Dune Wars Art Thread

[Deliverator]

Looking forward to trying 1.2.3 after I upload my water changes.

Does the 10 second animation NIF I made behave differently to the 30 second NIF? I can play myself once I get 1.2.3...

 

[davidlallen]

Does the 10 second animation NIF I made behave differently to the 30 second NIF? I can play myself once I get 1.2.3...

It fades faster, so the ghost doesn't last as long. So that is better.

 

[Deliverator]

Loading Screen

Had an idea for a new loading screen to set the scene a bit for the mod. Goes in Art/Interface/Screens/Loading.

 

[Deliverator]

With tubers gone, I find I sort of miss them, if only because they made the surface of the planet more interesting. In 1.2.8, which has the majority of stuff that will form 1.3, the planet looks quite bare and dull. What can we do about this?

Perhaps we can make some rock formation features, that have no gameplay function but are purely cosmetic to make the 'land' areas look more interesting? What do people think?

 

[keldath]

hey deliverator....

i told you guys having muchrooms or something like this is nessesary...

i spoke with david,
and suggested to have another brand of salt or a desert mineral - there are plenty of that we can use -
like rock salt, phosphates, and such,
we can use the sma elooks of the salt, with another texture, thats all,
should be nice.

 

[Deliverator]

Yeah, I think some sort of surface mineral deposits might be the way to go. I think the only reason the rocks with lichen idea was dismissed was because there weren't suitable graphics. There are few resources out there that can probably be adopted to some kind of harvestable rocks. I'll add it to my list...

 

[keldath]

we need this new feature to have art that wont hide the units on them.

why not using the salt/ice nifs?

 

[Deliverator]

Yeah, the icebergs are very nice. Maybe I can edit them to make them look a bit more interesting and rocky. I want something not too flat because it is the flatness of the terrain that is bothering me right now. I'll make sure that no units are obscured - don't worry. I've have a play around sometime soon.

 

[keldath]

cool d',

you can make the nifs a bit more thick, and use only certain nifs - there are plety of models there -perhaps you can filter some out.

i always like the look of the soostone (without an improvement ofc course), maybe you can use it for something.

 

[Deliverator]

This is very rough, but it shows you what I am planning for my knife fighting Fremen unit. Whether this will be the Fedaykin or an earlier unit I don't know yet. I have stitched together a mesh from sezereth's Govannon unit, and a couple of others. This needs further refinement. The body will obviously be wearing a stillsuit - I plan to copy the 1984 film stillsuits. I'm planning to use the archer knife fighting animations. It does mean they have to have two crysknives rather than just one. I'm planning to do a nice glow effect on the eyes too. This will be looking much nicer the next time you see it. Lots of work to do...

 

[davidlallen]

With tubers gone, I find I sort of miss them, if only because they made the surface of the planet more interesting. In 1.2.8, which has the majority of stuff that will form 1.3, the planet looks quite bare and dull. What can we do about this?

Mushrooms just does not feel like Dune to me. I am glad they are gone. Here are some suggestions for making the map more colorful.

* Eliminate brown as a color on the existing features and improvements. For example, the village tileset is almost invisible on arid terrain. Many of the bonuses such as burro weed are also a similar color.

* Add more resources to the map. More clusters, larger clusters. Once 1.3 comes out I will re-run my bonus-counting statistics to see how much we can improve this before boosting beyond what a typical vanilla archipelago map gives. Since groundwater seems much more important to growth than other bonuses, this may increase the map contrast without making the game play too easy.

* Add a map graphic for groundwater. I think this is important for gameplay without requiring resource hovers (alt-r) anyway. I will experiment with a small, medium and large oasis graphic; or maybe there is a better one.

* The terraform counter described in the "arrakis terraforming victory" thread will help, but not for the early game.

 

[davidlallen]

The current (lack of) artwork for groundwater forces you to play with resource hovers (alt-r), and some players may be confused until they figure that out.

What do you think about using the oasis art as the art for this bonus? It is easy to convert a feature art into a bonus art. Please see attached screenshot for an example. It looks a little weird to have an oasis on a salt pan, but perhaps this should be prevented by the xml anyway. That is, remove jungle as a featureboolean from the aquifer bonus. The well improvements look OK on top of the oasis art (not shown).

It may also be worthwhile to swap the deep well and shallow well graphic since the shallow well is bigger and more impressive looking. Making the well artwork some other color than brown would definitely help it to stand out.

 

[Deliverator]

I'll do something about groundwater, villages and wells on the weekend. I'd still like to try doing some sort of rock formations feature or something. I find the flatness of the terrain more weird than the lack of colour, you don't expect too much colour on a desert planet.

 

[keldath]

hey guys,


i was thinking - is it possible for you to remove the steam effects of the spice? cause i think it can mount slowness on game speed - the more texture the slower it gets....
the spice is cool enough without the steams as well, i think.

 

[Deliverator]

Yes, I can do that. The fact that it appears in the dark areas of the map is another good reason.

 

[koma13]

hey guys,


i was thinking - is it possible for you to remove the steam effects of the spice? cause i think it can mount slowness on game speed - the more texture the slower it gets....
the spice is cool enough without the steams as well, i think.

I agree. We should pay more attention to performance. Dune wars mod is already very very slow on my pc (AMD Athlon XP 2600+ ). Though I'm not sure it's resulting from artwork or the python stuff. Can't play on maps larger than small.

 

[Deliverator]

I'll look to create a more optimised version of the spice and the sandworm, and we can see if there's an improvement.

 

[keldath]

yes koma,
my motto was always - fast performance,

the high num of python, + all of the art - cause slowness,
this makes the game very unplayable.

i dont want to get like rise of man that its really slow....


***
deliv,
also - maybe reducing the use of nifs for the alt model, theres a lot of it.

we need to put more emphesize on this issue.

 

[Deliverator]

alt model? You mean the spice?

 

[koma13]

Now that I think about it could be also that RevDCM mod. A few days ago David suggested making a dw version only based on 3.19 vanilla + some selected features (jImprovement...). Maybe I will try this out to see how much impact it has on performance.

yes koma,
my motto was always - fast performance,

I like your motto.