Hi, I have a question about Flare's assets. As far as I know, with an isometric engine you cannot use oversized tiles. You have to cut them vertically into multiple stripes, and place them independently on the map so that the overall structure will display depth-correctly.
For example, in the art source, grassland.png you can see that with the house, but not with the ruined tower and underground entrance. Under the Tiled sources, grassland_structures.png, we can see that both the ruined tower and the underground entrance has been cut into vertical pieces, just like the house (which was already). Does this mean we have to place those stripes independently on the map using Tiled? And if so, what's going on with rottentower.png, which is defined as one single huge tile? Who is going to cut that and when?
So I guess what I'm asking is,
1. when should be the cutting done? When exported from blender (like with the house)? When converted to Tiled sources (like with the entrance)? Is it done by the engine automatically (like with the rottentower, or is it)?
2. if the tiles are already cut in the Tiled source, can we still place them at once with Tiled? I've seen no automap rules for that, but maybe I just missed.
Cheers,
bzt
From my own experience, yes, you have to put down the whole thing piece by piece to look nice; no workaround i know of when using the vanilla sets (Ex: grasslands_structures.png). The "grasslands.png" you linked is mostly outdated, thats why it has the rotten tower. You should have a look into the art repository, tiled folder to see what recent modders used.
1) You can just import any .png you want and give it a full size or cut it into needed chunks. Tiled will ask you the model size while importing; so if its a .png of a house of 200x200 pixels, you input 200x200 and it creates a single "chunk", if its a file 1000x800, with multiples houses, each measuring 200x400; you input 200x400 and tiled will auto-cut those chunks into each house whole. Sounds weirds but its like that...
2)Not that i know of, i place them manually.
Im attaching an example of what i explained.
One more thing, adding more models than vainilla sets have, has a problem, you will need to create a new tileset definition so the models are shown ingame.
That is done with a phyton script "tilesetdef-generator" included somewhere in the repository; to keep things sane i just use extra buildings into city hubs and use vanilla sets for combat maps. That way i just have a handfull of "custom" maps with the need of a custom tileset definition. (oh, i almost forgot, you need to install python 2.7 for it to run)
The tileset creator instruction is like this:
PS C:\Users\danim\Desktop\flare-engine_v1.11-68-gd1a5e854\mods\HERESY\tiled\grassland> py tilesetdef-generator.py Act1Triston.tmx
I use it from windows powershell, capitals+rigth click over folder, so i dont have to add any directions, the script need to be inside the folder with the map, replace map name and done.
After that you have to put the created file into the folder "/tilesetdefs" of your mod (create it if you dont have it) and replace the set the map uses to your own:
tileset=tilesetdefs/tileset_grassland.txt > tileset=tilesetdefs/tileset_triston.txt (inside the map file saved into flare format)
Im telling you, Flare is not for faint hearted people, you should check all the questions in the forum where i stumbled into this knowledge.
sample.jpg 627.5 Kb [4 download(s)]
I almost forgot, there is a workaround to all these, you can make those new buildings as npcs. You have to declare them somewhere else (.txt files) and set up the collision map by eye, but its less painful if you just want to add a single building.
But as you can see, i added that whole cathedral and house as singles, uncut.
Thank you for the answer!
In the meantime I got an answer from one of the developers too on freegamedev. He said the same, that no slicing is required any more. At some point it was, so structures that are cut vertically are the heritage of that era, but not needed for new assets as the latest engine can handle oversized tiles just fine.
Yeah, I'm getting the same feeling. For a player Flare is awesome and gold price for usability, but for a modder it is a "bit" rough around the edges.
Cheers,
bzt
@Danimal A few corrections:
Thanks dorkster, ill try for the next custom map;