Merricksdad's Black Hills Tileset (First Look)

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I was going to at least supply these two types of glaciers

 

Here is a flowing glacier coming down a basic slope. Not much mountain showing, but you can see a few new hogbacks starting to form.

 

And here is a screen capture of Grinnell Glacier in Edit: [Glacier NP] (not RMNP) near where we camped. It is heavily receded, but makes a nice location to hang out, or maybe a boss fight, or maybe just a special treasure or dungeon entrance buried under ice for tens of thousands of years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_shadguy]

               

Pretty cool project and results so far, MD!  Enjoy - your passion is evident!  '>

 

-Dave

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Fester Pot]

               

Looking great, MerricksDad! I like the tall spires of rock out in the grass region, very nice touch.


Will the grass to mountain edging become more blended in? Currently, in your screens, the grass is a line where it meets the mountain/hill portion of the tile.

 

Example: http://i.imgur.com/o78aGli.png


FP!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I have decals to overlay in many places, yes. Right now, the main texture of the tile is all you are seeing anywhere the mountain converts to ground. In the last iteration of this tileset, I had specifically created a bunch of corner fitting textures which were precombined with their adjacent textures. That was good back in 2000's, but this is the 2010's. We can do better than that, and we have more stronger graphics cards, so I can just use more decals and transparency. And vegetation!

 

 

Just a few examples of what could go in these places:

 

 

 

Lots of decals are already lined up. My texture library is back in peak shape. I had to do a lot of work after I rescued a bunch of it from my old hard drive. This time, I have duplicates '> Getting smarter!

 

But this time, since I am giving the set to the public, it has to work easily, and intuitively. The previous version was not intuitive, and you had to use my external GFF manipulation software to set up certain tile heights. I know I've mentioned this before, but the previous iteration used I think 8 levels of height transitions, and you could go from 0 to 8 in one jump. You can't do that with the toolset. But with GFF manipulation, you can make any tile fit anywhere, and it WILL load in the toolset just fine. You just can't edit it, or all hell breaks loose. So with that other tileset, I didn't need a bunch of duplicate tiles for each flat level. All I had to do was edit the index in the area GFF and tell it that the tile position Z was different. The toolset then draws it higher, matching up the walkmesh accurately. I really wish they had allowed that in the toolset. Simply putting any tile at any position would have saved a lot of time for users like myself.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

House stuff to attend to tomorrow, but after that, back to work on this!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_rjshae]

               

It looks like a good tileset for old mines, gaping pits, and chasms.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Today seems like a good day to mix in basic water, as well as do some mountain variety, such as this:

 

From what I understand, this is made possible by the total makeup of the rock. In this case, black hills granite is high feldspar, and breaks at near 90 and 60 degrees, giving both vertical lines in two directions, as well as 60 degree cuts up through the other face. I've noticed while rock hounding in the black hills that most of the stuff I thought was Quartz was actually Perthite, a group of feldspar, which in this case are as clear and light as quartz, and often intermixed with quartz, and so take on the same color tones as local quartz, such as Rose Quartz. I have some wonderful specimens of pink and slightly purple-hued near-completely transparent Perthite.


Other mountains break in 90 degrees in two directions without the other 60 degree cut, because they are topped with dolomite and calcite (limestone). Further still, sandstone has a distinct break appearance, as does crystalline basalt, such as the devil's tower feature (devil's postpile, giant's causeway, etc.) we have many specimens in Michigan of limestone and sandstone outcrops. Fitzgerald park is actually one place you can see both. On the east side of the river, sandstone is immediately available for viewing and climbing. On the west side, limestone, covered in lichen and fern, is just for looking at. The limestone layers are also mixed with flats of anthracite coal.

 

Any of this stuff that I can eventually incorporate into future upgrades will be useful to somebody, and fun for me to make.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I've incorporated at least the vertical breaks on the x and y axis. I've determined that doing a 60 degree break up from the x/y plane will be very time consuming, and may not carry over from tile to tile, so I am simply omitting that one.


This shot shows about 50% of the tiles required for full carve crossers when used on mountain terrain. The other 50% (not yet complete) will allow full cross cuts in all mountain terrain. You'll be able to divide larger chunky mountains into thinner spiky mountains. Alternately, you can just do a couple cuts here and there, making it look like it was weathered only in that spot.

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Well, I think the carve crosser is completely fleshed out. No details yet, but here is a shot of what you can do with it.

 

 

The first image shows basic useage through a raised section, cutting the raised section into canyons. The second image shows a three corner trick, turning two diagonal raised tiles into three adjacent mountain peaks. The third image shows that I forgot you could use 0 and level 1 stuff on the base level, so this is what it does if you carve the ground level. And the fourth image shows what a few piles of mountain with carvings looks like in front of each other. Nothing special.

 

So just to be clear, I was going to do a different chasm appearance than what is shown in image 3. I wanted a very sudden chasm which goes out of sight range almost instantly. So if I get around to that soon, that chasm will be in addition to the carving of the ground layer with the carve tool. Take that as a bonus. True chasm tiles will be corner-based, not crossing-based.

 

So about the carved canyons through raised terrain: They aren't flat or walkable by any means, but I do have them currently set to full walk and pathtype A. This lets me test the shadows and go wherever I want to for debugging purposes. I do not intend to make all the canyons and nooks and crannies walkable. They're just for scene texture. That being said, I do have plans for a number of walkable groups which do make use of the nooks and crannies. It's just that the amount of walkable room in these canyons isn't enough to supply a flat space for any monsters. They'll simply get hung up in the cracks. So when I do the groups for the carved areas, what you'll see is areas with obvious walkable space. I'll make room for various sizes of creatures to walk through by carving manually even further, and also taking back some of the mountain space above by disallowing higher Z-level characters from walking on them. It should work out well in the end.

 

You can see by the next image, I kid you not, you can carve 'til you are crazy from carving.

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Frith5]

               

Looking very nice. You know, one mountainous effect I've often long for is ledged cliff faces. This is similar to what you've discussed above, in that the ledges aren't useful for monsters to roam about on. What they could be useful for would be a climbing system. So, starting at the 'bottom' of a cliff face, every 10' up there'd be a small ledge that is neither wide nor long, but just enough as a 'resting point' to stop the climbing animation and jump the PC there, so they could then climb farther 'up' or 'down', all with a risk of failing the climb check and falling all the way to the base.  Could place a few mountain goats up there on the sides of mountains too.

lol.

 

Carry on.

 

-JFK

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Definitely planned some ledges. I like em like the ones in Dungeon Siege, just as you suggested, they are small parts of the tile, and have walkable locations.

 

I had previously done a ledge system with a module of mine back in 2006-8. One of the characters had a set of teleporation boots, which were very short range. He could jump from ledge to ledge, or in the case of the chasm, from the top of a pillar to the next one. We kinda ran the game like a Legend of Zelda adventure. Certain items let you get to places within already explored areas. Or go to areas previously inaccessible, but that you had passed by hundreds of times before, just knowing there must be a way to get that item you could see.

 

And I really like the goat idea! I had not thought of that. Now I want to put invisible strips of walk space on the rounds of my granite faces. Just like in some of my Harney Peak photos. Can't believe I didn't think of that '>

 

I really like when multiple brains meet in a single location.

 

I think from now on, I may show screen shots for this area in the guise of a mountain goat.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Didn't know if you guys wanted to see a close up of the current texture. This is more seamless and slightly lighter than the one in the previous shots. I think it will go better with the higher quality grasses I have (but not using yet). Again, this is a 512 image, and this is displayed at the maximum settings on my crappy dell laptop with old intel chipset. Shadows are screwy still, but lighting is great.

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Wall3T]

               

So i was watching alot of the progress and someone brought up the idea of a Highland Tileset, which reminded me i made one for my server a few months ago using a retexture of mondegos mountains (which is a retexture to Lord Rosenkratz Tileset).

 

in mine i couldnt quite get the rocks to appear as seamless, but i modeled mine after the Scottish Highlands to be designed in that purpose. i thought it intresting how close it was to yours and wondered if you were taking a similar approach?

 

im not much a tileset designer so im limited to what i can work with, but itd be cool to have something similar to what i have below

 

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[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I see that one has additional grass-things added, as will mine. Other than a few texture issues, as you mentioned, that looks like a great set. Right now, I am using a 1001cm cube to texturize anything on the tile. This is generally insufficient, but as you can see with mine, it does the job for now. I then rotate the cube 45 degrees on the Z axis so I can force more of the part to see the texture, and it also mixes at points other than a plain cube will. A plain cube will highlight things like 45 degree angles, and the edges of your tile which face those specific directions, and that only makes your tile look blocky and shows of the squares.

 

So I just finished the basics for shallow lakes. Again, they are not properly textured, but I did get the a-nodes set up correctly, and have used my tx_wateranim08 from that pack of Torchlight 2 water textures. It looks really good right now, and will look much better when variety, decals, and vegetation is applied.

 

And! Just in case anybody wants to play with it now, here's a dropbox link. I will continually update the file, so expect it to grow each time you download it. 16 megs right now. You can go in and at least check out the contour for yourself. Feel free to play with the fluff and carve as much as I did today. And don't forget to check out the album I'm building. Link should be on the first post.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_rjshae]

               

I have a curiosity question: can a layered mesh with an alpha-transparent lichen/moss texture be used to break up that rock  texture tiling? Or would that bog down the performance too much?