Jet's terrain thread

#21

So… what do these pipes feed in to? :smiley:

(It’s OK if it’s ‘nothing’, it looks awesome and goes with the world design/feel. Especially if they feed into nothing (visible).)

#22

That looks awesome!

#23

Alternate palette to be used in the forest “graveyard” area.

#24

NOICE!

#25

[quote=“RyanReilly, post:24, topic:94”]NOICE![/quote] ;D

Another one, with a counter-example of Doing It Wrong?. When you do these things, you need to mix in lots of other nuanced colors into the color ramp, or you get a boring, drab monochrome. The following two images are nearly the same, but because one mixes a bunch of contrasting color-opposites into the color ramp, it’s a lot more interesting to look at.

#26

A rotten, sickly palette (which will get combined with mushrooms for the levels that comprise the heart of the fungal infestation), and a lighter, airy palette.

#27

How would we interchange these in the game? The color schemes we have there look great!

#28

They’ll be used for different areas. It’ll be both decorative, and informative of where you are.

#29

We’re adding a bunch of levels, and a bunch of story to the forest. There are going to be several separate non-linear sections of the forest. I’m going to describe them here, because they could probably use music:

  • forest graveyard: there will be some ghostly enemies, but it’s not the usual cliched “strong evil” place. Sort of a sacred ground where forest creatures, some good, some bad, are put to rest. You travel to the forest to find the witch who lives in it, and she gives you the poisonous potion to kill off the mother mushroom.

  • autumn forest: haven’t really decided what the character of this is going to be. There will be a forest village in the autumn section, but the section will be much bigger than the village (besides, you’ve made a good forest-town song).

  • decaying forest: a plague of malevolent mushrooms have infested the forest, and the whole forest is starting to rot, outwards, from their epicenter. The hardest-hit parts have this palette and are starting to get really nasty. This is the strong-evil place; the mushrooms here have nothing to do with milgram; and in fact they’re not communicably sentient with the forest creatures, or frogatto. I’m using them as a pure-hostile/evil antagonist. There is a mother-mushroom in the center of this, and the worst thing about her is that although you can beat her, repeatedly, she’ll just keep regenerating over and over, until you poison her roots (there will probably be a strong-initial form of the boss, and a less annoying “reborn” version).

  • clean/light forest: Haven’t really decided what the character of this is going to be. Probably will use this as an unrelated side quest you can do to unlock some major powerup. Might put a temple in it (where you can get that powerup). I would use “TheWomb.ogg” inside the temple, but I’m not sure what I’d use outside. May have some significant waterfalls and/or underwater areas in the temple.

#30

[quote=“Jetrel, post:29, topic:94”][quote author=RyanReilly link=topic=74.msg632#msg632 date=1287633890]
How would we interchange these in the game? The color schemes we have there look great!
[/quote]

We’re adding a bunch of levels, and a bunch of story to the forest. There are going to be several separate non-linear sections of the forest. I’m going to describe them here, because they could probably use music:

  • forest graveyard: there will be some ghostly enemies, but it’s not the usual cliched “strong evil” place. Sort of a sacred ground where forest creatures, some good, some bad, are put to rest. You travel to the forest to find the witch who lives in it, and she gives you the poisonous potion to kill off the mother mushroom.

  • autumn forest: haven’t really decided what the character of this is going to be. There will be a forest village in the autumn section, but the section will be much bigger than the village (besides, you’ve made a good forest-town song).

  • decaying forest: a plague of malevolent mushrooms have infested the forest, and the whole forest is starting to rot, outwards, from their epicenter. The hardest-hit parts have this palette and are starting to get really nasty. This is the strong-evil place; the mushrooms here have nothing to do with milgram; and in fact they’re not communicably sentient with the forest creatures, or frogatto. I’m using them as a pure-hostile/evil antagonist. There is a mother-mushroom in the center of this, and the worst thing about her is that although you can beat her, repeatedly, she’ll just keep regenerating over and over, until you poison her roots (there will probably be a strong-initial form of the boss, and a less annoying “reborn” version).

  • clean/light forest: Haven’t really decided what the character of this is going to be. Probably will use this as an unrelated side quest you can do to unlock some major powerup. Might put a temple in it (where you can get that powerup). I would use “TheWomb.ogg” inside the temple, but I’m not sure what I’d use outside. May have some significant waterfalls and/or underwater areas in the temple.[/quote]

Sounds really, really, really good :smiley:

#31

Getting this working was altogether way too complicated. :-\ Nevertheless, it’s done, it’s functional, and it’ll allow a major new kind of level-design - one where you have pools of water that actually have holes in the bottom - out of which come our waterfalls. The pools have a strong current in them that pulls you down toward the mouth of the waterfall. And then the waterfall itself pushes you even harder.

#32

… I LOVE YOU

#33

That is so cool. SO COOL.

…Wait, why’s there white mist at the bottom of what appears to be a lake?..

#34

;D I’m glad you like it. I’m a big fan of waterfalls in games; this just took a while because making different parts mesh together correctly was involved.

[quote=“Zerovirus, post:33, topic:94”]That is so cool. SO COOL.

…Wait, why’s there white mist at the bottom of what appears to be a lake?..[/quote]

It’s a pool in a cupped area of a cliff, which happens to have a hole in the bottom. When water falls into air in a large volume, it almost immediately breaks into a fine mist; this is why rapids, for example, are white.

#35

I totally got the idea of the mist. I think it adds an awesome texture to the backgrounds. It’s all about the organic-ness!

#36

Not sure if this is the right place, but a ‘terrain thread’ seemed like a good place to discuss Terrain News #14.
I’m not sure why it’s “impossible” to do non-blocky terrain with a fixed-size tileset.
All you need to do is make some piecemeal blocks of terrain which do not entirely fill the 16x16 set of pixels.

See the attached bitmap.
(White -> air; Green -> terrain)
((Rotations and other variations not shown.))

#37

[quote=“AileTheAlien, post:36, topic:94”]Not sure if this is the right place, but a ‘terrain thread’ seemed like a good place to discuss Terrain News #14.
I’m not sure why it’s “impossible” to do non-blocky terrain with a fixed-size tileset.
All you need to do is make some piecemeal blocks of terrain which do not entirely fill the 16x16 set of pixels.[/quote]

This is absolutely correct.

What you can’t have, though, is features which are bigger than one tile. Every tile in a fixed-size tileset must have (nearly) identical borders. This becomes a gridding problem, because if you’ve got a fixed-size (say, 16px) tileset, no matter what you do, you’re going to have the same pattern every 16 pixels. Variants don’t fix this because variants deal with the interior of a tile, not the edges; variants can do everything on the inside differently, but they have to have the same edges so they still tile.

(Technically, it’s not that the pixels at the edge of the tile have to be the same as the other tiles, so much as that surface edges in one tile have to correctly connect with their neighbors, so there’s a little room for wizardry, but no matter how you slice it, you’re limited to a maximum size of features that get drawn. (in terms of signal analysis, your highest wavelength is always going to be one tile wide.))

The only way to have bigger features in your tiles … is to draw a few things that are made out of “bigger than one tile” arrangements, and that aren’t expected to tile nicely with the regular tileset. Even if it’s just made of smaller fixed-size tiles, if it can’t “legally” get placed without being connected to the rest of its set, it’s functionally just a bigger tile. I’ve attached an example from cave story. In it, you can see 2 cases of oversized tiles; the ground under the character, and the big brown block next to him. Yes, they’re made of 16-by-16 parts, but seriously? They’re just 32x32 tiles. (The roofline also is an unusual bit; it’s 48x16 strips, and has a middle that could be repeated indefinitely).

#38

An overdue, and fairly simple addition. Tracks are in-game right now, railcar, halfways.

#39

Something from a week or two ago - We finally have an appropriate background/setting to use the rain fx on.

“All” we need to do is make some levels that actually use it.

#40

Awesome work!!!
a little wind force applied to the frog will complete (if is not “disturb” much the gameplay)