Puppeteer
Emperor
That's pretty far out for me. I'm still trying to figure out how to assemble Ikea furniture with partial secondhand instructions and missing all the connectors. I'm working from the bottom up on trying to simply understand the data from the save, logically what it means, and how to remove restrictions without knowing the data structure of our future tile(s). Or rather how to code the visual representation without putting constraints on a future tile dat format.
But we'll have to at least think about the implications of procedural generation when formulating the new tile structure.
Clearly there is demand to remove the tile type limit, but the way the current graphics are implemented, even adding a single tile type will require a lot. It has to have tilesets for every tile type it could be next to. Heck, there isn't even graphics for putting desert next to tundra. The number of tile combinations to draw and even the file count grows exponentially, and/or you have to prevent tiles from being placed next to each other if there is no graphics for it.
My early thought is that we'll have to abandon the media-tiles-as-quarter-of-four-different-tiles paradigm and adopt a logical-tile-centered media with procedural blending between types. But I also imagine you could just have a bigger field of grass texture rather than go tile-by-tile, so instead of drawing a single tile you're drawing a big area that masks, wraps, and blends appropriately when the game draws it.
Editing to add: Oh, I guess I didn't make it clear here: This map drawing effort is to replicate what Civ3 does; it's not meant to be the new primary graphics. It's what we can use to draw pretty pictures for any new tile, map, or unit data formats we might come up with. I'm using programming interfaces so the new tile type can have its own design but just implement a few getters to use the legacy Civ3 graphics until a new map graphics format evolves.
I originally thought we might mix old and new graphics, but it's quickly becoming clear that makes no sense; it will make more sense for a new map format to pre-convert the media to the new format. What I'm doing now writes no new data but just reads the SAV into memory, reads the appropriate legacy terrain pcx files and displays them.
Editing again to add: The goal is still to be able to use preexisting mods, and this map viewer should be able to do it. The goal is also to remove limits on things like tile types. But from where I am now, I see no path to being able to add more than 16 tile types to old mod formats. Instead I imagine the old mod can be one-click converted to the new format then be edited with new tile types (17 or 1700 or 1.7 million more), or perhaps a new mod can load multiple old mods and pick and choose unlimited tile types from them.
But we'll have to at least think about the implications of procedural generation when formulating the new tile structure.
Clearly there is demand to remove the tile type limit, but the way the current graphics are implemented, even adding a single tile type will require a lot. It has to have tilesets for every tile type it could be next to. Heck, there isn't even graphics for putting desert next to tundra. The number of tile combinations to draw and even the file count grows exponentially, and/or you have to prevent tiles from being placed next to each other if there is no graphics for it.
My early thought is that we'll have to abandon the media-tiles-as-quarter-of-four-different-tiles paradigm and adopt a logical-tile-centered media with procedural blending between types. But I also imagine you could just have a bigger field of grass texture rather than go tile-by-tile, so instead of drawing a single tile you're drawing a big area that masks, wraps, and blends appropriately when the game draws it.
Editing to add: Oh, I guess I didn't make it clear here: This map drawing effort is to replicate what Civ3 does; it's not meant to be the new primary graphics. It's what we can use to draw pretty pictures for any new tile, map, or unit data formats we might come up with. I'm using programming interfaces so the new tile type can have its own design but just implement a few getters to use the legacy Civ3 graphics until a new map graphics format evolves.
I originally thought we might mix old and new graphics, but it's quickly becoming clear that makes no sense; it will make more sense for a new map format to pre-convert the media to the new format. What I'm doing now writes no new data but just reads the SAV into memory, reads the appropriate legacy terrain pcx files and displays them.
Editing again to add: The goal is still to be able to use preexisting mods, and this map viewer should be able to do it. The goal is also to remove limits on things like tile types. But from where I am now, I see no path to being able to add more than 16 tile types to old mod formats. Instead I imagine the old mod can be one-click converted to the new format then be edited with new tile types (17 or 1700 or 1.7 million more), or perhaps a new mod can load multiple old mods and pick and choose unlimited tile types from them.
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