I said I needed to bring screenshots, so here we are. Got a crab diggin in ma boat:
Not totally finished yet, as you can see. The parts are pretty flexible and general purpose, but I may need a few more tiles to make stuff a little more seamless. I also noticed some difficulty in putting together the cliff-water border on the bottom side. There are some half-aligned mountain-water border tiles that I tried to use there, but they don't align at all with the beach shores, so you can only do that kind of transition against high rocks. Blah blah...
What I mean is this: the top cliff has a height of 2 units. The bottom cliff has a height of 4. I have height-2 cliff tiles for there, but they do not work with the beach border. Maybe that's a less rambling way to put it.
I also want more stuff like those vines. Don't know where I got them, but they are sweet. I'm wanting to make more fronds and grasses for placement on cliffs and roofs and stuff, just to liven up the space and make it more jungle-y and dynamic. I'm also not completely satisfied with the shape of the small trees. They are basically shrunken versions of the big trees, but not in a 1:1 aspect ratio. So they are a bit stretched vertically.
Here, I'm experimenting with the sand overlays. Each ground type has an overlay for creating nice borders to other ground types. They each assume they are 'on top' of everything else, so you can have, for example, sand spilling over grass, or grass growing over sand. However, you can use sand-on-sand for a neat clumping effect. I'm not sure how great it is in practice, since you can't use those tiles for anything, but they are very nice for filling in slopes and making ad-hoc 'flat' stairways. My world will be made up of a lot of channels and cliff-paths, so I hope to use this to good effect.
You can also see all the different kinds of building styles I'm starting with. One or two of these may change. Four of these are 'fortress-style' building sets, which means they have high walls and flat ceilings like in the picture. They can of course be used with ALttP-style houses. You jus' gotta stick a roof on 'em, and you're g2g.
I've been removing the black border from a lot of my tiles. I don't know why I was doing that in the first place - probably just to be consistent and easy. It is nicer than antialiasing problems. This change is really making things look less 'flat'. Also, I accidentally redesigned the LA crystal tile. Though I forgot a little piece in the front... That's just an example how awful I am at making tiles. Can't even draw all the parts where they are!
Also, I've been working a lot on my side-project for this: a color palette editor program. Originally I was making it in Java, but that got a little bloated and unwieldy, so I rethunk the design. I started programming it in Rust, because it seemed simple enough and Rust is a pain in the butt to learn, and... well, it's going well. Don't know how to do the interface yet, and I need a more powerful color library (I made my own in Java and it is sweet, so I'll probably just port it.) Right now I'm thinking of making it a web app, since CSS is actually pretty powerful for making slick GUIs. But I don't have internet, so it's hard to work on that part. Also, I despise looking for information on web programming, since web programmers by and large tend to be ... let's just say you have to dig through an enormous amount of garbage to find useful information on the subject.
Edited by RetraRoyale, 21 February 2016 - 03:21 PM.
