correct, no public code.
But i predict that this tool and XCC TMP Editor will become useless at some point this year.
btw, does OpenRA use TMPs for the terrain as well?
How does OpenRA handle/differ between the rectangular shaped cells from TD/RA1 and the diamond perspective cells from TS/RA2? Does it support both? _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection. Main Nod building SHP creator.
btw, does OpenRA use TMPs for the terrain as well?
yes
Lin Kuei Ominae wrote:
How does OpenRA handle/differ between the rectangular shaped cells from TD/RA1 and the diamond perspective cells from TS/RA2? Does it support both?
Isometric cells are not yet supported at all, but Sleipnir promised to clean up our coordinate system and add optional isometry someday. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
Surely there must be a better system for terrain than TMP, at least removing the colour limits? I guess it was all designed originally to support RA1 as best as possible but removing the limitations would surely be nicer. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
TMPs are good imo. They don't have a lot of redundant data and are nicely compressed.
The only issue is the palette, which could be fixed by allowing different TMPs of the same theater to use different palettes. e.g. an ini key for the TileSets in tem.ini/snow.ini.
A radical change like now supporting png or other fileformats for TMPs would be too much imo. _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection. Main Nod building SHP creator.
A radical change like now supporting png or other fileformats for TMPs would be too much imo.
IMO it'd be nice to support both modern formats and TMPs. If someone is creating a new game with the engine, (s)he shouldn't have to deal with limited color palettes. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
true
but i fear that by supporting PNGs, the amount of data that needs to be stored for a map will increase by the factor 10 or even more.
Also PNGs don't work directly. A special custom format is still needed that can hold the additional data for TerrainType, SlopeType, Destroyable Terrain, TileHeight etc _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection. Main Nod building SHP creator.
We have a GUI Tileset Builder that can import a palette indexed PNG file and spit out the TMP set with tileset defintions in our modding SDK. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
true
but i fear that by supporting PNGs, the amount of data that needs to be stored for a map will increase by the factor 10 or even more.
Also PNGs don't work directly. A special custom format is still needed that can hold the additional data for TerrainType, SlopeType, Destroyable Terrain, TileHeight etc
? why ?
having a standard png with some transparent color and adding all other info to yaml-files
sounds pretty "easy" to me. _________________
Storing the terraintype in a TMP for a single tile=1 byte in the tmp itself.
Storing the terraintype in an additional YAML file for a single tile around 30 bytes. Identifier, Header, additional nomenclature and formatting blow this unnecessarily up.
e.g. you have to specify
Code:
filename: myterrain.png
# of Tiles: 3
Tile1:
TerrainType: Clear
SlopeType: Flat
Height: 0
Tile2:
TerrainType: Rough
SlopeType: slopeNW (can be also stored as an integer from 0-7)
Height: 1
Doing this for 2000 TMPs with 1-20 Tiles each makes the YAML about 600.000 Byte big.
Now take this times 3 for additional slopetype and height and you end up with almost 2MB just for the additional data. Reading that amount of data, synchronizing it with the corresponding terrainfiles (pngs) and other stuff makes this unnecessary slow and complicated.
Not to speak of the later bugfixing, when you have to scan through a MByte big text file, searching for the single false set tile information. _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection. Main Nod building SHP creator.
I agree that from a modder's perspective it would be very inconvenient to have to manually code every tile to tell the game which cell is what terrain type, height, which slope, etc.
Maybe a 16 bit TMP format could be added (along with an editor that can actually handle them of course)? _________________ QUICK_EDIT
cells, tiles are for me the same when it comes to TMPs. A tmp can consist of one ore more tiles (cells).
16bit TMP format sounds interesting. I assume you then want each pixel to point on an index of a palette that supports 65536 colors?
Maybe better would be to directly have each pixel store the color instead. and then go up to 24 bit for a full 8bit per R,G and B value. Not sure how you then want to store transparent pixel though (e.g. in extra graphics). Going up to 32 bit with an additional alpha channel would make this quite big again.
But with 32 bit full alpha support, some really nice things could be done.
e.g. a semi transparent metal grid gangway above a normal ground tile. It would be a single TMP with 2 tiles on the same x,y position but on different heights. The upper tile having the metal grid style using alpha. _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection. Main Nod building SHP creator.
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