BIG NOTE: see a couple posts down for new attachment.
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The attached file is a template for walls and obstacles (and stairs and trapdoors).
I have no artistic ability and I know it. It's not intended to be usable (for one thing, the crumbly walls are hard to see and the secret doors are dang near impossible to see. For another, several of the obstacles don't fill enough space and it would be hard to tell which squares they block).
The file is only there to show you where such things would "
go"
if you were to make a new style. (For the record, I made all the art myself in Photoshop (yes, I own a legal copy of it. When I had a good job I found myself occasionally buying really expensive toys. Like Photoshop
) See the footnotes for way too much info about how the art was made).
To use your new styles, put them in "
Style1Tiles.png"
(or 2 or 3. but only 1-3 in the current JtRH).
It's a 16x45 file of 22x22 tiles. The top 3 rows are walls (and hard walls, the only difference is apparently whether the wall texture gets inserted in internal spaces). Next 3 are secret doors.
Next row has an unused spot, a trapdoor, an unused spot, tunnels (the black dot is the direction you can traverse it), and force arrows (note that the background color used there is the "
transparency"
color used by JtRH. not to be confused with actual transparent spaces).
The down stairs with the shadow on the left wall goes down the next 5 rows, and the upstairs are next to the 4th row of stairs (note just 2 tiles of shadow and they don't line up nicely for creating them. I created mine on top of each other then moved them to the right spots). Stairs are automatically darkened and lightened by the game based on the size of the stairwell.
The rest is obstales and crumbly walls. I made "
art"
designed only to show you which obstacles are in which spots.
In 3 spots above the crumbly walls, and many many spots below them, you'll find dupes of the obstales with a lot of black. Those are the shadow effect squares for the various obstacles.
Note that duping the original art and then adding shadow is not the RIGHT way to do shadow squares, but was a good way to do in the template so you'd know which shadows go with which obstacles. The "
real correct"
shadows are probably just black and white (or black and transparent). They overlay the "
original obstacle"
(looks like alpha blending to my untrained eye).
(For the record, the brown lumps are rocks, the green lumps are plants, the black and white lumps are skull piles. The brown square is the small desk. The little grey squares below the crumbly wall section are the 1x1 versions of the statues - the top one goes to hand then goblindude, if I remember correctly. The big desk and huts and statues are kinda obvious, I guess).
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That covers you for a lot of things, but the textures won't match your walls very well unless you add a mess of texture files. In AE the few textures involved were in the StyleXTiles.png file, but now each texture is in its own file, for a reason the next paragraph gets into.
I didn't include a template for texture files because they can be almost any size and are tiled across the screen (with a notable exception I'll get to). By "
any size"
I mean any rectangle of 22x22 pixel squares, of course. For example, the "
sandy floor"
in iceworks is 5x5 (110x110 pixels) while the pit is 10x10, the base floor is 8x8, etc. Squareness is not necessary, but probably easiest.
The textures are in a bunch of different files (the X is actually a number from 1-3)
StyleXFloor.png - the basic tile floor (an AE version of this would be 1x2)
StyleXGrass.png
StyleXDirt.png
StyleXAlt.png - the "
sandy floor"
StyleXRoad.png
StyleXMosaic.png
StyleXWall.png - the internal texture of big chunks of non-hard wall
StyleXPit.png - the deepest reaches of the pit floor (an AE version of this would be 1x1 and all black
).
"
But, but,"
you say, what about those neat arches for the pits?
This gets to the size exception I mentioned:
StyleXPitside.png and StyleXPitsidesSmall.png must be the same height (if they are not, your computer will self-destruct and take out half a city block. that or JtRH will bomb on loading a room with your style with a failed Assert() error
). These are overlayed over the pit mosaic (I think you can use transparency here, not sure how the shadows work exactly) beneath anything which exists at the "
regular height"
.
For safety's sake and sanity, I'd make Pitside 4xN (N looks to be about 4 or 5 in the included styles) and Pitsidesmall 1xN. I'm not sure how exactly it decides to use Pitside or PitsideSmall - one alternative would be "
pit isn't wide enough for pitside = use pitside small"
but another might be "
pit is less than 4 wide = use pitside small"
I didn't check how it actually chooses, so I'd stick with the 4x5 and 1x5 just to be safe.
Ideally, care would be taken for all these StyleXFoo.png styles to make sure they tile nicely.
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Additional "
for the record"
info: I have no access to the original graphics. I guessed StyleXTiles.png would be the right file to change because that what it was in AE, which also had a GeneralTiles.png. (Well, technically, it had .bmps of those, but the bmp =>
png change is not a real brainbender). I copied AlefBets GeneralTiles.png to that name, loaded up the editor and started placing walls and obstacles (So, yes, it looked like a room full of randomly facing mimics, disconnected swords, and such for a while
) and then started editing the file until things made "
sense"
. The obstacle shadow thing threw me for a while (well, a while by my standards - 2 whole minutes of noodling) but I got over it. I also had to add 3 rows to the GeneralTiles.png to make space for the additional graphics.
I determined how textures work by looking at the freely distributed source code, then trying dropping a few random .pngs into the right file names (I didn't play with Pitside and Pitsidesmall yet which is why I still have unanswered questions about the shadows, sizing, and transparency stuff in them).
The whole process took about 7 hours. It would take days if not weeks to make and tweak really good art. Respect the developers for doing that not once, but thrice. And no wonder there's only three styles - there were 58 images per style in AE (most which were wall shadows). Now there's a millllllion images.
the "
art"
: I freehanded the art, but used the blur filter in Photoshop for parts of the stairs and the skull piles, the mosaic filter for the plants (which is why they look so unplantlike), and a couple filters I can't remember the names of for the rocks and the other half of the stairs. (My stair shadows are cheap. I polygon lassoed a triangle and used the brightness/contrast adjust). The big tents and huts are just "
free transform"
of the original small ones (which is where those annoying white borders came from) with some overlaying of layers and layer-erasing to copy them repeatedly. The trapdoor was just me drawing random lines with a shaky hand. The crumbly walls I did in one square and cut and pasted over all the others (then I lightened them to make 'em easier to see, but they're still hard). The secret doors are just extra pixels thrown in (and REALLY hard to see). The shadows are all "
draw a rough outline in black freehand, and use magic wand + paint bucket to fill the area with black"
. The tunnels I made too small (by placing pixels one by one) and expanded with free transform and Photoshop did some color anti-aliasing for me. All colors were picked by randomly moving the color selector around the RGB space until I found something which was "
close enough"
- except for the transparency color and "
unused"
color which are the same as in GeneralTiles.png so I guess I stole those from AlefBet. No screenshots were used in the making of this file (though I did copy the file into the directory and restart JtRH into the editor QUITE A LOT to see if I was changing the right tiles).
Given all that, I conclude the art was wholly authored by me and thus I am fully in my legal rights to declare it public domain, which I now do.
Whether or not I'm pissing of Erik by distributing the information about how to mod the art and textures, though, remains to be seen. If I am, I apologize and hope he simply uses his magic mod powers to make this post disappear, but doesn't put a hit out on my family or kick me from the boards or something because I swear I posted this in good faith.
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I originally posted this in the wrong forum (I get arch and dev mixed up in my head). I deleted and reposted the message to the right place. Sorry if I confused any of the one or two people who saw it in the wrong place.
I've also edited this post about a bajillion times because I'm a grammar/spelling pedant, but the content is the same as half an hour ago when I originally posted it.
[Edited by silver at
Local Time:05-17-2005 at 10:01 AM]
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