@gamerman01
Ok so I had the triple threat going, knocked down under the weather, then knocked down by the weather (thanks xfinity lol) then a little BG3 detour, predictably, but I’m on the mend again now trying to get back on track.
So I have the baseline more or less sorted, I blew out the pixels in the mentioned areas just so they’d be slightly easier to read. Might need more just wanted to get something down. Image is too large to attach at scale on these boards. But here’s a quick wip on the drobox and then reduced to 25% so it could be attached.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/f8aq8x0dijka0sreeow66/baseline_uhd_global_1940_new_2-25-24_wip.png?rlkey=34y2lp8ws0kuwz5rsxtx9a0ae&dl=0
Just to give a quick primer on what I’m doing, so hopefully it will be easier for other peeps to make adjustments if they want. The baseline image for whatever map will live in the downloaded maps folder. This one anyone can adjust just using a simple image editing tool like say MsPaint or GIMP or PS cause it’s only 3 colors. It’s also the easiest to run through the utilities (main is the tilebreaker, and then the polygon grabber) which tells tripleA what is a tile and where it’s boundaries are. The baseline image is the one used inside tripleA. I find it helpful to think of not so much as the map, but as a stencil.
The baseline can be used like a stencil to mask or to make selections from another image (in this case a topo) to create the relief map image. That relief is the thing that ultimately gets displayed to the player in-game. It’s like the fancy part that has all the border feathering or cloud effects and whatnot. The current relief is sort of a hackjob, cause I created the topo from a different map, then pulled it into this one at a reduced scale so it would just crush my rig. The difference between UHD and 4K is like a gang of ram, and many minutes for each layer. Like it works for me, cause I vaguely remember what I did in terms of the masking, like what selections I grabbed and how I hotkeyed the borders and such to be at whatever width, but it’s not terribly useful right now for the end user. Instead what I need to do is create a topo that matches the base 1:1.
That way anyone could just use the baseline and the topo to generate a new relief without having to do the extra steps, going back to the old relief and noodling the stuff, or replacing the pixels for whatever gets moved around or tweaked.
For the current UHD stuff, it’s a bit jank and bit off and just sorta impressionist I guess, the under part I mean, but I’m trying to clean it up a bit. If I can do the ocean layer and the land topo layer separately that might also be helpful in case someone just wants to tweak one part. Like all this stuff they do by selecting stuff using the baseline. So isolating just the white part, or just the blue basically, or just the black (and then modifying only that selection on whatever under image for the relief.) I used basically a combo of fill/copy/paste, and expand selection, feather and whatnot to an entire selection all at once, which is way faster than the noodling, but only if I get it set up like that first.
This is what I think would be cool…
A map relief that has the political boundaries with the borders all colored over with paint, like in the current display. For that one the player should be able to adjust the HEX colors that are painting over tiles in the map.props pretty much at 1:1. Basically supped up Iron Blitz in the look, or whatever I can cobble together that gets kinda close to that.
Then a map relief that has the political boundaries with the colors along the border lines. Basically looks more like the physical boards. Again for players to adjust the HEX colors to customize that but the colors are different. It’s just a different look and the colors read differently, basically you want them brighter relative to the topo (which right now is high saturation, cause I just desaturate it anyway so the colors show through) but on the map version that looks more like the physical board the overall read is pretty different. Not sure if it would even be interesting to most players, so I might just totally table that until I get this other one dialed, but ideally they’d just both be there so the player can choose.
Finally the one thing that I can’t really change in map props which is the ocean color. For that what I’d like to do I guess is have maybe 3 baselines where the blue is the control color. 1 darker (revised style) 1 lighter (modern) 1 very light (classic). I think then all the player has to do is run the tilebreaker on whatever base they prefer and I can get that blue to carry into the relief from the base. The current map isn’t like that, not for the UHD anyway, for that the relief has the ocean blue sz tiles stuff painted over as the topmost thing basically. But I also lazed out and forgot to save the last one, so sorta trying to re-figure out what I did last time lol.
Anyhow, ramble ramble, too many excuses. I’ll get on, I’m aiming for a Spring cleaning. Fingers crossed
Catch ya next round
