The Mana World Forums

community service instead of army

candy ass

good map, good work, you should recruit people in the internet for help, friends, until same look for ppl in college it be interesting, the graphics is the great key to atract players and helpers, i showed the graphics for my brother and he used to play wow, he saids Duck you, but he doesnt know the work to do this game, more do u think about ppl that not are busies with yours work and yes with the graphics ?

For ppl like my brother dont matter how much you worked to do it, for ppl like my brother matter the great graphic, aint here to say bad about game, im here trying talk about a thing that is true, with the hard work of the crush and more ppl u could found better ways to make a better graphic, im wanna help with things that i read in all magazines that said the experts in the hints, dont face this topic like a rude, face this topic like a oportunity for you, i hope that you understand

It seems as if nobody really encourages people to do maps.
And if somebody submits something it can take long until it is
implemented. The last releases were nearly only code stuff and no graphics.
(Except the inn, but honestly seldom people in there. It's nice
-sure- but small and nothing to do there except sleeping- imho cos
I'm no gambler )

And one of the devs stated that the forest maps won't be added now.
Because of the Savannah-inbetween-maps.
And we don't even have monsters for wood maps...

There is a desert map in the forum lying around for some time now,
and nobody thought of adding it....

All in all, well.... make your own conclusions.
(Really, no offense meant )

i made a 2nd map. now a little bit larger than the last one and focused on natural look and playability (with the first map i just tried to make a showcase using every single feature of the tileset)

here it is, the product of 3 sleepless nights:


the map is untested yet, so there may be some map bugs. plese report every error with the exact map position. i will correct it as soon as possible.

TMX File:
http://www.crushnet.org/TempFiles/tmw/forest_2.tmx

i'm a little bit disappointed that noone else wants to use my tileset for making some maps. i'm really curious how other people would use my tileset. noone want to try it out? it isn't really that difficult.


the map adjoints north to my first map. when i did everything right the intermission will be as fluent as between new_1-1 and new_3-1. but to do so i had to make some modifications at the first map (only in the blocked area in the north). here is the new version:
http://www.crushnet.org/TempFiles/tmw/forest_1.tmx

in case someone is curious how i did that: i took the first map and used the resize feature with offset to get a large open area north of it. then i designed my map in that area and saved it. to divide the map into two smaller maps i used the resize feature again. first i made it smaller without Y offset to get the upper half and saved it under a different filename. then i got the lower half by reloading the large map, making it smaller by resizing with Y offset and saved it, too.

Great work Crush, I'll test both of them. On the first one there was a non-working sign, but except from that it seemed to be working.

I really like it. Probably it could use some more variation and detail on the smaller scale to make it more interesting to play, but the overall look is great. Only thing I'm not sure about it this super-straight road thing.

Crush wrote:i'm a little bit disappointed that noone else wants to use my tileset for making some maps. i'm really curious how other people would use my tileset. noone want to try it out? it isn't really that difficult.

That's not true. I've been fiddling around with them a little some weeks ago.
Take a look at this: http://www.lindeijer.nl/~frode/homemade/new_9-1.tmx.gz
Posted it in IRC then.

And ofcourse it's a very weird statement to say nobody WANTS to use your tiles when nobody is using them at the moment. As you know a lot of people are busy with other stuff. And you also know new maps are by far not the main priority.
And I don't see "Using Crush's forest tiles to create maps" anywhere in the assignments page on the wiki.

Also I think making maps is pretty useless at the moment. When the action-layers system is implemented maps can look a lot different with bridges and climbable cliffs. This will affect the design of maps.
I wonder if you are creating maps at random or that you are creating them to fit in the world. If you are creating them at random, without (a lot of) concept drawings, there's a big chance we won't even be able to use these maps in the final game.
About your tileset... I think the cliffs are a bit hard to handle when it comes to creating maps. Transisions between directions are very complicated, more complicated then needed, yet incomplete. Also here I think pre-design could help simplify things. Think before you draw, and keep thinking while drawing.

The overall impression is good, but I agree, the roads are far too straight. In real life roads often curve and wind around somewhat because they often follow the contour of the land. I understand we don't really have contoured land, but the same idea could be simulated by varying the roads a bit.

Also (and this has to do with the tileset more than the map) the large areas of trees look very tiled and unnatural. The repeating pattern really jumps out.

Even dense forest areas have some clearings where lightning has struck or storms have damaged the trees.

Verious wrote:Also (and this has to do with the tileset more than the map) the large areas of trees look very tiled and unnatural. The repeating pattern really jumps out.

I don't think this really is an issue.
The style of the trees mimmics the style of the trees in Secret of Mana. Above that, you'll probably never see more then half a screen full of these trees and on a larger scale they look less tiled.
I agree a forest with variation looks better. This can be done by creating 5-10 different trees of the same kind and having them randomly placed within a certain area.
Preferably this should be done in a non-tile-oriented way. I mean with pixel-coordinates instead of tile coordinates, out of which follows the trees should be objects, not tiles.

Modanung wrote:Above that, you'll probably never see more then half a screen full of these trees and on a larger scale they look less tiled.

That is true; however, they still look very repetitive even when only a handful are visible. Especially how the points of the trees all line-up vertically.

Trees as objects sounds interesting, would you be able to chop them down and burn them if they weren't part of the map?

I was going to try my hand at mapping, but I do not know how to load the tilesets in Tiled. It says .PNG is not a tileset format. I'm probably doing something stupidly wrong though.

I guess you followed what's written in here:

http://tiled.rpgdx.net/tutorial.html

Wow! You mean resize and offset worked? That's great!

i'm very, very good at mapping. i would love to help make maps. However, i tried Tiled and came to the conclusion that it is a very awful program (no offense, Biggeruniverse). It has few features, zero convenience, and is so unbearably slow! Not to mention it is created as a universal tool for all games so the necessary features that need to be implemented exclusively for this game are not, such as the ability for a mapper to test his levels. Sorry Crush, but i can't start working on levels until TMW gets its own level editor, and i imagine others are refraining from helping with maps for the same reason. Please give me something here.

Well we've already had a own editor and that thing sucked really. Tiled is a lot of better and because Björn worked at it i dont think its so foreign as you mean.