Here's the new thread for Clash of Cuivilizations Map Graphics and graphics art as a whole. To find previous discussions on this issue, go here:
http://www.apolyton.net/forums/Forum21/HTML/000188.html

As a brief update, I'll let you know that I'm currently playing around with new color palettes -the idea is to make them less bright- for the Map Graphics, with the hope of including a new and modfified palette for Demo 5. I will probably bring some new graphics as well, like new Forests and city icons. You can see some of my cities at my homepage and in my "Graphics Demo page": http://www.geocities.com/fiera_com/graphics.html

here are the replies to your comments on the previous thread:

quote: I guess it really depends on the unit. For human character units, i'd say go with bright colors for some things, but when using things made from metal or wood, only make the highlights bright.

Aha, sorry, I guess I didn't express myself clear when I said that the units should have bright colors. It's quite clear that the units can't be "just" bright, they need also dark parts, so I think the right concept it's to show the units with a great contrast, as opposed to the terrain graphics, which will have low contrast. That will make the terrain stay as background, and the units "come" to the foreground, which is my original idea.

quote: For ships, no (although highlights are good). They should still be moderate to contrast with both the shallow and deep sea areas. For modern units, it will depend on what they are. Planes I'd say bright/moderate and tanks and stuff. dark with highlights in moderate colors.

Well, I'd say that ships should be highlighted to be told apart from the sea too, but all those are things that need to be tested.

quote: Also something you may want to consider is putting differnt layers for some things so that say there is a forest, it might cover a little of the unit in the front part instead of it looking like the unit is more or less floating above the forest. Same thing with cities...its just a thought.

Yes, that's a very interesting idea indeed, but I'm afraid that the different scale between man figures and other objects such as buildings or trees would make things look a bit weird. Rather than hiding in a forest, it would look like the horde unit is walking through a bonsais garden, if you know what I mean.

Welcome to the Clash Project! Inundate away, we'll enjoy it

I've got some new graphics, if the people like it, this will probably mean even more work for you!

Well, the truth is that I've got some radically new stuff. After hours and hours of work, I found out that it was impossible to replace the old palette with a new one without totally modifying the look of the tiles. Thus, I made up a new set of terrain tiles, with the colors that I would like our Map Graphics to have (both the Mountains and Hills tiles are very much like the old ones, but softened and with new colors).

I am generally confident with the final result, however, if you don't like the new terrain, at least tell me if you think that the new colors are better. With those the units and other objects such as cities will always "come" to the foreground at the player's view.

Look at the new demo here:
www.geocities.com/fiera_com/demo.html

It's a large file, sorry if it takes too long to load. Furthermore, I think you need to view it with IE, for Netscape won't load bmp files (I think).

You can see Grassland, Plains, Forest, Hills, Mountains and Ocean there. I think you'll be able to tell which tile is each of them. I've also put some units with their PCs. I took the ship graphic from Bernd Brossing's units. It was the smallest of his units I could find, and yet it's probably too big for the PCs.

Please note that the blue PC is hard to tell from the Ocean square. I think that we should use bright colors for each civ (ie, red, yellow, orange, purple, etc).

For a quick comparison, you can see my previous demos, with the old terrain graphics, here:
www.geocities.com/fiera_com/graphics.html

Thanks for all the hard work you put into this! Although the new terrain demo clearly does make the units stand out better, I at least don't really like the overall impact. The very low contrast within the tiles gives me the impression for the flat land areas that the units are standing on a big pool table with the appropriate colored felt... kind of boring. Personally I like a lot better your units on the old terrain. And I think the contrast was plenty good already. I won't comment further at the moment because I would like to hear what the others think also.

I think the fur forest is cool, although again the contrast on it is a little too low for me. But I'd certainly like to see what a version of that one with the same contrast as the previous tiles looks like.

On the blue PCs having trouble on the water, I think it might work if we just put a black edging around the power circle (PC). I really don't want to tell players they can't be blue if that's their favorite color Anyways we can try something as a temporary fix and see how it works. We may find something better than the PCs that makes the issue unimportant.

Keep up the excellent art work!

Before it gets too far along, you might want to think about how roads and rivers should look.

quote: Fiera, you have a ringing endorsement to move forward...

Thanks, Mark, I think you'll end up liking this terrain graphics set if we are able to effectively improve it. Please note that I'm not yet 100% satisfied with it either. Furthermore, I think that the demo I managed to build doesn't necesarilly look as a real screenshot made with the separate Gif files for each terrain square would look like.

quote: The very low contrast within the tiles gives me the impression for the flat land areas that the units are standing on a big pool table with the appropriate colored felt... kind of boring.

I really think that we can blame my demo for producing that "pool table" effect. In fact, I must confess that I thought it looked slightly like a fitted carpet. But, as Richard, LGJ and you Mark have suggested, it would be easy to implement a softening or irregular effect, so I didn't bother too much about that. I may get some demos ready if you want anyway.

LGJ,

quote: I think you should do what Rich suggests as well as make the mountains bigger or hills smaller since the hills currently look larger than the mountains.

Yes, they do, don't they? Well, I've shrinked the Hills graphic a bit. You can take a look here for a comparison with the old Hills tile:
www.geocities.com/fiera_com/demo.html

Well, thanks everyone for your comments!

PS: Mark, before working on roads and rivers I'd like to know about how they're going to work. Are they both going to give the units extended movement as in Civ2? A weird thing in Civ2 is that rivers didn't link tiles from right to left and from up to down, just in diagonal. Is this going to happen also in Clash? (I hope my questions actually make sense).

Lets wait on rivers... there are many details involved in that choice (FE if a ship steams up a river and the rivers are between tiles, then what tile is it In?) I also need to look up the old posts on the subject so we don't reinvent the wheel, but I may not get the chance for a bit. We can look at the pros and cons when everyone has had a chance to speak, and then decide.

Roads are easier. In the current spec they go from the tile center (where a city would be) and radiate outward towards the center of all 8 adjacent tiles.

There is one thing I'd like to ask you to keep in mind, if possible. In our ecology model, there isn't a unique "forest" terrain. We would like to split the map into geography and vegetation, with different possible combinations, like hills with forest or rolling terrain with desert. Would it be possible to make vegetation something that gets put on top of a basic structure like a hill?

For more information, look in the Ecology Model Thread.

I've read the Ecology Thread. I take it that the Ecology system is not yet at a final stage, but if I'm not wrong, last posts showed a trend towards a simplifying of your Version 2 of the Ecology model, which I think it's a great work, but probably too complex.

It seems that there is an agreement to use a few terrain types and combine them with the appropriate vegetation types. That's a good idea and, to answer to your question, I think it can be easily done on the graphic side, at least for flat types (my Desert, Plains, Grassland and Forest tiles already adjust to this idea). For Hills and Mountains I could try to make similar differences using mainly different colors. I can give a try to this if you agree.

If there's something I've missed about how you planned to implement your Ecology model on the game map, please tell me so. I want to fully understand your model before we speak about making any modifications to it.

But for the record, I'd like to say that I don't mind working on, say, 25 terrain tiles instead of 10, if that makes the game better.

Have one graphic each for:
1. completely forested tile
2. a 'copse' of trees (like 3 toghether)
3. a single tree

Having these three type you can go down gracefully from completely forested (1), to mostly forested (array of 2, missing one copse), to partly forested, to barely at all (one of #3).

I've implemented the deforestation idea as Mark explained it over some grassland tiles. I've put there three types of deforested squares, I think you'll easily distinquish them. I like very much the result, in fact I think we may have "accidentally" found a suitable solution to the excessive flatness of my terrain graphics.

Take a look at it here, and tell me how you like it:
www.geocities.com/fiera_com/demo.html

This may be much more difficult to do for Hills and Mountains. At least, I haven't yet been able to make anything that looked even slightly good.

I have some ideas for roads too. Will discuss them later, for I've gotta go to bed now.

It looks like this would also work on the plains and desert as well. The fir trees might look a little funny on those tiles, but other types of tree would do great. Could you try this with other plants, like a deciduous tree, a jungle tree, and some kind of desert vegetation? Could you make a taiga/arctic tile in addition to the existing ones? Also, we will eventually need a wetlands graphic, and some wetlands vegetation that works like those trees.

quote: Originally posted by Richard Bruns on 04-14-2001 09:06 AM We can also show a road cut through the terrain by remiving a swatch of trees where the road is.

Yes, I already had had that idea, but if we plan to have roads for all 8 directions in which units can move, that's gonna be very difficult to make. I may try to do it but I can't grant that the result won't be messy.

The new stuff looks good!

On roads being in all 8 directions... Roads Can be in all 8 directions, but for most squares Won't. It won't be like civ where you push 'r' and all possible roads in a square are automatically built. Players will draw the roads they want (or the AI could do it) and only what they want will be built and show up in the graphics. Only a major city would have more than a few major roads going into it. Minor local roads wouldn't be shown. Most squares will just have one major road running through in some direction.

Richard,

I am, of course, no ecology expert, but I was thinking that the fir trees would probably go better with Hills or Mountains rather than with Grassland. I'll probably use deciduous trees for Grassland.

I'll give you a list of terrain types here:

* Terrain: Basin, Flat, Rolling, Hills, Mountainous
* Climate: Arctic, Sub-Arctic, Cold Temperate, Warm Temperate, Sub-Tropical, Tropical; Ice Cap, Ocean, Sea, Lake
* Vegetation: Wasteland, Desert, Low Cover, High Cover, Light Fores, Forest, Climax Forest

You would need different vegetation graphics only for old (conifer), temperate (decidous), hot (tropical) areas and the water vegetation, although this will most likely only be a few little, green, floating, things.
Do you know Transport Tycoon? Your latest tiles actually reminded me of that game, and there were also three sets of different trees. By the way those graphics are already very good. They look very tangible, in contrast to CivII, where the empires were founded on a moulded pancake . CivI looked better: the terrain was like a spunge that had teeth (mountains).

Can you do something like the three forest tiles with desert-low cover-high cover?

I'm sorry, I've been a bit busy lately, but I've managed to put together a deciduous trees demo. They're over a Plains tile, but I can put them over Grassland or whatever you need, as I've made them as separate layers...

I will work on roads now, and then also on rivers now that I know that they'll be in-square...

You can take a look at the demo here:
http://www.geocities.com/fiera_com/demo.html

Simon,

hi, and thanks for your comments!

I started working on these trees before reading your post, however, I think that they might fit in your model.

The new trees look a little too "pointy". I'm sure that's because of only having a few pixels at the edge to deal with... but getting the trees perfect is a lot lower priority than roads and rivers etc.

Hmmm, with a 40x80 tile, each of the smaller tiles would have to be 8x16 pixels. Fiera, Can you draw a house icon that small?

Or to get really radical, each square could have multiple terrain types. The square could have 8 mini-squares of desert and 17 of plains This would turn a square into an ecological province, for all practical purposes. So we can use all the old ecological province plans that relied on a big batch of squares with fixed borders. Each pro