Theoretical and practical ideas of graphic
Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 4:07 pm
Greetings, nice to be here.
I came in touch with crossfire some weeks ago, and played a bit around with it (on my server at home).
Here are some thoughts about the graphics.
My comparision to Ultima 6 or 7 does not mean I want to make CF an Ultima game, its here 'cause in my humble opinian U7 is one of the bestlooking games with an similar graphical style.
Lets start.
I noticed that the graphics aren't as limited as they appear,
for the specs say 32x32 256color tiles.
But, although the pics are nice done, they carry their history.
Why does even an Ultima VI look better?
(This isn't meant to offense the original artistst, but while in 1995 there was some sense in doing things as they were done, in 2010 the most reasons are gone, most PCs have the power for better graphics).
1. Colors
To stay by the example, U6 uses three different colored woods. Table, chair, wall, they fit in their colors good together.
While its good to use similar colors in the game to make things neatless, too generic colors fail greatly for most users can't see them anymore.
A good example would be the yellowish dirt floor. This kind of yellow, as seen in Paint on windows 3.x makes my eyes bleeding because of painfull cancer.
2. Neatless
Here cames the tricky one. U6 uses an rotated "military isometrical view", while crossfire uses a clean cavalier perspective. This means in CF the side-walls don't occupy a complete tile (implicated the horizontal walls are 32px height), while in U6 they do.
Not a real big deal, but:
You can't set an stonefloor for inside an house, and have it surrounded by grass. Either you'll have grass in the house, or stone around it.
On an symbolic approach like seen in Nethack thats ok, but it will displace the graphics.
Solution:
Applying walls to one tile-side (in my example below I took topright).
For this to look good the mapdesigner has to use it properly, or it will look displaced again (which, in turn means on old maps it doesn't look worser for its already displaced).
Below you can see an simply and fast drawn example pic, is an redone "wwall" set. I used the ideas from above to do it.
Its a bit low-contrasted, sorry.
As you can see, its bigger and won't fit with the other walls, wich menas theres need to replace them all.
I tested this set on my server at home, it works even with gtk1-client.
And here's my point, we can make the graphics much betterlooking, the possibilitys are there.
Of course this are just ideas and a good base for discussion, but if there is interest Iam sure I can rework most wall within two months.
I can provide an template on the formate above so other can work it too.
I hope this will at least be an interesting discussion, thank you for reading.
Regards, Daniel
I came in touch with crossfire some weeks ago, and played a bit around with it (on my server at home).
Here are some thoughts about the graphics.
My comparision to Ultima 6 or 7 does not mean I want to make CF an Ultima game, its here 'cause in my humble opinian U7 is one of the bestlooking games with an similar graphical style.
Lets start.
I noticed that the graphics aren't as limited as they appear,
for the specs say 32x32 256color tiles.
But, although the pics are nice done, they carry their history.
Why does even an Ultima VI look better?
(This isn't meant to offense the original artistst, but while in 1995 there was some sense in doing things as they were done, in 2010 the most reasons are gone, most PCs have the power for better graphics).
1. Colors
To stay by the example, U6 uses three different colored woods. Table, chair, wall, they fit in their colors good together.
While its good to use similar colors in the game to make things neatless, too generic colors fail greatly for most users can't see them anymore.
A good example would be the yellowish dirt floor. This kind of yellow, as seen in Paint on windows 3.x makes my eyes bleeding because of painfull cancer.
2. Neatless
Here cames the tricky one. U6 uses an rotated "military isometrical view", while crossfire uses a clean cavalier perspective. This means in CF the side-walls don't occupy a complete tile (implicated the horizontal walls are 32px height), while in U6 they do.
Not a real big deal, but:
You can't set an stonefloor for inside an house, and have it surrounded by grass. Either you'll have grass in the house, or stone around it.
On an symbolic approach like seen in Nethack thats ok, but it will displace the graphics.
Solution:
Applying walls to one tile-side (in my example below I took topright).
For this to look good the mapdesigner has to use it properly, or it will look displaced again (which, in turn means on old maps it doesn't look worser for its already displaced).
Below you can see an simply and fast drawn example pic, is an redone "wwall" set. I used the ideas from above to do it.
Its a bit low-contrasted, sorry.
As you can see, its bigger and won't fit with the other walls, wich menas theres need to replace them all.
I tested this set on my server at home, it works even with gtk1-client.
And here's my point, we can make the graphics much betterlooking, the possibilitys are there.
Of course this are just ideas and a good base for discussion, but if there is interest Iam sure I can rework most wall within two months.
I can provide an template on the formate above so other can work it too.
I hope this will at least be an interesting discussion, thank you for reading.
Regards, Daniel
