Since I've started down this road of doing up the background tiles, I thought I'd move on, and have a go at redoing the sand tiles. Before I start, This experience has taught me something I ought to share with you all. I don't consider myself at all artistic, and have never done anything before more than look through the menus of the GIMP. One of the nicest things about working on an open source project is that it gives you the chance to do something completely off-the-wall that you've never done before. With a little perseverance and some constructive criticism, you can bootstrap a decent understanding of a topic, and I would recommend anyone reading this that's said to themselves "I'd love to help with Globulation 2, but I don't have <whatever skill>" to stop making excuses and start using our community as the teaching tool that we are.
Anyway, I've been thinking about the texture that tiles have. As Stephane previously mentioned, water was changed long ago. As I understand it, one huge tile is used for a plane of water instead of 32x32 tiles. I love the effect of the water - it gives a feeling of an ocean with calm waves. On the other hand, the new grass tiles are based on random noise, where every pixel has a slightly different hue, unrelated to its neighbours. Again, this seems very appropriate to me, because that's what grass is like - every blade slightly different. However, neither of these approaches is really applicable to sand, which is made up of rather grainier pebbles. After playing around some more with different effects, here's the method I settled on: 1) Create a new 672x672 image (again, the size is important) 2) Fill it with yellow. This colour will be the basic colour of your sand, so choose it carefully. 3) Filters->Distorts->Mosaic. You should play around with the settings, but I've found it's best to have a low neatness and a tile size of 16. 4) If you look carefully, the mosaic tool messes up the right and bottom edges of the screen, with a white or black line and some shading by it. I don't know why it does this, but rather than fix it, shrink the canvas size down to 640x480 with an offset of 0, so as to remove the corrupt sections. 5) Scale the image down to 128x128 pixels. This obscures the mosaic nature of the image, and leaves you with just a nice gritty patch of yellow. 6) Cut the image up as before. Well, not quite as before - I've managed to make a slightly less ugly version of my scripts from before: (define (my-copy-square x y from base) (gimp-rect-select from (* x 32) (* y 32) 32 32 2 0 0) (gimp-edit-copy (car (gimp-image-get-active-drawable from))) (let* ((image (car (gimp-image-new 32 32 RGB))) (layer (car (gimp-layer-new image 32 32 RGB-IMAGE "foobar" 100 NORMAL-MODE))) (filename (string-append "terrain" (string-append (number->string (+ base (+ x (* 4 y)))) ".png")))) (gimp-image-add-layer image layer 0) (gimp-display-new image) (gimp-rect-select image 0 0 32 32 0 0 0) (gimp-edit-paste (car (gimp-image-get-active-drawable image)) 0) (gimp-image-flatten image) (file-png-save 1 image (car (gimp-image-get-active-drawable image)) filename filename 0 9 0 0 0 1 1) (gimp-display-delete image) )) (define (my-copy-row y from base) (my-copy-square 0 y from base) (my-copy-square 1 y from base) (my-copy-square 2 y from base) (my-copy-square 3 y from base) ) (define (my-copy-all from base) (gimp-image-undo-disable from) (my-copy-row 0 from base) (my-copy-row 1 from base) (my-copy-row 2 from base) (my-copy-row 3 from base) (gimp-selection-none from) (gimp-image-undo-enable from) ) (my-copy-all (aref (car (cdr (gimp-image-list))) 0) 128) This script should work so long as you only have one image open, even if that image isn't the first one opened in this session. Note that the last line starts terrain numbers from 128 instead of 0, as sand terrain tiles start at 128. 7) Again, copy these images into ~/.glob2/data/gfx and play. Using this method, I've created some sand tiles: http://www.globulation2.org/sand1.tar (make sure to use the new grass tiles I mentioned in my previous post too). Personally, I'm undecided about these tiles. They give a real impression of a pebbly beach to me, but I'm not sure whether the yellow is too much. The transitions between sand and water/grass now look very silly - they'll be the hardest thing, so I'm leaving them until I'm happy with the two on their own. Stephane: the sand/water transition is currently done with the sand becoming transparent with water underneath. Is it possible to do the same with sand/grass? Also, do you know whether Glob2 can support partial transparency yet? - Andrew _______________________________________________ glob2-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/glob2-devel
