More Maps

[Kivutar]

@PFG: too much realistic. The map must be playable first. If the ballon is too big, it would block the camera.

Something like this would be perfect in term of proportions:



Also having stairs on the ship makes the map less "plain".

[lirmont]

Found a design on wikipedia, which you can see here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Brockhaus-Efron_Aeronavtika.jpg (fig. 7).

I really don't like the body for my purposes (the "it's so plain" concern), but, at the same time, I do want to have something that's believable/presentable. Hopefully, if you guys think this version is believable, the body can be adjusted to be more interesting.

Images: 001, 002

[Lijj]

Definitely looks less like a deathtrap. just needs a more arrow dynamic platform in the front and some support chains or tethers on the sides of the platform.. Im not sure what the x's are at the feet of the craft either.

[lirmont]

The X's are probably just decoration for the assembly that supports the propeller. It was part of the design image I linked, and so I didn't question anything, since we saw what happened when I tried to design an aircraft.

Images: 001, 002, 003

[Lijj]

Shapes look good now. It looks solid.

[Kivutar]

I like it very much.

[lirmont]

Just want to say thank you for all the suggestions on the airship map. It's obviously like night and day between the original and what we have now. You can see them on the first post if you skipped here. I'm not going to export any of the maps to Tethical's format until all of them are done, so don't hesitate to add more suggestions into the mix. Thanks!

[Lijj]

Good to see such creativity on this project..
The wood textures are the only complaint I have Lirmont, especially on the outside. there's so much you can do with the textures to make the ship seem more special.. using the optical illusions of textures and faux depth.

I saw another amazing map in the works last night from Kivutar that hopefully I will be texturing soon. I'm also working on the double resolution sprites right now; they are very tedious because each frame is at least four times the work and I don't have shishi's to check the frames for these so I need to make gifs manually for each cycle and edit from there til they are perfect. So hopefully I can switch back and forth from texturing and spriting so I don't get bored with one or the other... mostly sprites, because they're huge and therefore time consuming as hell.
If anyone wants to try to make a high resolution sprite let me know.. I can think of only two people I think would be capable of such sprites and that's Smash or Twinees so if you guys are interested or if you do spriting and you are not Smash or Twin but think you can handle the big leagues [(4x pixels at least) per sprite but only 24 frames for fighter types] let me know.. So I can show you the format standard since I changed the format and the proportions slightly to stray from FFt copyrights.

[lirmont]

I'm also working on the double resolution sprites right now; they are very tedious because each frame is at least four times the work and I don't have shishi's to check the frames for these so I need to make gifs manually for each cycle and edit from there til they are perfect.

What features do you need from Shishi's? Something that loads an image and cycles through certain blocks of it in order? Also, are you on Windows?

[Lijj]

I just realized  the above sounds cocky..but I just mean it as in it's hard work so don't say ' ooh I want to try a sprite ' if you don't have the confidence in it or experience (not that I think anyone will, it is work) There is more merit to making one of these though for sure, It's more than a frankensprite and it would be your very own pixel art to be proud of if anyone does decide to give it a shot.

What features do you need from Shishi's? Something that loads an image and cycles through certain blocks of it in order? Also, are you on Windows?

Yes I'm on windows 7 64 bit.
What features I need or would love is exactly that ,something that shows the selected squares aligned perfectly in a window that I could scroll through and see the frames one by one one by pushing up or down on the keyboard. It would really make this easier and faster.. Especially if the frame scroller program or shishi clone had a refresh command like control r to refresh the saved bmp or pngs.

[Lijj]

Here's the Tethical sprites size and layout from Kivutar's script and doubled in size to show the frames of a type 1.
we need another script for casters with 2 more frames added but we can get to that later

this just shows where the sprites go and what frames are use thank goodness the frames are little..
this isn't an actual tethical sprite

[Asmo X]

Try to make maps a little more dynamic. If you want a town area with houses, look at some of the FFT maps like Magic City Gariland. Notice how it's not just a straight row of houses; they're positioned differently among interesting terrain elements. A good comparison to yours would be Dorter 2. It IS 2 rows of houses on an incline, but the terrain looks really organic and theres a lot of variation in the architecture.

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

This is more of a complaint against fantasy movies and video games in general, but could you give that woman some head protection, Lijj?  I hate seeing people with all this elaborate body armor but no helmet.  Even something like a force field helmet (like full-body shields in Dune) that is just a nearly transparent bubble around her head would be nice.

[lirmont]

So here's a test house/dwelling for Map #1. Dirt/dust as the floor, tin as the building material, wood as the door material. Start of pathing leading away from the house to a road. The scene isn't deformed to the height of the sprites yet, so imagine it squished down until the door is the height of a sprite (it'd be about 2.5 units high if you use the sprite's height as a unit).

[Kivutar]

Very nice work.
It would look great with real 3d characters instead of sprites. Don't you think?
If you know where to find some models, I can try to write and abstraction layer over sprites/models for the units.

[lirmont]

It probably would, but I'd be more interested in starting work on 3d effects than that.

[Lijj]

This does look really cool. But it is hard for me to imagine FFT clone sprites running around on.

[lirmont]

That's because I haven't scaled it down to be short and stubby yet. Part of my problem (as I understand it) with the original go was trying to copy what FFT did with dimensions (badly, on my part). So this time (like with the airship), I'm modeling in similar proportions to the real world (pictures I found on the internet) and deforming them as a last step to fit dimensions that work for maps (namely square dimensions versus rectangular dimensions).

[Kivutar]

The engine already does that for you.

The ratio in FFT is (1, 1, 1*6/7).

If you take a look at our custom maps json files, you will see [ 1.5, 1.5, 1.285714286 ] wich is in fact [ 1.5, 1.5, 1.5*6.0/7.0 ].

The engine reads these informations and apply them to your model when loading it. So our blender models can still use blender units when editing them, making easy to stick to the grid.

Note: Since yesterday night, the scale for custom maps became [ 1.85, 1.85, 1.585714286 ], wich is [ 1.85, 1.85, 1.85*6.0/7.0 ] because it fixed many resolution issues. But the ratio never changes.

[lirmont]

Trying to brainstorm stuff to litter the map with. In the meantime, progress pictures: