The Mana World Forums

I noticed that a lot of tile artists are working mostly on revising old tiles. While it is a good effort to improve the quality of the game it does not really add anything new to the game. It feels to me like we are stepping on one place instead of walking forward. I am sure our players would rather like to see some fresh, new scenarios than gradual revision and over-revision of the old stuff.

So I would rather like to see some completely new scenarios being created.

Examples:
-We only have one dungeon scenario in the game (caves). I think we should have at least another one.
-As you might have noticed from the Map development plan on the wiki the Argaes development is currently blocked by a new city (more urban than the current woodland_village tileset could do). Isn't there someone who would like to do the challenge? Irukard already created a good castle wall tileset which could be used for the city walls, but we need some private houses as well.

What do you think? Should we keep redoing old tiles again and again or should we rather leave them as they are for now and start creating something new?

I Think we must make a Overview

Desert-->Rock Desert-->Mountain Desert--->Rock Mud Desert---Mud Desert--->Mud Fallow---> Fallow Greengras---> Greengras Flower--->
Greengras Rock--->Greengras Mountain-->Darkgreengrass Mountain with Snow--->Rock Mud Darkgreengras---> Mud Dark and Browngrass--->Fallow and Browngrass...............

Special Terain:
Sand,Rock and Cliff Coast with a animated breakers.
Oasis in Desert Maps and around it Greengras and Plants.
cave system with wett,snow and dry vegatation thats a underground copy from the terain over it.

And how many Colors be allowed apply ?
How many small,medieum and Tall Plant and rocks be apply?
What a color sheme has everyone ?
How many Titleset can we use for a single map?
How must look like a map exit to another map ? (in the moment are many that bigger than the port into a other map and the other way round)

Thats all think we must to know and rhen we can make thinks together there are not different but rather to fit into one another.
We need regular Rules !

There are a lot of things that should be done:

The guidelines should be finished by someone. (I think seradest means this?)
I also like to see a texture library. In this library should be a few different stone textures, wood textures, etc. pixelartists can use this to make sure every wood looks the same etc. Right now the wood in hurnscald looks totally different than the snowvillage or the wood in Irucard's tileset. Don't get me wrong, there should be different types of wood, because there are different types of tree (oak, maple, pine etc) but they should use the same amount of textures, contrast, saturation etc.

IMO those things should be done BEFORE new tilesets are created. Because every tileset needs to be adjusted to use the guidelines and/or the texture library.

And while we wait before those things happen (to lazy to do it myself right now, though I already did make a start for the guidelines) I don't see a reason why old tilesets shouldn't be improved. Besides its a good starting point for pixelartists that just started. It's not that much work (at least a lot less than a whole tileset) AND there is high chance it will be ingame because the old tilesets have perspective issues etc.

Although I agree with your vision of which is most important; we must not forget that not all pixelartists have equal capabilities. I for one do not feel confident enough to start a whole new tileset, and felt pretty much over my head trying to redo the cactus. I'm willing to learn more and advance over time, but that will probably be a slow process. That's why for now I focus on smaller projects, like redoing a cactus

I think redoing old crappy tiles is a good stepping stone and learning tool for the new pixel artist aspirants.

For the more advanced artists willing to commit themselves into doing huge and gargantuan tasks, new work going into actually building our world would of course be the preferred option.

What is with the Developer
"i" ? he make a titleset with new walls and stuff for the Main city.

Seradest wrote:What is with the Developer
"i" ? he make a titleset with new walls and stuff for the Main city.

Yes. But more tiles are needed to map that city.

My point is that we are putting too much emphasis on quality and not enough on quantity.

Promoting Lens tiles to the official style reference, for example. Sure, Lens new forest tiles are beautiful, and we all wish everything would look like that. But unfortunately only very few people are that skilled. By demanding such a high standard we are alienating potential newcomer pixel artists and thus hurt the long term development.

I do not demand Len's quality. I do wish to have tilesets that have proper perspective, which even starting pixelartists IMO should be able to do. The old tilesets do not have the correct perspective, and should be improved. So I do not think we are putting to much emphasis on quality.

Crush wrote:My point is that we are putting too much emphasis on quality and not enough on quantity.

Promoting Lens tiles to the official style reference, for example. Sure, Lens new forest tiles are beautiful, and we all wish everything would look like that. But unfortunately only very few people are that skilled. By demanding such a high standard we are alienating potential newcomer pixel artists and thus hurt the long term development.

So, Len's contributions are too good to be used ?

If we are expecting to be a serious effort we should aim to that quality, the point is when we have the graphics already we are not using them

I am not against using them in the game. I am against using them as style reference and thus implying that graphics must be that good to be accepted.

I dont think it imply that graphics should have the same and/or better quality. If you don't want use the forest tileset as style reference, what tileset do you want to use then?

AxlTrozz wrote:

Crush wrote:My point is that we are putting too much emphasis on quality and not enough on quantity.

Promoting Lens tiles to the official style reference, for example. Sure, Lens new forest tiles are beautiful, and we all wish everything would look like that. But unfortunately only very few people are that skilled. By demanding such a high standard we are alienating potential newcomer pixel artists and thus hurt the long term development.

So, Len's contributions are too good to be used ?

If we are expecting to be a serious effort we should aim to that quality, the point is when we have the graphics already we are not using them

We need a Graphical standart not a mix.
Too good Graphics can be make lower but low graphics to make high is harder i think.

But even though we have to understand not everyone is as graphically gifted as the next person, TMW should aim as high as it can, like Crush said.