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Burnt ground tile


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Hi. I'm just wondering... is the burnt ground tile I'm seeing in beta videos final? I'm curious why it is drawn as it is (solid black square with an unburnt border around it). Looks like a row of hedges/gardens! (Sorry, not trying to be a prick!)

Why wouldn't it be done more as a random (fractalish) series of blotches that would tile together better, and not have such a straight edge? Some technical reason, or just your preference?

Ya, this is me with my traditional 'low priority' suggestions! Still, thought I'd mention it and ask. I'd love to see it more as random splotches (as opposed to a solid black), as that would tile better, too).

Ignore me at your leisure... ;)

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I would think so... The current one is a solid black square that doesn't extend fully to the edges of the tile, so you end up with this grid or array of squares.

What I'm suggsting is that would be resplaced with a tile of random black pixels (extending all the way to the edges)... Kind of like those scan code things you see on websites and billboards. If possible, something with more than one colour, but it's not terribly important. (BTW, by 'random', I'm not saying that each tile is different... just that the one tile graphic has a splatter of black pixels, rather than a solid square.)

Maybe I'm missing something about the method that's being used, but that's why I'm asking. There's a good chance there's some technical consideration I'm not aware of, and I'm talking out of my butt.

The tiles replace each other, correct? There are not layers or overlays on top of other tiles? I'm also assuming that there are burnt tiles for each ground type, rather than one single 'burnt' tile.

My theory is that if you have a non-solid square (a splatter), then you would still have a basically square shape, but with 'rough edges'.

Put another way, take a grass tile, replace half of the pixels with black pixels (in a random splatter). Then, you have (quasi) rough edges, since you don't have a solid black edge (nor a solid black interior). Put beside another burnt tile, you have a 'fractal' against a 'fractal', and they blend. Put beside an unburnt tile, you get a rough edge.

What's the reason for the 'unburnt' border around the burnt tiles, anyway?

(I'm asking all this out of curiousity, and not an 'I'm better than you' type of thing, obviously!)

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This is what I'm talking about (at 10 minutes into this video):

Burnt tiles are currently solid black squares with an unburnt border.

There are some surrounding tiles that have just a few black pixels. Is that 'semi-burnt' tiles? If so, imagine the same kind of tile, but with more black pixels (but not a fully black square) as what I'm suggesting for the fully burnt tiles.

Edited by ladlon
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Take a look in assets/tiles at destroyed.png and damaged.png.

Is that the image you are thinking of?

I am pretty sure that the damaged and destroyed tiles have those images overlayed on top of them.

There looks to be only the single damaged overlay for all tile types.

I am not certain but I think the undamaged border is to allow single destroyed tiles to fit in with undamaged tiles surrounding them.

It just looks a little odd when they are grouped with other destroyed tiles.

However if they did not have the undamaged border they would have a sharp dividing line between the destroyed and undamaged tiles.

Your suggestion may work as a replacement tile.

Another way may be to increase the size of the overlay tile so it covers slightly over one normal tile.

The edges would still be rough when surrounded by undamaged tiles but when placed with other destroyed tiles the overlap would remove the grid effect.

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Sorry, I don't have the game yet, so I can't check out the files. I'm waiting on the Steam version.

I may be misunderstanding how the system works. I assumed either each ground tile had a corresponding burnt tile, or that there was one universal 'burnt' tile for all ground tile types (...although, I suspected that wasn't the case, since you see the clean border of (for example) concrete.

But, as I think you are suggesting, maybe there's a 'burnt' overlay that is placed on top of existing files (like a bullet hole decal would be). If that is the case, what I'm thinking still should work. You have a decal that has (say) 50% of the pixels black, and the rest transparent. And, the decal is the same size as the other ground tiles (...I'm really not sure why it wouldn't be).

If there is no reason for the burnt tile to be the same size as the regular tiles (could be bigger or smaller), then you could improve it further by making the burnt decal slightly larger than the ground tiles (so it overlaps onto the neighbours), and do a rough edge (make it somewhat circlular, but with a rough edge). Beside another burnt tile, the two would overlap and 'blend'. Beside an unburnt tile, you'd get this natural rough burnt border, rather than a straight line.

It's a bit like the old DOS based games that had tile based island maps. Very early ones had blatant blocks with clean, straight edges (..like Minecraft world!), whereas later ones roughend the edges a bit. They were still obviously blocks/tiles, but there was at least a rough edge.

If you could do the overlap thing, then the tile could still be solid black (but with the extended, rough edges). If it would have to be the same size as the ground tiles (no extending into neighbour), then you roughen the edges AND have pixels 'missing' within the tile itself, otherwise, you just end up with a black area with squiggly gridlines! The missing/unburnt pixels within the tile help blend the missing/unburnt tiles of the rough edge.

The burnt tile would kind of be like a mixed up checkerboard... some burnt pixels, some unburnt, giving you a rough edge when put beside an unburnt tile... but also 'blending' when beside another burnt tile (random checkerboard against random checkerboard).

(I REALLY hope I don't sound like I'm talking down to you, or like I think I'm an expert in any of this! Just asking!)

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Yeah it is used as a decal placed over the destroyed tile by the look of it.

That means there is only one of them that can overlay any other tile type.

My concern with the random checkerboard design would be that it would still repeat on each damaged tile.

It would only look random on the single tiles, once you got more than a couple of them together you would likely start to see the same pattern repeating.

The larger the destroyed area the more obvious the pattern.

Making the whole tile black with a border that overlapped the surrounding tiles feels like a better option, simply because there is no discernible pattern if the whole area is black and the edges would still be uneven.

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This is what I'm talking about (at 10 minutes into this video):

Burnt tiles are currently solid black squares with an unburnt border.

There are some surrounding tiles that have just a few black pixels. Is that 'semi-burnt' tiles? If so, imagine the same kind of tile, but with more black pixels (but not a fully black square) as what I'm suggesting for the fully burnt tiles.

Yeah the small holes are the damaged overlay, the black tiles have the destroyed overlay.

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Yep, I get what you are saying, but currently you get a repeating pattern of black squares. While the random checkboard/splatter WOULD result in a bit of a 'waffle effect', it would at least look more organic than the solid black squares with solid, clean borders (and that, presently, unexplainable clean 'gutter' around it!).

It's not ideal, but I think better than the 'rows of hedges' that I'm currently seeing. There is pattern repeation, as the result of tiling, in other elements currently anyway. What I'm assuming is a 'semi-burnt' decal (the three(?) dots) works fine (despite the repetition). My suggestion for the fully burnt tile would be pretty much the same thing, but just more dots. I don't think the burnt tile needs to be so dense to read as burnt. Just a speckling of dots.

I'm not necessarily against a solid black tile... but more against the clean gutter. I could probably live with a solid black tile if it didn't have the gutter (and the resulting grid, when you have a field of adjacent burnt tiles). That said, I'd still prefer an overlay with some variation (all black tiles, but varied opacity of each pixel)... as a solid black tile would risk being confused with a non-visible/unexplored tile.

Edited by ladlon
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I agree that either method would be better than the current one ;)

I did not mean just colouring the tile in black, I was thinking more about just expanding the current image to cover the full tile.

This is a quick test with the current image increased in size and the darkest parts made transparent.

aZL7dGC.jpg

As you can see the tile I made is slightly too large so the bottom two sides are slightly covered by the tiles beside them.

I forgot about that when I spoke about the decal covering multiple tiles, it won't work that way.

Still, I reckon it looks slightly better.

The old image is 6 damaged tiles while the new one is 4 damaged tiles in case you were wondering about the difference in the covered area.

aZL7dGC.jpg

aZL7dGC.jpg

aZL7dGC.jpg.d238019a8c33bd3672d101417347

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Ya, that's already a big improvement!

What I figured is that you include some of the unburnt pieces/pixels (that you have currently in the inner part of the new tile), and put some more on the edge, to roughen the outer tile edges. Overall, less burnt pixels, more unburnt/transparent ones.

Actually, if you were to inverse what you currently have, that would be pretty much what I was thinking. I don't think you need too much density for it to read as a burnt tile.

Failing that, I'd settle for what you did right there. That's much better than the waffle effect of the old one.

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The ground damage tiles definitely don't look great at the moment; we are planning to get more variations painted of both damaged and destroyed tile overlays which will be randomised to alleviate the current tiling issue. I am also going to investigate whether we can do bigger decals easily - it would be nice if things like explosions created one big crater instead of multiple small ones.

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The ground damage tiles definitely don't look great at the moment; we are planning to get more variations painted of both damaged and destroyed tile overlays which will be randomised to alleviate the current tiling issue. I am also going to investigate whether we can do bigger decals easily - it would be nice if things like explosions created one big crater instead of multiple small ones.

Hello again, Aaron! Okay, so I guess it's the same deal as my last post... It's not representitive of the final product, and you guys are still working on it.

Cool. I just wanted to throw my opinion in again, as I wasn't sure what the status of the decals were.

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