Dune Wars Art Thread

[Ahriman]

(such as the side of a mesa, where the adjacent plot is *not* mesa)

That's be cool, it would be nice to have some fun on-land features. Maybe a mesa plot with a cavemouth in it or something.

I would say though that if on-land plots block improvements, they should have higher base tile-yields (like many of the features in FFH).

 

[Deliverator]

Progress update on the Dune landscaping.

I have made six rock formations now using some nice Kohan II meshes as a starting point. I want to have two more skins for each of these - one that fits the polar terrain and recoloured one that stands out on Rock. One gameplay issue is that I don't think two features can appear on a tile so we can't have Spice and a rock feature on the same tile. However, the rock features also work quite nicely on Sink/Graben tiles so we can place some there. I'm thinking perhaps give these a defensive modifier since the rocks provide more cover?

Spoiler :

Also, I found some Peak feature meshes in the vanilla art pak file. With a few tweaks and a new texture they blend in pretty seemlessly with the terrain. Since these peaks are features, they would need to be impassable otherwise units will disappear into them. If we just sprinkle a few of these on Mesa tiles it could look pretty effective as well as adding more strategic interest to the map. We could increase the amount of Mesa very slightly to compensate.

The return of the peaks...

Spoiler :

That's be cool, it would be nice to have some fun on-land features. Maybe a mesa plot with a cavemouth in it or something.

Putting cave openings into some Mesa plots is fairly straightforward compared to getting Peak meshes to blend. I'll try it out. Perhaps we could make Sietch a Fremen improvement instead of a building, only buildable on Cave plots...

say , do you have plans for new unit arts?

There are always plans. It's all a matter of time as usual. At the moment, I am focusing on trying to make the map enviroment a bit more interesting and involving.

 

[Ahriman]

I have made six rock formations now using some nice Kohan II meshes as a starting point.

Looking nice.

However, the rock features also work quite nicely on Sink/Graben tiles so we can place some there. I'm thinking perhaps give these a defensive modifier since the rocks provide more cover?

sounds fine. Can we still have improvements though? How do improvements interact with them visually?

Since these peaks are features, they would need to be impassable otherwise units will disappear into them. If we just sprinkle a few of these on Mesa tiles it could look pretty effective as well as adding more strategic interest to the map

They look very good, but they'd need to be rare. How are we though at making impassible work? Remember that mesas impassible to vehicles aren't actually impassible.

Perhaps we could make Sietch a Fremen improvement instead of a building, only buildable on Cave plots...

I don't think we'd want to make caves common. I think a tiny handful just for visual impact might work better.

 

[Deliverator]

sounds fine. Can we still have improvements though? How do improvements interact with them visually?

Yes, we can still have improvements. I'm trying to leave space free in the centre of the tile for improvements and units. It might not be perfect visually but it should be reasonably OK.

They look very good, but they'd need to be rare. How are we though at making impassible work? Remember that mesas impassible to vehicles aren't actually impassible.

The problems we had were trying to make Mesa (PLOT_PEAK) impassable with the Mountains modcomp which doesn't seem to work as expected.

These new peaks are an impassable feature which works fine with vanilla code - see screenshot.

 

[Lord Tirian]

These new peaks are an impassable feature which works fine with vanilla code - see screenshot.

...would it be possible to make them destroyable with atomics? Not quite what Paul did in Dune, but if we add features already, having some fun interactions with other things might be pretty cool.

Cheers, LT.

 

[davidlallen]

The "new" peaks would be really impassable and also you would not be able to build anything there. This would have a small effect on gameplay but not much. I imagine we would modify the python to convert a few existing mesa plots to this type.

The rock arch feature today only appears on deep desert or coast, and it has no effect except to prevent spice from appearing there. As long as there are only a few of these it does not make much difference. I imagine we would modify the python which places the rock arch, to place the same number of rock features but choose among the six graphics rather than the one current graphic.

 

[davidlallen]

...would it be possible to make them destroyable with atomics?

This has been suggested a few times. It is a late game effect which should not change gameplay too much, but would be very thematic.

Originally we were planning that suspensor and vehicle units could not cross mesa. Turns out we need an sdk change for that, which is possible. But it is low priority due to some concern that incoming attack fleets would have to make long detours around mesa chains. The human player could nuke one mesa to make a passage, which is almost exactly what Paul did; but the AI would never think of this. Unless we make this change, changing the terrain has practically no use.

 

[Pickly]

Here are some dune terrain icons (For both the Civilopedia and worldbuilder icons.)

 

[davidlallen]

These look great, thanks! The previous ones never matched the actual terrain. There is a button form which needs to go around the outside, but I can add that. I will definitely put them into 1.7.2.

It does raise one interesting point which we have discussed a long time back. I have concatenated all the buttons below. Quick, which one is "desert waste"? There are four terrains which are practically indistinguishable, at least to me, on the 64x64 size without any "context". The coast and ice ones are a little better on the map, because you can visually see that it is a coast or a polar cap.

 

[Ahriman]

AFAIK, those are anchor grass, saltpan, desert waste, deep desert, graben, grassland, mesa, polar, peak, polar desert waste, rock. Rugged isn't pictured.

I agree that desert waste and deep desert look pretty similar.

Which others do you find indistinguishable?

 

[davidlallen]

You are correct. Mesa and rock are pretty similar. Deliverator's comment about this before was that the shadows on mesa were enough; perhaps that is true, but I had suggested something with more grey on the top of the mesa to make it easier to see.

 

[Pickly]

Added rugged (I had forgotten that rugged existed as a separate terrain type. ), and added new pictures for polar desert and the coast. (These hopefully should show more easily what the border terrain is, though polar desert and deep desert might still not stand out as much until compared on a full map.)

Do you guys want copies of these files to show directly in the thread (In whichever file type can be uploaded for here for pictures.)?

 

[The Capo]

I have a question, I may be mistaken here but I think I heard a while ago that you made some units based on Bernie's Egyptian/Arab riflemen. I think you mentioned you made a worker and a musketman or something of that nature. If this is the case is there anywhere I can get these units in the DB? I can't find them.

 

[davidlallen]

There are no muskets on Dune. The units were made by mechaerik: scout, settler, worker.

 

[Deliverator]

If you want to use font that is intended for use with the Dune Wars GUI theme you will need to copy the file AlbertusMTStd.ttf from the Dune Wars/Resource/Fonts directory to your Windows/Fonts directory.

The font can be seen used for the city heading in this screenshot:

Spoiler :

An adapted version of this font was used for the titling in the 1984 Dune movie which is why I chose it. Unfortunately, there is no way to get the installer to install fonts AFAIK so people have to know to copy install the font by hand.

 

[Lord Tirian]

Hey, Deliverator, I've found out something that might be useful... and that isn't used in Dune Wars, last time I've checked:

in art\terrain\lights, there are nif-files for the lighting of the entire game/terrain and the units. If you now compare the vanilla files to Civ4Col, you'll see that the Colonization lights are more yellow-tinted - a slight off-white, giving Col the warm colours and look & feel compared to the vanilla Civ4 look.

The files are simple to edit with nifskope, so playing around with them could be a quick and easy way to give the whole game/artwork a different atmosphere, for example, just try copying over the Col lights and you'll see it already.

Cheers, LT.

 

[Deliverator]

Hey, Deliverator, I've found out something that might be useful... and that isn't used in Dune Wars, last time I've checked:

in art\terrain\lights, there are nif-files for the lighting of the entire game/terrain and the units. If you now compare the vanilla files to Civ4Col, you'll see that the Colonization lights are more yellow-tinted - a slight off-white, giving Col the warm colours and look & feel compared to the vanilla Civ4 look.

The files are simple to edit with nifskope, so playing around with them could be a quick and easy way to give the whole game/artwork a different atmosphere, for example, just try copying over the Col lights and you'll see it already. .

Yeah, I've noticed those files before. I noticed that Afterworld had custom lighting and tried that but the effect wasn't really discernable. I'd be interested to see how dramatic an effect you could create by playing with these. For example, could you create a night-time effect by reducing the light and giving everything a blue tint?Anyway, I'll try out the Col lights and see what they look like sometime soon.

 

[Deliverator]

I have been reworking the terrain a bit locally - one of the improvements I've made is to use dummy terrains for the spice instead of features. This looks much better and more integrated with the environment IMO. Also, there is the advantage that cultural borders and grids will show up on spice which has been an issue up until now. The two new spice terrains - one for desert waste and one of deep desert - and just clones of the existing terrains with the same screen names. There should be no gameplay effect - I'll check sandrider and suspensors work ok.

Spoiler :

 

[Ahriman]

Great! Having the borders hidden was mildly irritating. Nice improvement.

 

[TomChick]

That does look nice, Deliverator! I won't miss having to mouse over contested desert to see whose side of the border gets a spice tile! And it still has that delicious look of coffee cake topping.

-Tom