xu4 is looking for texture artists!
Darren from the xu4 project is wondering whether anyone out there would be interested in making art — or custom textures — for xu4. Were someone interested, Darren is confident that he could make the process of adding custom art into xu4 very easy; he might even be able to add additional features such as:
- More than 4 frames for tile animations
- Sex-specific tiles for classes
- Special tiles for special NPCs
- Variations on the same types of tile (ie: grass, trees, forests, etc)
- Spell special effect tiles
- Special weapon attack tiles or sprites
Of course, this all only works if people out there are interested in helping generate content in the form of textures, tiles, sprites, and animation frames. Individual artists wouldn’t need to create comprehensive texture sets; Darren could find ways to make incorporating even specific details a relatively easy task…if people would be interested in that sort of thing.
So, Dragons and Dragonettes: what say you? Drop a comment below, or drop me an email (I’ll forward it to Darren) if you’d be willing to contribute some content and some time!
I’d be interested in discussing implementing algorithms that increased the texture complexity in whatever way is possible with the engine, as well as providing some test textures.
It’s basically already been implemented by prior members of the xu4 team. You just need to specify the graphics file with the tile in xml, the number of tiles, dimensions, etc. In the source code, there is actually an added guard tile that has 4 frames vs the default 2. There is room for improvement, I’m sure.
I was brainstorming an idea however that you might be interested in contributing to — basically the idea of smoothing out transitions between tile types. IE: grass to ocean / grass to rivers. I imagine that a clever algorithm analyzing the surrounding area could choose/generate an appropriate mask to make rivers and shores look less blocky.
Come on over to #xu4 @ freenode some time.
Sorry, I meant ‘in the current repository version, there is a 4-frame guard tile added when VGA mode is selected’. Also, what I referred to as ‘already implemented’ only applies to tile replacement.
Someone also implemented a clever algorithm for animating the fireplace with pixel manipulation. It looks pretty nice. It would be fun to work on spell effects like that, or animating rotating magic axes, etc.
Yes, that’s what I was thinking too. There are severe limitations to having just one tile to represent a type of land cover. No matter how good you make the one tile, it’s still obvious that it’s a tile, even seamless. I’m going to be working on Sanctimonia tonight, but will hook up some time tomorrow in IRC if you like.
May I just pause for a moment to say…that this sort of inter-dev collaboration is both a) awesome and b) something I desperately hope I’m able to help foster (or give context to) between other Ultima-related and Ultima-inspired projects in the future.
Because damn…it’s just cool to see.