the-battle-for-wesnoth-water-animation to LPC style. I reduced the color count in GIMP, recolored to the LPC palette, and made a Tiled tsx file with the animation and the individual tiles joined by Wang tiling. Then I took my terrain map and made the neutral blue transparent. I made a new layer underneath the "terrain" layer for water, and filled using the Wang tile fill tool in Tiled. See example here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/na1pdfh9nc257nb/AAA9jsIt7CdKboNGLn6kccGLa?dl=0
I think it works ok for a first pass. A few issues I couldn't figure out how to address with this strategy:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
I like your "stream v3 anim" best, or v2 for standing/non-flowing water. Maybe it's just because of the pebble background, but I feel like the v4 blended version is a little visually confusing. The larger size of the moving wave blobs makes it seem more apparent (to me) that the little waves are coming out of nowhere.
One thing I had considered to handle movement was to have looping animated versions of the current water "accent tiles" in 4-8 different directions, to be scattered around in the middle (non-edge) of the water. These could represent little waves or eddies (as if there were a rock or other disturbance under the surface, creating turbulence). These animated tiles wouldn't connect to one another, but the overall effect would hopefully suggest movement. The effect might be enhanced if there were a few rocks with animated eddies around them. Then the shores could be animated separately and just move in and out (like in Zabin's waves here https://opengameart.org/content/animated-ocean-tileset or in Curt's). This is sort of how rivers look anyway; the water moves fastest in the middle and slowest at the shores/edges. In your current examples, the opposite is indicated---all the motion is at the shore/edges, and the middle stands still. Maybe this is why it looks a little strange.
Anyway, great stuff! Hope we can some up with something.
My summer thing is food, so here is a lot of food: https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-food
There are some examples in the Source of Tales map, starting about half-way up: http://www.sourceoftales.org/talesworld/ . I'm hoping to make an example map at some point which shows all the tiles in use.
Evert is right; 4 and 5 are for the same purpose (for ramps leading to the top).
1 is for transitioning from the top of the cliff to another terrain.
I admit 2 is not really very useful, because there is a tile missing with the bottom- and top-edge of a cliff in the same tile.
I'll try to post an example later, but hopefully this gives you an idea.
They should! Although I admit they are kinda confusing... Which tiles are you having trouble with specifically (can you post an image showing which ones)? Have you looked at the example map in tiled.zip from the original submission?
Wow, this is really neat you guys!! pvigier, I enjoyed reading your dev diaries and I can't wait to see where this goes.
I agree with Sharm that the trees look better when clumped. Even if all the trees are the same, like in Evert's example, it looks a little more natural. This also reminds me I would like to revisit my trees repack, because some of the trees are really stylistically just way too different. I started tweaking Skorpio's tree (the one in Evert's example) a while ago to make it look more like Sharm's tree from the base assets, but never got back to it.
Great work with the cliffs, Evert. I feel your pain... even putting together the mountains set, I realized how many combinations there are and how kind of non-intuitive it is. I'm not sure how to make it simpler though without drastically changing the art style. East/west/north waterfalls shouldn't be too hard to hack together from the terrain and mountain tiles, since most of the waterfall itself will be obscured by the cliff.
Both examples remind me is that we could use some more filler/variant types for the ground. The simple, flat terrain shapes of the LPC base assets are excellent when there's enough other visual interest in the scene---they are easy to parse and they let other things pop. But when they're just in a big open space by themselves, they look really barren and repetitive. I've been working on a "grassland" or "savanna" set for a while that operates on the same principle as the bricks---to be overlayed on top of the terrain tiles on a separate layer; you can see a few diferent ideas for that in the example I attached (uses tiles from Sharm, Hyptosis, Jetrel, Daniel Cook, and Zabin). Maybe something like that could be incorporated as a "sub-biome," or mapped to an intermediate level of the elevation profile in pviger's example.
Finally, tou guys should also hook up with macmanmatty; he's interested in procedurally generating trees, and had me draw some leaves to be assembled into trees and stuck on different trunks. The results turned out better than I expected (see the apple/peach/walnut/oak and maple examples), although I'm not sure they'll ultimately really look consistent with the LPC style, since those trees don't show every single leaf.
Anyway, didn't mean to hijack your threat and turn it into my own personal WIP showcase :p I'll be watching to see how things develop!
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