Desert Dunes (realistic)

[thamis]

Hi everyone!

I looked at all the different "dunes" that were out and to me they either looked like hills or small blobs in the desert. What I was missing is the typical dune shape that causes the typical shadow that can be seen from above.

So I worked a little and guess what - I have come up with some decent-looking dunes!

I just have one problem:

 

[thamis]

There are "rows" in the desert that all look alike. Dune next to dune. Bah! Yea, that's realistic!

What I'm looking for is a few squares of dunes, not every single one! Also those straight rows look pretty weird. It's because the desert has no own tileset but rather uses the xdgc, xdpc, etc tilesets. So it depends on whether it's below grassland or plains.

Does anyone have an idea how I could change that? I don't want every f***ing square to be filled with a dune!

 

[thamis]

For everyone who wants to work with it, here's the file:

 

[thamis]

Argl... I just accidentally deleted the file that I made!

But still, if anyone can tell me how I can make the dunes appear in random intervals, I'd be very grateful and post a nice version later.

 

[Incubus0223]

hey looks pretty good, but when i downloaded the file for some reason when i ran winzip it say no files to extract

 

[Neomega]

Try this, make dunes a bonus resource with no, or little bonus, and jack up there appearance ratio.

 

[thamis]

Download: Yea, I accidentally deleted the file. :-(
I can re-do it any time, though. I just need some ideas. The dunes as bonus resource are nice.

 

[warpstorm]

That'll work, NeOmega. The only (minor) problem is that you can't just distribute a graphics file then, but a you need a modified bic(x) too.

 

[thamis]

Incubus:

You did those sand dunes (that looked like blobs to me), but you managed to make different dune tiles. How did you do that?

 

[GIDustin]

I would love to help as these dunes look great, but your zip is corrupt. If you could re-post the file, I will help you. I helped Incubus a few times, and even made a dune mod that combined all of his dunes mods in one, and they appeared sparatically.

I really like this. Please re-post the file so I can see what I can do

GIDustin

 

[GIDustin]

ok Thamis, what did you do? I just loaded up one of Incubus' mods, and now I got rows too. It never did that before. . . .

Perhaps this is something to discuss with FIRAXIS before they release PTW?

GIDustin

 

[warpstorm]

Another radical approach (this would be a ****load of work) would be to do dunes and other compatible transitions for each and every transition tile (hence the ****load of work, because nearly every tile is a transition tile).

 

[thamis]

With copy & paste it's not that bad. You just have to do one transition tile file, ad then copy & paste the "dune" layer onto all others.

 

[warpstorm]

I found seamless transitions with details that "extend" from one tile to the next to be very time consuming, but help reduce the tiled look a lot.

 

[Incubus0223]

Originally posted by thamis
Incubus:

You did those sand dunes (that looked like blobs to me), but you managed to make different dune tiles. How did you do that?

yea blobs they were i didn't try to hard on them,

what i did was i put it on a whold desert pic but not in the main desert file, i think that should work, if not just tell me.

 

[thamis]

I didn't quite catch you here... Where did you put it? How's the file named?

 

[warpstorm]

It looks like he put them only in the all desert tile in xdgc.pcx (the desert-grass-coast transitions file).

 

[thamis]

Okay, my new version of the dunes. I made the dunes on the main desert tile smaller and there are less of them. This way you don't notice the vast abundance of dunes right away.

 

[thamis]

Download the dunes file here:

http://www.creativedesign.biz/public/xdgc.zip

And the PSD:

http://www.creativedesign.biz/public/xdgc_dunes_template.zip

 

[warpstorm]

That looks a lot better. You still have the repetition, but nothing you can do about that.

<constructive_criticism>

You might want to look at your tile edges closer, the seams between tiles are fairly obvious. There might be a color mismatch there (I'm guessing the edge pixels are a shade to light)..

Like I said earlier in this thread, one trick to getting rid of the tiled look (to a certain extent) is to make some details span multiple tiles. By this I mean to do something like make a dune that goes half on one tile and half on the others. This can take a while if you choose to do it because you not only have to account for this in every tile that abutts it in this file, but in all the files that contain desert transitions also (xdgc, xdpc, xdgp)

If you want to take things to the extreme (warning, this is a lot of work), you not only have to make details cross tiles, you need to make details that while connecting perfectly tile to tile are different, yet flow from tile to tile. By this I mean to put one half of a sand dune on one edge of a tile and have a bunch of different halves to the dune on the mating sides of the other tiles. Extreme, yes. But if you can do this you will have a tile set that doesn't looked tiled at all (to date, nobody has released one that does this, TTBOMK). Extreme.

</constructive_criticism>

I like the dunes look. They are the best desert I've seen yet for Civ3.