The Mana World Forums

5t3v3 wrote:I don't know, I hate to be negative, but the black border looks odd, what's it supposed to represent?

Not sure which bit you mean. The 1-pixel wide line is an artifact that will take a lot of fiddling to remove while keeping the uneven edge of the ground.

jaxad0127 wrote:octalot, if you have time, could you make the insides of the walls black, so we can use the lava tiles without stuff looking weird?

I'm not sure which bit you mean either.

octalot wrote:Not sure which bit you mean.

I meant this part:

The 1-pixel wide line is an artifact that will take a lot of fiddling to remove while keeping the uneven edge of the ground.

Yeah I know, to get rid of that one would need to redo a big part of the walls. I'm not saying you have to, or that it's an easy job. Like I said, I hate to be negative, destructive. I'm just saying my opinion that it looks unnatural ^_^

I must say that the tileset is beginning to look real nice now, hope you get it ready to use soon cant wait

I've made the tops of unwalkable tiles black. Works well in the caves, but I don't think it works with lava:



Cave.png gets that change, the not-so-straight tile for the northern fringe of unwalkable areas, and some rocks in water:


The ramps have some semi-transparent pixels (assuming that's OK). Seems to add a little when they're over water.
I'm not happy with the eastwards and westwards ramps yet. Eastwards and westwards will be an annoyance to mappers no matter what I do.
Northwards and southwards are better, both in looks and ease of use.


If you look at the "+" shape at the top right of this set, the ramps fit on to it. Eastwards and westwards overlap by one tile; the southwards ramp doesn't overlap at all, and makes the tiles south of the crossing in to parts of the ramp.



Updated ramp test map, and graphics sources: http://www.s.cotton.clara.co.uk/gallery ... 01.tar.bz2

Looks great.

There still look to be a lot of duplicate tiles, which can be eliminated and possibly reduce this down to one additional tileset instead of two small ones.

Currently it's set up for ease of editing and mapmaking, hence the duplicates. How aggressively should duplicates be removed, balanced against working out which bits need to be used in maps? (Particularly I'm thinking of the top line of tiles of the water and bilevel sets)
How would you like to partition the tilesets - merge the water with bilevels, or merge the ramps with the bilevels?

Revision 2008-10-04:
The ramps have some semi-transparent pixels (assuming that's OK). Seems to add a little when they're over water.
Eastwards and westwards facing ramps will be an annoyance to mappers no matter what I do. When mapmaking I paste the tiles with little red 'x' marks as well, then delete them.
The infrequently used duplicated tiles are gone. There are still some duplicates to make mapmaking easier; now that they're all in one tileset they shouldn't add much to the filesize.
Updated ramp test map, and graphics sources: http://www.s.cotton.clara.co.uk/gallery ... 04.tar.bz2

While you're at it, how about finally replacing that horrid spider web and those bones with something better?

There's an annoying couple of brown pixels in the black bit of the previous sets, so both need replacement.
This set's PNGs have been optimized better, they're 256 colour and much smaller .


The spiderweb lights the ground in front of it; those tiles have to change too. Maybe the maps should be edited to use normal ground instead of those three tiles.

At the entrance to lamp-snake cave is a lit-from-outside cave (as at the top-right of the tileset), with the tiles from the spiderweb in front of it. There's probably other breakage elsewhere.

No idea what to replace the skull pile and bones with, other than items that will look like they should be picked up. At this point I'd like to turn the tileset over to someone else to make that change.


Updated ramp test map, and graphics sources: http://www.s.cotton.clara.co.uk/gallery ... _2.tar.bz2

cave_bilevel_water.png has changed too, but it's the same few brown pixels as cave.png.

Please keep the color resolution at 32bit. Those few kb are not an issue for us and performance-wise it doesn't make a difference because all graphics are converted to 32bit when they are loaded.

Nice try at the spider web, but I don't think that it really looks much better that way. It was too bright, now it is too brown.

24 hours for comments, then I'll upload the previous version with just the stray-pixel fixes (the problem that I know about is a brown line outside the north-east corners of caves).

Is there any chance you might be able to add door tiles for vertical walls, and the bottom walls? This would probably allow mappers to add more dimension to the maps. To make the door on a bottom wall visible, I suggest a white glow marking where the door is.

I like your style of working. You make your workflow clear.

Well, the web is better than it used to be, I'll give it that. So I'd be willing to take it until someone else retouches it in the future.

Thanks for all the comments.
I've put a new tarball up at http://www.s.cotton.clara.co.uk/gallery ... 05.tar.bz2 . 32-bit PNG files, built from same source as 20081004_2 (complete with the changed spiderweb).
This just removes the lossy compression that took the graphics down to 256 colours, it's otherwise identical to the pictures 5 messages above.

sj16936724: I like the idea.

There are still too many duplicated tiles. I'm going to try to remove them and tighten up the tileset.

EDIT: Instead, I marked the tiles I feel are duplicates of other tiles in this set or the original:
xfc.bz2 file