OpenBW HD Tileset Tool - Page 2

On January 31 2017 07:34 imp42 wrote:

Seems like I failed hard to properly communicate the content / purpose of the OP. All textures you see are just for illustration purposes. the post is about the how the tileset mechanism works. It now states this in big red letters at the beginning. I will also provide a Spaghetti Bolognese texture to make the point clearer

Edit: here we go, Fighting Spirit as Spaghetti Bolognese:

:p

On January 31 2017 00:06 imp42 wrote:

A good example of how that is currently not the case can be easily observed here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/467815-qmapmaking-instantly-change-of-tileset

On January 31 2017 00:06 imp42 wrote:

See my answer above with some impressions of our tileset mechanism combined with Blizzards textures.

As to why we are making our own version:
The long-term goal is to play OpenBW without any dependencies to Blizzard. As long as any dependencies exist, we will always require users to own a legal copy of the original game.

Furthermore:
Ever tried making a broader ramp or similar in a BW map? With our tool it will be a piece of cake.
You're a modder and want that grass to be just a tiny tad darker? Easy as adjusting the brightness of your grass texture, and it will automatically be applied to all tiles in the map.

Edit: IMO you also underestimate the importance of a good tileset when it comes to map making. You will want everything to work together smoothly out of the box and focus on important aspects such as high/low ground, main sizes, rush distances etc., without having to manually adjust things.

A good example of how that is currently not the case can be easily observed here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/467815-qmapmaking-instantly-change-of-tileset

On January 31 2017 18:51 JungleTerrain wrote:



"Ever tried making a broader ramp or similar in a BW map? With our tool it will be a piece of cake."

I've been making maps since like 2006-7 or something like that, and I was introduced to SCMDraft2.0 (the map editor that allows copy/pasting, tileset indexed, rectangular terrain, etc) around 2007-8. This was the first time I learned how to make inverted or extended ramps (tile by tile, and even then they were buggy because of elevation differences and tile properties I did not know about). So ever since then ramps, or even terrain in general, have been a pain to deal with, and can be an annoying limitation when making a map.

So here are my questions, pardon my curiosity:
How will OpenBW HD make this easier for map makers?
Will there be a map editor that comes along with it, or no?
--> If yes, what capabilities would it have?

Since the game seems to run on a background of individual tiles and subtiles (the 32x32 grids inside tiles with different properties), and the original BW already has a set number of tiles per tileset (can be seen in the SCMDraft tileset indexed menu), would the ability to make different types of terrain basically introduce new tiles with new properties that didn't exist in original BW?
And assuming unit AI and pathfinding (what I as a mapmaker have assumed for the longest time and take into consideration when making maps) seems to be a continuous improvisation of a viable path for each unit (behaving differently when grouped or not grouped and taking into account the "magic box") every few seconds or so, won't new or modified tiles produce unit pathfinding that could possibly never occur in the original BW?
I say this because one of the most reliable ways to debug resources on maps is a method of actually changing some walkable terrain somewhere else on the map, and somehow this changes pathing around the whole map very slightly, with the effect of sometimes fixing resource gathering or screwing it up somewhere else.

I don't know how much sense I'm making here lol, but maybe you can get the gist of what I am asking and can give an explanation that gets to the heart of what I'm alluding to here, I asked too many questions. I'm also open to being proven wrong in my assumptions on how the game works.

On February 01 2017 01:18 imp42 wrote:

First of all, excellent input. I was hoping to get a comment like this. To be honest, despite dealing with Brood War at quite a deep level for several months now, I'm fairly new to map making. So I could miss a lot of details.
I've been using SCM Draft heavily for the "reverse engineering" of maps. Let me try to elaborate a bit using the ramp as an example.


Top left you see the original top-right/bottom-left ramp. Dots in red indicate fully walkable paths (I didn't double-check those, I just know all maps have a fully walkable path and my manual marking is good enough for illustration purposes).

Top right: extending a ramp such that it becomes wider while still fitting the same cliff angle is as easy as cutting out a staircase shape and shifting the tiles 1 down, 1 to the right (red dots are shifted to orange dots). If you want to extend the ramp less than that you can also just shift 1 down or 1 to the right. As a result, the cliff won't match its original diagonal line anymore. But that's not a big issue, you can just extend the cliff shifted by one tile as well.
So far everything is fully compatible with original Brood War out-of-the-box.

bottom left: the original top-left/bottom-right ramp

bottom right: if we want to create the bottom-right/top-left ramp, which does not exist in original Brood War, things get a bit more complicated. First, we can simply rotate the original ramp by 180 degrees. This will correctly place the fully walkable tiles correctly, but it will look bad (see the area circled in red). Propably we would want the tiles in that area to have a different design and possibly even make the dotted tiles walkable.
In OpenBW this is just a matter of painting new tiles, but original maps use some "hacks" to make it look good. They borrow tiles from another design. This can best be seen here:


Above you see the inversed map used in Fighting Spirit, with the green numbers indicating tile index and sub-index.
In the red are you see an alien 41.12 tile inserted. It makes the top border look pretty good, but you can also clearly see a sharp line at the tile border because it doesn't match perfectly.
If we wan't to remain backward-compatible with such "hacks", then the tile designer of the 41.12 HD version must keep that in mind, which complicates matters.

Wrt your other questions: yes, there will be some form of map editor. In a first step it will most likely target tileset creators more than map creators. This is simply because getting existing maps to look good in a HD tileset has priority over creating new maps directly in the HD tileset, and currently it's just me working on it. If anybody wants to step forward and help out he will get all the support necessary.

It is likely that OpenBW will contain new tiles with new properties, such that new OpenBW maps cannot be played in the original BW. It's a priority that old maps run in the new mode. Remaining compatible in the other direction as well would probably restrict us too much.
For the all-important pathing we're looking into a real-time pathing prediction which you can use in the editor.

by the way: walkability has mini-tile resolution, so there are partially walkable tiles. The concept of shifting and rotating applies to them in exactly the same way.

On February 01 2017 16:31 JungleTerrain wrote:


Ok, so the terrain will have to be dealt with by the individual who is working with the tiles...

I imagine being the only person working on this so far must be difficult.

On February 07 2017 16:39 imp42 wrote:
Question: Are map makers able to mirror half a map or rotate a quarter of a map with current tools?

(at least horizontal mirroring should be feasible)