Dune Wars Art Thread

I do empathize with your view that the background is bland - but to a certain degree this is intentional. The issue is that as soon as you try and make it more interesting the outline of the unit gets harder to distinguish. This is one of those situations where making things look pretty and making things that are good from usability and gameplay perspective can pull you in opposite directions. When I've tried to use some sand ripples or deserty texture for a background the unit itself becomes less distinct, particular when resized down to 32x32. The simple gradiant effect is the best I've found for making the unit stand out.

This is my process, all done in Paint.NET apart from step 5:
1. Take a screenshot of the unit using NifSkope.
2. Select and cut away the background colour.
3. Crop to a square leaving enough boundary for the frame when resized.
4. Add radial gradiant background layer. The hex values for the radial gradiant are 83483F and FFD86D.
5. Resize down to 64x64 using Photoshop (the downsizing bicubic algorithm is so much better).
6. Apply Sharpen+ plugin, Amount 75.
7. Increase Saturation +10.
8. Apply Alpha Mask to make the border transparent.
9. Add frame layer.
10. Save in the DDS pixel format A1R5G5B5. I've found this format gives much much nicer quality for icons than the harsh compression of DXT3. The icons are ~9kb rather than ~5kb and you can't use semi-transparency, but it's worth it IMO.

I can try again with a very subtle Dune ripple background or something, but even the gradient background design would be a significant improvement IMO. If we get a nicer design we can implement in the future.

Some screenshots to be liberally sprayed around in promotion of 1.5...

Cool. I put the city screen shot onto the external website. Could you add the thopter and harvester to some of the city closeups? Also can you make a closeup of the worm attacking something? The one we are using looks cool, except it appears that the walker is self-destructing due to an electrical short or something.

No problem, but it won't be until the weekend.

I added a couple of other shots into the Modpack thread.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8459100&postcount=13

Art request: I wish we could find replacements for a lot of the improvement buildings.

DA63. The turbine bothers me in particular. I was not able to find anything like a windmill or turbine in the download database. If there is other building art in another game which could be imported, that would be great.

DA64. The other improvements are not so bothersome, but still do not really look like what they describe: the surface mine, deep mine and core mine are random buildings; so are the desert plantation and dew collector.

DA65. The desert compound doesn't actually do anything, but it "should"; there should be a subsystem related to harvesting little makers to model the sandworm life cycle. One possibility is to delete it for now. The art is a little "cartoony".

DA63
Why not just use the modern period windmill graphic from vanilla? You could make clusters of them for turbine 1, 2 and 3.

DA64
Agreed. Something with a smokestack issuing flames/smoke would be good for the mine.

DA65
I'd lean towards removing them, or at least giving a tile yield bonus. But I really don't think the little maker resource makes much sense at all; it only applies to one faction, and I really don't think that the process for creating reverend mothers needs.

Its not like little makers are rare things that can only be found in particular locations, like an oil or coal deposit or something; they just go out and capture a tiny worm and drown it. They can find worms anywhere in desert; they're not a strategic resource to be fostered.

Also, it doesn't even quite make sense for BG; the Fremen make *their* reverend mothers using the water of life, but IIRC the Bene Gesserit don't; the BGs are never drowning worms off on Wallach IX, they use super-refined spice somehow. And Fremen RMs aren't quite the same as BG ones; they have the memories and such, but not all the super-BG training and nerve-control and such.

And its weird having a resource just for a single faction.

Sand trout I think should probably just be a tile bonus, or removed. But sand trout provide no economic benefit; they're just a pest that suck up moisuture; the Fremen don't farm them, they put predator fish in their water supplies to kill any sandtrout that get in. I don't think you can eat them either.

Any votes to *keep* desert compound, little maker, sandtrout?

Ahriman said:

Why not just use the modern period windmill graphic from vanilla? You could make clusters of them for turbine 1, 2 and 3.

Click to expand...

Huh. I hadn't thought of that. I agree this is a good idea, but my Nifskope Fu is too weak to make the clusters. Perhaps this can go onto deliverator's art queue. I think a single windmill graphic for all three turbine levels is still better than the existing graphic, so I will put that in.

EDIT: My Art Fu is apparently especially weak. In vanilla, when I give myself a modern era tech, I can see the modern windmill appear and it rotates. I can also see the modern windmill nif/kfm in art/structures/improvements/windmill. However, I cannot see any reference to the modern windmill in any of the xml files, such as xml/art/civ4artdefines_improvement.xml. I added my own reference to dune wars artdefines_improvements anyway, and I can see the windmill in the dune wars game. But it doesn't rotate. Can anybody spot something wrong with my artdefines in the spoiler?

I tried with bExtraAnimations both 1 and 0, still no rotation.

DA63: Lord Tirian has recently done a cleaned-up version of the modern windmill for Planetfall - I'm sure we can adapt this. It's always worth keeping an eye on the Graphical Quibbles thread in the Planetfall subforum. I'll take a look at the windmill at the weekend.

Drinking the water of life is part of becoming a Reverend Mother within the Bene Gesserit as well. At the time of Dune they are still dependent on Arrakis for it, but I agree the current set up is a bit weird. I think it would be more interesting to make the RM a unit that depends on a BG unique resource similar to Sardaukar and Ginaz Swordmaster.

davidlallen said:

Can anybody spot something wrong with my artdefines in the spoiler?

Click to expand...

How did you check it? In the Pedia or in-game? Because the windmill only turns in the pedia and while worked.

Cheers, LT.

I think it would be more interesting to make the RM a unit that depends on a BG unique resource similar to Sardaukar.

Click to expand...

I was a fan of making "Truthsayer cooperation" a trade good. This makes sense to me: the Bene Gesserit carefully loan out truthsayers to selected parties (or marry them), like how the Emperor has his truthsayer.
The resource could be required for building Reverend mothers, and for building a structure that boosts influence and espionage.

Lord Tirian said:

How did you check it? In the Pedia or in-game? Because the windmill only turns in the pedia and while worked.

Click to expand...

In vanilla, the windmill in the pedia does not turn. I set bExtraAnimations to 1, and checked a *worked* windmill in DW. It turns. So I guess mine is same as vanilla now. Thanks for the pointer.

Stumbled across this page, which has TrueType fonts for Gallach, Fremen and Guild. Not sure we'd find any use for them, but they are kind of interesting.

Out of curiosity: Does anybody wants to do the promo buttons, once the promotion design is finished? Otherwise, I'd like to try my hand at them once the design is "stable" enough to make buttons for them...

Cheers, LT.

I'd be very happy for you to do that. After doing the tech tree and unit ones - I think I'll be thoroughly sick of buttons. I've opened a thread to try and get us to a new promotion design.

Deliverator said:

I have been trying out different designs and techniques for the unit icons. The stylised icons are a nice idea, but they are useless in terms of differentiating units. [...] It shouldn't take too long to create these for all the units - it is just a question of repeating the process over and over.

Click to expand...

I'd like to put this into 1.5.1. I appreciate the experimentation you have done on the heightmap changes; but if this is close to wrapping up, could you put up the files?

Here is a patch over 1.5 with the unit buttons. I didn't do missionaries, great people and a couple of others were left as they are. They're not perfect by any means, but hopefully they are an improvement. As the 3D art gets reskinned/replaced we can obviously replace the buttons too.

Along the way, I made a couple of changes to the unit art. First, I wanted to make the Desert Worker, Settler and Fremen Scout distinct so I've created a bit of variety in the cloaks and turbans. Second, I found this nice unit for the Quad which I have included. Third, I've made a new spice eye icon for the Spice bonus.

I've also redone the ground pedia viewport as you can see. The other two screenshots need fixing up at a later point.

Hopefully, you've picked up the new Scytale leaderhead from the terrain patch. Here's a new Mohiam to go with it.

I decided that the harvester needed an animation. It felt wrong with them just sitting there. So now they drive around a bit and throw up some spice dust. It will only animate while in or touching your cultural borders.



Just replace the harvester NIF with the attached. The only XML change is the following in CIV4AttachableInfos.xml:

<AttachableInfo>
<Type>ATTACHABLE_SPICE_DUST</Type>
<Description></Description>
<fScale>0.75</fScale>
<Path>Art/Effects/SpiceFX/Attachable_Spice_Cloud.nif</Path>
</AttachableInfo>

It is working fine and is release-worthy, but I have a couple of questions for Lord Tirian, or anyone else who might know.

1) When I exported the rigged harvester from Blender it looked like this in SceneViewer and the game.

It looks fine in NifSkope. I've had this issue before. The only way I know how to fix it is to use a shader on the mesh. Do you have any idea why this happens?

2) After switching the shader on, I couldn't get your enviromental light thing to work. I used Environment_FX_Dune.dds texture as the Glow map instead which looks similar, but not exactly the same. Maybe you can figure out what is wrong and make a version with no shader and your original TextureEffect lighting?