View Issue Details
ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
0006913 | Valley 1 | Graphical Bug | Mar 28, 2012 3:17 pm | Mar 29, 2012 11:56 pm | |
Reporter | Penumbra | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
Status | resolved | Resolution | fixed | ||
Summary | 0006913: Visible wind should have an "edge" so it doesn't look like an error | ||||
Description | It feels like the wind just "stops" instead of being a cloud head or a giant storm. If it had a softer edge (or and angry one, even) it wouldn't look like a bug. | ||||
Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
Internal Weight | New | ||||
|
Or I could just remove the visible wind entirely, since people seem to want things with it that are well beyond my abilities. That's what I'm leaning towards at the moment, because as much as it's nice to have visible wind, if it leads to art quality complaints in everyone who sees it... well, that's pretty much something that needs to go away, I think. Not that I'm complaining about you complaining, but you're more of a canary for things to come, I expect. |
|
I'd recommend at least leaving the areas darkened. That's a visual indicator of the winds existence without trying to be a visual representation of it. |
|
Perhaps what I can do is simply make some sort of "black cloud" graphic. And not have it scrolling, but it would have kind of a black cloud that was over each particular region. I could even make them bob up and down a little bit. That would look better at the edges without being hugely involved to do. I have both a limit in terms of what I can artistically come up with for something like this (I'm simply not a pixel artist), and I also have a really strict GPU load limit for the world map in particular (it's already straining the GPUs for many people). |
|
Fair enough. I think it should be everywhere the player expects. If you left it exactly as it is right now, but made the "intangible" ocean darker, it would look like it belonged. The player has no concept of what is "real" ocean and what is filler. That's why I thought just spreading it as the default would be simple graphically. But if that's the way it is supposed to be, that's fine. I love the look of it, I love how oppressive it feels on the continent. It certainly makes the small bit of clear land you have fought for feel like a reward. I would be sad to see it go after just getting used to it :) |
|
Ah, that makes perfect sense. The black cloud graphic would be perfect! Edit: do you mean for all of it, even on the continent? Or just out in the open ocean? |
|
Well, the oceans are a tricky business in and of themselves. What I have to work with for these things is that the number of draw calls -- the number of batches of vertices sent to the graphics card -- matters a great deal. So I can't just say "draw a 64x64 tile in this location." If I do that, then you get something like 2000 draw calls on 1080p resolution, and it will bring the most modern GPU down to its knees (and older GPUs would be lucky to get 4fps out of that). So it actually becomes an incredibly tricky math or logic problem, depending on how you approach it. Using overdraw and cleverness I can somewhat reduce the math complexity (which is good, because that's not only hard for me to come up with a good algorithm for, it's also more CPU-intensive, which also hurts your framerate). You'd be surprised how complex some of this gets. |
|
What if there was just a different tile graphic for "deep-deep ocean" that was static but blended with the awesome wind graphic you already created? |
|
Wow how does it get so expensive again? Isn't the map just a bunch of square textures? And other square textures moving over those other ones? You already have the rain texture for chunks, and I think if you just shrunk it down and animated it on top of the map it should look pretty stormy. |
|
I think the visual difference between The Deep and windy areas is that the former are distinct regions with bold black edges; whereas the latter is an overlay. But personally I much prefer the world with (visible) wind than without, even the way it looks now. |
|
Yes, the visible wind adds so much. Please do not remove it because of one canary with a bad heart ;) |
|
|
|
I uploaded a shot of the wind switched to BlackClouds.png and it looks much better IMO. And this is while it's animating in the wrong direction too ie not diagonally (though obviously that's not visible in the shot)! |
|
I think either look fine. Maybe its my time playing "oldschool" games, but I am used to hard edges on graphical effects in games built around "tiles". |
|
Ah, I have absolutely nothing against the "hard edge" graphically. The existing storm graphic is wonderful! The edge I am referring to is more the fact that the "deep-deep ocean" looks calm. The hard fought foothold made by the players is small bits of calm amidst the raging storm. To have all that relatively calm ocean out there takes away from that. If those tiles just had a static, darker, "rough and stormy" ocean image it would be fine. |
|
If that is your concern, then as a quick experiment if you go into your region icons and backup then replace the OceanOverlay.png with a copy of Wind.png the oceans suddenly become a lot more oppressive looking. Too oppressive in fact. addtionally said wind.png doesn't actually make too bad a wave effect |
|
Wow! Ok then. I don't think "too oppressive" is possible for the "Overpowering wind storm that ended the world" |
|
At the very least I think it shows quite how much of the brightness of the world map comes from the Ocean squares. |
|
|
|
Well, see what you think of the attached. It's vastly more oppressive, and uses the black rain like Bluddy was mocking up. It also changes around the graphics for the ocean shelf areas, and removes the rain from being on the deep normally. So it's roughly the same load on the GPU as before, maybe only slightly more load, and I agree I think the effect is far superior. The edges are still sharp, but there's just no way around that that I can think of. |
|
Awesome!!!! That looks incredible. The focus is now on the land. This truly makes me want to build wind shelters! There is absolutely no problem with the edges. I only brought up edges when the original reason for keeping the wind isolated to land masses was story based :) The screen shot you posted above just pops, I love it! |
|
Awesome! Whew! ;) |
|
Wow, good job! |
Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
---|---|---|---|
Mar 28, 2012 3:17 pm | Penumbra | New Issue | |
Mar 28, 2012 3:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Internal Weight | => New |
Mar 28, 2012 3:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0021499 | |
Mar 28, 2012 3:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => closed |
Mar 28, 2012 3:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
Mar 28, 2012 3:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => not fixable |
Mar 28, 2012 3:24 pm | Terraziel | Note Added: 0021500 | |
Mar 28, 2012 3:27 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0021501 | |
Mar 28, 2012 3:28 pm | Penumbra | Note Added: 0021502 | |
Mar 28, 2012 3:29 pm | Penumbra | Note Added: 0021503 | |
Mar 28, 2012 3:30 pm | Penumbra | Note Edited: 0021503 | |
Mar 28, 2012 3:34 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0021504 | |
Mar 28, 2012 3:40 pm | Penumbra | Note Added: 0021505 | |
Mar 28, 2012 5:21 pm | Bluddy | Note Added: 0021514 | |
Mar 29, 2012 9:05 am | zebramatt | Note Added: 0021570 | |
Mar 29, 2012 9:52 am | Penumbra | Note Added: 0021576 | |
Mar 29, 2012 7:33 pm | Bluddy | File Added: Screen Shot 2012-03-29 at 7.30.55 PM.png | |
Mar 29, 2012 7:35 pm | Bluddy | Note Added: 0021621 | |
Mar 29, 2012 7:37 pm | TechSY730 | Note Added: 0021623 | |
Mar 29, 2012 7:51 pm | Penumbra | Note Added: 0021624 | |
Mar 29, 2012 8:07 pm | Terraziel | Note Added: 0021625 | |
Mar 29, 2012 8:17 pm | Penumbra | Note Added: 0021626 | |
Mar 29, 2012 8:23 pm | Terraziel | Note Added: 0021627 | |
Mar 29, 2012 8:55 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | File Added: RevisedWorldMapWind.png | |
Mar 29, 2012 8:57 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0021630 | |
Mar 29, 2012 8:57 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | closed => resolved |
Mar 29, 2012 8:57 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | not fixable => fixed |
Mar 29, 2012 9:10 pm | Penumbra | Note Added: 0021632 | |
Mar 29, 2012 9:14 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0021633 | |
Mar 29, 2012 11:56 pm | zebramatt | Note Added: 0021646 | |
Apr 14, 2014 9:29 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Bug - Graphical Issue => Graphical Bug |