CoM II - Terrain tiles

[Seravy]

This thread is for discussing the new terrain graphics, overland and combat.

A quick summary of what is potentially wrong and needs changes according to my understanding :

1. Overland grasslands. We have the poll for this already up.
2. Combat grasslands on Arcanus. In the original game, the green ground and the trees were easy to tell apart but somehow in CoM II they are too similar. The only possible explanation to that would be the grassland pixel colors or their ratios.
3. Combat Forests on Arcanus. The problem is mainly the gameplay - 80% of the tiles having trees is excessive. The gaps are also very random and hard to see because they are usually only a single tile.
I think it might be better if forests had a 95% rate of forest tiles but had several larger areas (maybe between 5 to 12 at random, size 2x2 to 5x5 each) that have 90% grassland tiles instead and only 10% trees.
4. Combat Forests on Myrror.
The same as Arcanus plus the black trees have horrible visibility because edges of unit figures are black. However changing this likely means changing the color of forests on overland Myrror as well.
5. Combat Grasslands on Myrror. I haven't had the time to compare these to the original game but if the visibility in forests is so bad, this might be wrong too.
6. Combat Mountains on Arcanus. These are mostly good but the base colors of the tiles seem way different from the original game.
7. Combat Mountains on Myrror. The most obvious problem on these is using the same mountain tiles as Arcanus while "rocks" on this plane are a different color (purple was it I think?).
8. Overland hills and mountains.
This is a subjective part, people seem to have a strong preference to either the old or the new version. It might be a good idea to make this an optional setting to either use the old tileset or the new procedural generation. (I will need to find a tool that can extract original tile graphics for this though.)
9. Arcanus overland deserts. The contrast is too high making it look way too "striped".
10. Myrran sea in combat. It's too dark.

I think that's everything?

[Sapher]

This is annoying http://prntscr.com/ukh01v (that is a silver color).
I am thinking that game looks a bit better in general if i don't resize it to full screen. May be it should be possible to increase map size when you resize a game? Now it is always 13x9 tiles even in full screen but it could be an optional setting. 
Myrran forest overland tiles are also annoying.
Is that hills or mountains? http://prntscr.com/ukh6yl  Both squares in the bottom row are hard to understand without F1
The correct answer is that left one is mountains right one is hills but how can i know that from looking at the map?
On the same screenhot right column is also bad. Is that mountains grassland forest or mountains mountains forest? Hard to tell...

[Seravy]

Is that hills or mountains? http://prntscr.com/ukh6yl  Both squares in the bottom row are hard to understand without F1
The correct answer is that left one is mountains right one is hills but how can i know that from looking at the map?

I believe the best solution to that is adding the grid hotkey that shows where the tiles are.
The edge of the unexplored area makes it worse in this case, as the mountain tile has additional mountains on it but they are not really visible because the tile is halfway outside the visible area.

The silver color definitely looks bad there, probably the only solution is to draw the backgrounds in a different color if the player is Silver. That should be easy.


This is a comparison of CoM I and CoM II combat grasslands.
   

CoM I is more uniform with an emphasis on the darker colors, so the edge of the tree which is lighter is slightly easier to see.

CoM II uses a more realistic distribution of grass pixel colors, but due to that trees are harder to see on tiles where lighter pixels are weighted higher.

I guess the only solution is to force a higher ratio of the darker colors.  These are some possible ways to do that: (the numbers are for me to remember which version increased which pixel type how much)

   
   
   

[jhsidi]

This is annoying http://prntscr.com/ukh01v (that is a silver color).
I am thinking that game looks a bit better in general if i don't resize it to full screen. May be it should be possible to increase map size when you resize a game? Now it is always 13x9 tiles even in full screen but it could be an optional setting. 
Myrran forest overland tiles are also annoying.
Is that hills or mountains? http://prntscr.com/ukh6yl  Both squares in the bottom row are hard to understand without F1
The correct answer is that left one is mountains right one is hills but how can i know that from looking at the map?
On the same screenhot right column is also bad. Is that mountains grassland forest or mountains mountains forest? Hard to tell...

Yeah it's hideous in fullscreen. I play it in a square box, as old monitors intended. But it would be amazing if at some point -- probably far down the road -- the HUD could be locked to resolution and the rest of the screen was simply filled with the map.

The problems with doing it... well, not counting whatever challenge Seravy faces in the code... are primarily the top of the HUD in overland, and the bottom HUD in combat. The backgrounds need a 9-slice treatment so they can stretch, with the buttons and info boxes perhaps remaining as they are now but centered. And all the info screens would need to load in a square popup with the map behind it, or be redesigned.

Alternately, could just lock the resolution and flank the screen with black bars. At least then I wouldn't keep resizing the window by accident when I'm trying to click buttons near the bottom of the screen. Anyway, it's already worlds better as-is than using Dosbox.

[Sapher]

All i see on those pictures is that CoM1 has 1 stone and 3 trees on the whole map and CoM2 has much more of both on the twice smaller map size.

[Seravy]

Yeah it's hideous in fullscreen. I play it in a square box, as old monitors intended. But it would be amazing if at some point -- probably far down the road -- the HUD could be locked to resolution and the rest of the screen was simply filled with the map.

The problem with that is speed. Assuming a 3x internal resolution increase, that's 9x more pixels to process. Basically, divide the FPS by 9. Based on how the current 60 FPS was reached by some major optimizations to the code, I don't think another 9-fold increase in performance would be realistic.
It's probably possible to work around that by storing a prerendered version of the entire game map in memory but then there are tiles which are animated so that isn't simple, more like insanely complex and it doesn't help that terrain changing spells exist.

So no, I don't think this feature will happen any time soon, if ever.

The rest of the HUD isn't a problem though. Basically, those can still be drawn in the current internal resolution of 320x200 on the current canvas, then stretched to the displayed size using the current code that puts that canvas onto the game window. No change required.
Meanwhile the map can be drawn on a different canvas with internal resolution equal to the actual number of pixels in that area of the screen and copied to the game window from there.
So the only problem is the processing time which basically increases linearly with the number of pixels. The only viable way to speed it up is probably to use multithreading but the map has dependencies all over the place (you have to draw things in the correct order otherwise it just doesn't work.) and even if some miracle solution existed that can split the job up to 9-16 threads, we can't really put a "16 core CPU required" tag on a game with 8 bit graphics.

A "lock window size" checkbox in settings could be useful and easy to add.

So...which grassland sample(s) are your preferences?
I think those with pixel "5" included are not very good but the rest are okay.

[jhsidi]

It's probably possible to work around that by storing a prerendered version of the entire game map in memory but then there are tiles which are animated so that isn't simple, more like insanely complex and it doesn't help that terrain changing spells exist.

So no, I don't think this feature will happen any time soon, if ever.

Fullscreen with letterboxing and a good alt-tab to switch back would suit me fine. Maybe increase the width of the window slightly if doing so meets your performance requirements. The potential improvements just leave a reason to make CoM3 :P

I like the last screenshot fine, or perhaps the one marked 26x3.

[roarmalf]

Fullscreen with letterboxing and a good alt-tab to switch back would suit me fine. Maybe increase the width of the window slightly if doing so meets your performance requirements. The potential improvements just leave a reason to make CoM3 :P

I like the last screenshot fine, or perhaps the one marked 26x3.

Those are two I liked the most

26x3 is my favorite I think

[Seravy]

Arcanus forest with the new system added :
(95% forest but a random amount of areas that have 90% grass instead)
   
This actually looks fairly good except for unit visibility which is bad for greenish units like those Nagas.
Changing the color of trees probably won't work - there will be some creatures in the game that use that color no matter what we pick.
I think the only good solution left is to put a marker above the units to show where they are - we tried everything else.

This is with markers added :
   

Improved version :
   

[Sapher]

Markers help a bit but why not draw units last so they could be on top of everything?