Art question

[drcode]

Maybe this is kind of a stupid question, but I know nothing about computer artwork.

What I'm trying to understand is: How would one create those 8x8 tiles that U7 uses for its terrain? They have dozens of 'grass' frames, and they look really good. But when I try to create my own grass using a few green colors randomly spread around, they look terrible.

[Jon Miller]

I'm interested in this problem too. I haven't tried Exult Studio yet, so this may be completely wrong or completely obvious, but doesn't the Ultima terrain consist of medium-sized chunks, maybe 64x64, which themselves consist of 8x8 tiles? My guess is that, when they were designing, the Ultima artists worked primarily at the chunk level, and then broke it down into 8x8 tiles. That would explain why, if you look closely at terrain or pretty much anything else in Ultima 7, you can pick out the joins where the chunks come together. But within any one chunk, the art is just about seamless.

I could be wrong, though. Does anyone know if you can lay down those 8x8 grass tiles at random, or if they need to be "assembled" in a particular order for it to look right?

In any case, in messing around with this stuff, trying to get a game going, I've found that it's better to work with sizeable plots of terrain, so you can be sure that the overall texture is just how you want it in the game. Then it's a question of what and how many repeatable tiles you need to reproduce the effect.

The real problem is always where the chunks of whatever size meet up. If you're not careful, it's really obvious, and you get a grid effect. One thing you can do, in some other graphics program if not in Exult Studio itself, is to recenter things, so that the cross where the chunks came together is now in the center of a new chunk, and at the edges of this new chunk, you've already got a smooth transition ready to go. Then, if you smooth out the middle of the new chunk, the places where the graphics repeat themselves should be relatively subtle.

Hope that last part makes sense, and good luck...

[fliptw]

hit google and look for tesselation and photoshop

[drcode]

Jon: You may be right about them designing a whole chunk, then splitting it up into 8x8 tiles. Look at how many grass frames there are; looks like a few dozen.

Also, note that ExultStudio lets you put tiles together into chunks, but you need a paint program to draw the tiles in the first place.

Fliptw: Thanks. Browsing around now...

Also: I don't have Photoship, but Gimp seems to do most everything, provided I can figure out how.

[Kurt]

*thinks*
I might actually have some graphics that are of use to you guys.
Anyone remember The Games Factory? A windows tool that lets you program simple games with minimal effort?

Anyway, it came with a load of graphics... had a lot of nice grass and other terrain tiles that might be useful.
I'll see if I can find it then upload a few graphics, if you're interested.

[co]

drcode: you might want to look at this page: http://24.70.255.173/tutorial/.

[drcode]

Thanks! That's just what I'm looking for.

[Colourless]

For the original game i would imagine they designed a few 'base' chunks and converted all the blocks into shapes. They would have then started designing chucks with some modifications (alligned to 8x8 squares) which would then have been converted to more shapes.

Deluxe Paint would have been used for sure (best palette based image editor EVER) and a specialized program for chunk editing was probably used as well.

-Colourless Dragon

[suraimu]

I remember Deluxe Paint. That was an awesome program, back in the day.
I wonder if it would even still run today. Probably about as well as U7

[drcode]

Lot of hits in Google for "deluxe paint", but I guess it's an Amiga program. But what did it do that can't be done in Photoshop or the Gimp?

I was looking at the terrain in BG last night, and it does look like some of the tiles were painted in groups. One grass area had sequential runs like frames 0-7 or 8-15 from the same shape.

[suraimu]

Nothing, deluxe paint was mainly in use like 10 years ago, if not longer.
It was on the Amiga and PCs, like 386s and stuff. Modern image manipulation
programs are a lot better than it, but DP was a large step towards those
programs from what we had before.

[Colourless]

Well the thing is, DP is/was a palette based image editor, unlike Photoshop, Gimp and PSP. DP had various advanced palette editing features such as automatic ramp generation and things like palette colour cycling. Photoshop and Gimp also have a real problem handling palettes that have 2 or more colours that are exactly the same.

[drcode]

I'm finding that the Gimp is fairly decent for drawing in 8-bit color (er, colour), and you can even switch to an updated paletted by switching out to RGB mode, then back to 'indexed'. And I've finally found a semi-decent way to do terrain: Draw it in Gimp in a 32x32 shape, using 'transform/offset' to make it tileable; then use ImageMagick's 'convert -crop 8x8' to break it up into 16 frames for use in Exult. They can then be put back together in ExultStudio (which is kind of a pain), but it also looks pretty good when they're just placed randomly.

But as Colourless pointed out, Gimp isn't really strong for palette creation.

[Matthew in rainy guildford]

DrCode:
I've got a copy of deluxe paint, but it's on 5 1/4" floppies!
Oh well, good for nowt but a coffee mat now!
Have you had any ideas for a new game plot using exult studio? What is your vision for a new game!
An idea also, put up photos of the development team for the v1.00 release!!

[(Piscatorial)]

I agree; though GIMP and Photoshop are both powerful enough, neither is designed to work with 8-bit images. Y'all might want instead to check out one of the palette-based paint progs, two popular examples being Grafx2 or D-Pixed. (Both have some drawbacks, but hey they're freeware.) I'm not sure if any good alternatives exist for Linux users... no, wait -- IIRC Pixel32 is in testing. It's shareware, $32.

[drcode]

From the screenshots and gallery, Grafx2 looks pretty nice. I'll probably stay with the Gimp for now, and just write utilities for modifying palettes. In particular, a palette change will mean updating 100's or 1000's of files using it.

[Stuart]

It's been discontinued, but the source is available under the GPL. Hmmm... wonder if it can be made to compile under Linux...