FRTown background tiles

[Bandy 3]

Tried to see what could be done to freshen up the old stock FRTown background tiles; I was finding them very busy and hard on the eyes compared to the soothing sight of Jan's bucolic countryside.

 

These screenies are just experiments/proof of concept of streets and shadows for only one town tile (stock tiles surround). I tried making drop shadows for the buildings, but this single tile is implemented in various rotations in game side-by-side and it looks funny to have conflicting shadows, at least to my eyes.

 

I'm going to add more textures to mix it up so there will be less of a "concrete" feel: sidewalks, grass for parks, open squares,... Cobblestone streets would be nice too, eh?

 

 

[+quack74 329]

I like that. Good idea. Some towns and cities are a bit busy. This is for Jan's terrains right?

 

What these terrains need is more human element. Maybe more of Jan's pedestrians in towns and cities and stationary trucks and cars around buildings and in the streets.

Edited March 13, 2010 by quack74

[Bandy 3]

quack! Yes of course it is for Jan's terrains; anything less would be, well, less!!! I totally agree with you about the human element required, but I was thinking one step further...

 

At least a couple of animated vehicles (troop trucks, delivery trucks, a taxicab, ... but not too many to avoid FPS hits) could be made to travel a set path/circuit, such as the large rectangular boulevard in the tile featured above. These animated vehicles wouldn't be any different than having a truck make a circuit on the periphery of an airfield, as we see can be done.

 

I suppose I understand the confusion about what tile set these will be made for. Jan did not re-paint the FRTOWN tiles, but he did a fine job with buildings and a natural layout. The issue I've run into is that it is d@mn hard to make the street pattern flow seamlessly from tile to tile as they are because the building layout is not mirrored, or symmetrical, along the edges within a tile let alone between the 3 FRTOWN tiles, i.e. a natural place to have a street 'exit' a tile ends up running into a building on the next tile 50% of the time. Now this was likely done to mix up the appearance of tiles, which is a noble goal.

Edited March 14, 2010 by Bandy

[Bandy 3]

An update. I have made some progress with repainting Town tiles, but have run into an issue that I hope somebody may be able to help resolve. I have posted the following over at 3rdWire as well...

 

The stock 3rdwire FRtown tiles are 8 bit, when I try to insert 16 bit bmp's they do not appear in game. I'm thinking TK has coded in this limit to help reduce the resource intensity of rendering towns in game because of the added requirement of all those buildings. Just a guess though.

 

I'm using Photoshop to make the new Town tiles (and have had absolutely no problem making new tiles or editing bmp rural or river tga tiles in the past) but Photoshop does not allow me to save these Town bmp's at 8 bit, the option is not available. I have to change the image mode to 'Index color' to get the 8 bit option, which just wrecks any detail you try to introduce.

 

Can I get Photoshop to save 8 bit bmp's without resorting to the mode change, or does it amount to doing the same thing? Can something other than 8 bit bmp's be used for town tiles???

[Hansa 12]

It Looks great

[Bandy 3]

OK,

 

Despite the mentioned bit issue with Photoshop (I cannot save as 8-bit bmps in the CS2 version I'm using, I MUST change Image Mode to 'Index Color' for 8-bit option to be activated on 'Save As', no way around it...), I can post some progress screens. What you see are only replacements for 3 core tiles, all the 9 other 'margin' town tiles (SEEN AS COLORED PLACE HOLDERS IN SCREEN SHOTS) still need to be completed, but they should go quickly now...

 

Of interest, I've noticed that on sim-render the Town tiles sometimes randomly 'drop' a building here and there, sometimes even a complete set of buildings for a whole tile (see upper right of bottom screen shot), so if you try these beta tiles and see this problem it is not my fault!!! What I did to ameliorate this though is to leave 2D renders of buildings on the tiles, which render under the 3D buildings, so if they fail to show, all is not lost image-wise.

 

The basic background below Jan Tuma's buildings is green grass, side walks, and what I hope looks like a cobblestone street texture. Also, the drop shadows give a nice effect, but when the same tile is used multiple times at different rotations, then there must be shadow conflict. If you can't live with this, don't try these tiles!

 

That said, please try them out, and post constructive criticism. If you don't like the large 'round-a-bout' for FRTown1, I supplied an alternative [ALT] version of this FRTown1 tile, simply rename by deleting the [ALT].

 

TO INSTALL: Unzip the attached file, and place three of the town tiles in the .../Terrain(s)/seasonal_tiles/Early_Summer folder of Jan Tuma's terrain tile install. PLEASE back up FRTown1, FRTown2, FRTown3 first.

Fly a 'Single Mission' in July in any terrain...

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 28, 2010 by Bandy

[Bandy 3]

Apologies, the following download has the beta tiles in proper rotation!

I couldn't figure out how to delete the other upload.

FRTown betas.zip