D'oh

[PlotinusRedux]

So, my first attempt to indicate faction ownership by changing the terrain color didn't take the palette into consideration....  I *hate* 8-bit color.

[ete]

Well that's quite.. spectacular. You'd definitely know who owned which bits of land if you pour millions of tonnes of brightly colored paint on it :p

Maybe that'll have to wait until modern graphics with reasonable color depth is supported.

[PlotinusRedux]

This is better.

[ete]

Much, though I'd personally prefer something a bit more subtle, I like the original terrain.

[Dio]

This looks similiar to what they did with the mini map in the corner of the main screen on certain prerelease screen prints. An example is provided below.

[Buster's Uncle]

What would be great is, if instead of this being a faction boundary function, something of the sort was added to the map/scenario editor as an option according to boundaries defined by the map/scenario creator...

[PlotinusRedux]

Much, though I'd personally prefer something a bit more subtle, I like the original terrain.

It's just a toggle (alt-t) for getting a clearer view, then you toggle it back to the original terrain--it's not stuck that way.

[ete]

Okay, handy.

[BFG]

I like the idea, though to be honest I'd be more interested in painted UNITS than painted terrain.  I'm guessing that would be much more difficult however.

[PlotinusRedux]

BFG,

It wouldn't be that hard to do, but with the severely limited palette, it would be harder to get results you'd actually want to play with.

This really just grew up of wanting to be able to toggle tile yields on the map like you can in other Civ games--with my bad eyes I have a hard time telling the difference between moist and raining and rolling and rocky.  What I've added is:

<ALT-R>: toggles between normal, show current tile yields, and show potential tile yields (what you'd get for each resource with their improvement--i.e., farms for food, etc.).

<ALT-T>: toggles between normal, show tile ownership, show raininess, show elevation, and show rockiness.  The last 3 just use solid colors to make it easy to tell which tiles are what--elevation shows white below 1000m, light red between 1000 and 1999, darker red between 2000 and 2999, etc.

I'm also adding 1 new mode to the existing <T> toggle to hide forests and fungus so you can see what's underneath.

[JeroenDStout]

Interesting - so how did you do this? You mentioned that the land is a palette shifted based on the slope, does this just use a different initial point on the palette?

It looks good. I have often wanted a 'tactical overlay' for the game.

[PlotinusRedux]

Interesting - so how did you do this? You mentioned that the land is a palette shifted based on the slope, does this just use a different initial point on the palette?

I've got 7 solid color textures, 1 for each faction, chosen from close enough to the centers of each color gradient in the palette that the palette shifts don't hit a different gradient.  The first picture with all the wild colors I'd used colors to close to the edges of the gradients so they were getting shifted to completely different colors.  I keep those textures in memory in instances of the same class AC is using for its other textures, then point it to those instances instead of its normal ones when it goes to draw tiles, depending on the mode.

Since they had to be near the center of the gradients, and there are only about 7 gradients, the choice of colors was very limited--not every faction is getting its actual faction color, I just picked as close as I could.

[JeroenDStout]

Are these then also the solid gradients used for drawing the different weapons and armour?

[PlotinusRedux]

I haven't dug into that yet, really, other than to see the unit models themselves were in the .cvr files--I'd assume that's also where the weapons and armor all, and they get shaded differently than terrain.  Each .cvr file has its own palette, but in the end they get merged with the terrain in an 8-bit bitmap, so their final colors have to be somewhere in that palette.  I haven't looked at any of their palettes to see if they are using the same one as the terrain while they're being shaded, or if their shading code is also doing palette shifting--that's something I'll look at longer term.  I like the idea of faction coloring on the units--I just got sneak attacked by an enemy unit by my formers I thought was one of mine.