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Friday, July 1, 2016 - 08:03

In Tiled go to Edit - Preferences. Then under the Plugins tab enable Flare.dll This will let you export a copy of your TMX map to the Flare format.

If you haven't yet, I suggest taking a peek at flare's TMX maps for examples. There are some specifics things to set up. E.g. there should be three tile layers named "collision", "background", and "object". And the first 16 tiles are reserved for special collision markers.

Looking neat! Keep us updated!

Thursday, June 30, 2016 - 19:20

Try posting it tiled and scaled up so we can see. Like this.

Looks like a good start. Next trick is to make a second tile that seamlessly blends with this one.

 

Thursday, June 30, 2016 - 18:41

Having lighter and darker shades of green allows you to add depth to the grass. If you use few colors, all the grass will look like it's the same height, and kind of flat.

So imagine you have 4 shades of green. You could still draw a blade of grass with just 2 colors, but now you have three different brightnesses of grass (the two brightest shades, the two middle shades, and the two darkest shades). The brighter ones will seem taller (getting more sunlight and less shade), so you can group them together to imply some topology.

Sometimes the darker color is used to imply a spot that is low, where there's barely any grass so it's mostly shade. Sometimes a sliver of dark is used under a bright patch of grass, to imply that grass is even taller and casting a shadow. It's also used around the grass edge tiles to make the grass look like it's above the dirt.

The logic behind each pixel placement is about where the lights and shadows would be in 3D space. Plus, it's choosing pixel placement that implies the right curves and shapes when zoomed out (pixel cluster shapes, anti-aliasing).

Tuesday, June 28, 2016 - 15:13

This is one of the major game art dliemmas. A grass tile is one of the first assets needed in many games, yet it's one of the hardest environmental assets to do well.

It's okay to get abstract and basic with grass tiles though. There's a general game design principle that floors are better with less contrast and fewer busy details. It makes the action on the battilefield clearer. It helps the player see where they can move, because walls and obstacles will stand out. Look at the outdoor areas in Diablo 3, and notice how much softer and painterly the ground is compared to all the other tiles and objects.

Monday, June 27, 2016 - 20:38

I get the general idea of the pixel placement, but I couldn't tell you specifics without studying it myself.

I'm badly colorblind so I would be using tools to help me figure out what's going on. Example, you said this grass is about 5 colors. Try picking one color and replacing it with another that is usually next to it. What is the grass missing without this color? Is this color used for diffuse base, specular highlights, shadows, edges, shading, etc? What happens if you make the color darker/lighter, saturated/muted, or shift the hue?

Monday, June 27, 2016 - 16:38

The pixel art in the example was definitely done painstakingly by hand. This is Square Enix in 1996, doing the best pixel art in the biz at the end of the SNES lifecycle.

There is barely any recognizeable repeating pattern. It's impossible to tell where the tiles are split. The transition to other tile types (dirt, other grass) is perfect. This all takes meticulous technical and artistic planning at the 16x16 tile level.

Resizing a texture gives you random pixel clusters. Blades of grass or individual leaves would lose their shape and become basically noise. Hand placed clusters are what make each leaf and blade look nicely shaped, even at this tiny resolution.

The resized rock texture example above isn't a good comparison. Rocks don't need to keep a specific shape to look "rocky". Grass and leaves do.

Sunday, June 26, 2016 - 10:30

If I were studying a complex pixel pattern like that, I would try learning how it works by editing it. Make minor changes to the pixels, zoom out and see if it still looks good. Undo or continue until it starts to make sense.

Saturday, June 25, 2016 - 23:20

Well, that's some of the best pixel art grass ever made. It's hard to explain when they make it look so easy.

Read up the pixel art tutorial this came from: http://opengameart.org/content/chapter-8-a-world-of-tiles

Here's a slightly simpler grass/leaves tutorial in stages, it might help you get a grasp of what goes into it: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CjeXkAIWYAEjHs1.png

Tuesday, May 24, 2016 - 12:52

I'm sure if a super weird corner case actually comes up, we'll update or clarify the site rules. (We did so with the Wikipedia CC-BY-SA case).

A suggestion for content makers: if you're going to put a lot of effort into a derivative work, it's a good idea to contact the original artist to double check the license before you distribute (or, before you even begin the effort).

A rare few open game artists see CC licenses as a "here are my terms, now please don't bother me". But, by far, most artists enjoy hearing about interesting derivatives. Especially because those derivatives may be useful in our original projects too.

 

 

Sunday, May 22, 2016 - 12:17

MedicineStorm is right. I've been a copyright mod here for a long time, and I can't recall many times where the license was correct but the intention of the original artist did not allow the content.

Here's one case.

Most popular video games have Wikipedia articles. Images on wikipedia must be a free license, often CC-BY-SA -- obviously this is important for an encyclopedia for sharing knowledge.

Someone new to the site started uploading sprites ripped from Wikipfedia articles, of commercial proprietary games. Technically, the letter of the license on Wikipedia would allow that. Do you think the owners of those games intended for their encyclopedia images to be ripped and freely reused in other games? Of course not. We took down that content.

Being technically on the right side of the law isn't going far enough for us. Just because we (or our site's users) might win a copyright lawsuit over such a technicality, why would we want to leave our users open to lawsuits in the first place?

The copyright mods here have a love for open licenses, and a duty to our users to know what we're doing.

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