Battle for Craglorn - Alpha/Early Testing Thread

Tannenbernie

@rogercooper Ah yes that makes sense.

Bringing in a Victory condition should make it possible to win i hope.
And making a clone with a 2vs2 setup is on the map anyways so that one should be winnable.

Thx for the advice.

Cernel

@tannenbernie I wonder why no Elves? It seems that you have picked the most common fantasy species/races/peoples except the Elves, which I would argue are more common and folkloristic than the Ratmen (as I'm not actually aware that Ratmen exist in folklore at all, differently from Dwarves, Orks and Elves).

Also, I would expect Ogres to be part of the Orks instead of the Humans as they are basically giant Orks. I would rather expect Orks to have Ogres and Humans to have Giants in their ranks if at all.

Personally, I don't like the Ogres in the Empire of Men list: they apparently are the only units which are not human. I would either have two more non-human units or remove the Ogres and have the humans as purely realistic (but this is just my preference).

Are you drawing from or picturing some established fantasy universe, or is this your own fantasy world?

About the skin, the Units Table in the map is terribly blurred. It's eye-bleeding... Just get rid of it and disable the east-west wrapping: notes do not belong to the map anyway.

Talking about units, don't just dump all your units in the main folder... You are supposed to make one folder for every faction and have in the main folder only those units whose images are shared by all factions (and maybe also those which are unique to the Neutral pseudo-player, but you can put them in a "Neutral" folder as well). In your case, the only image which should be in the "units" main folder is the "City" (and maybe also the four Neutral units). This will make the Units Help window actually helpful (though it is basically useless if you make a very good table in the notes).

Tannenbernie

@cernel said in Battle for Craglorn - Alpha/Early Testing Thread:

@tannenbernie I wonder why no Elves? It seems that you have picked the most common fantasy species/races/peoples except the Elves, which I would argue are more common and folkloristic than the Ratmen (as I'm not actually aware that Ratmen exist in folklore at all, differently from Dwarves, Orks and Elves).

Hoi. I was looking for another "evil" species, so the "good" dwarves and men have another evil counterpart together with the orks. In the warhammer universe its quite common to play Ratmen, which are called "Skaven" there. I did not want to "steal" that name, no idea if it would bring copyright problems.

My actual version 0.2, which i am working on, is 2vs2, so Dwarves and Men vs Orks and Rats, which seems more easy to win and balance.

Also, I would expect Ogres to be part of the Orks instead of the Humans as they are basically giant Orks. I would rather expect Orks to have Ogres and Humans to have Giants in their ranks if at all.

You have a good point here. I will think over the "big guys" for the four factions again. Im also not so happy with the troll in the dwarf army. There needs to be some more thinking on those by my side.

Personally, I don't like the Ogres in the Empire of Men list: they apparently are the only units which are not human. I would either have two more non-human units or remove the Ogres and have the humans as purely realistic (but this is just my preference).

In the older books of Warhammer the Ogres were natural part of the Empire army, so i just took that over. Bur you are right again, i will have to think about the "big guys", in all four armies.

Are you drawing from or picturing some established fantasy universe, or is this your own fantasy world?

Basically i oriented myself at the Warhammer Fantasy setup, bringing in four of the many armies: Empire, Dwarves, Orks and Skaven.

About the skin, the Units Table in the map is terribly blurred. It's eye-bleeding... Just get rid of it and disable the east-west wrapping: notes do not belong to the map anyway.

Yes it was a screenshot which was then changed in size ... ah well, i will think of something else there. It was supposed to help testers find their way around in so many different units.

Talking about units, don't just dump all your units in the main folder... You are supposed to make one folder for every faction and have in the main folder only those units whose images are shared by all factions (and maybe also those which are unique to the Neutral pseudo-player, but you can put them in a "Neutral" folder as well). In your case, the only image which should be in the "units" main folder is the "City" (and maybe also the four Neutral units). This will make the Units Help window actually helpful (though it is basically useless if you make a very good table in the notes).

Ok, will do that.

Actually i worked a bit at some first units.
What do you think, good enough to use or crap?

Empire of Men - Spearman 72px:

Empire of Men - Lancer 72px:

Empire of Men - Reiksguard 72px:

Cernel

@tannenbernie I personally think that simple things are definitely good enough. Something less defined lets your imagination complete it. However, those units make me think more about ancient near-eastern armies than medieval armies, but that may be just me.

I think that, at least originally, the humans in the Warhammer universe were actually mostly evil or at most in between of good and evil, and the fight between them was a matter of law against chaos rather than good against evil.

Tannenbernie

@cernel said in Battle for Craglorn - Alpha/Early Testing Thread:

I think that, at least originally, the humans in the Warhammer universe were actually mostly evil or at most in between of good and evil, and the fight between them was a matter of law against chaos rather than good against evil.

Mmmh you probably get that mixed up with Warhammer40k, where humanity is united under an semi-evil dictator-god, fighting for survival vs Chaos. In Warhammer Fantasy the Tribes of Men were united by Sigmar, the most holy of good heroes, to fight for their right to live vs the Ork Hordes. That was the beginning of the human Empire.

The fight vs Chaos as a new faction which fights both good and evil was indeed also introduced in the Warhammer universe. Still, both Men and Dwarves fight vs evil hordes of Orks and Skaven as well as vs the Hordes of Chaos, be it blood-thirsty warriors of Khorne or plague-fallen followers of Nurgle.

RogerCooper

@tannenbernie The Reiksguard seems to be on the short side. You might want to change his pose and make him the same height as the spearman.

Tannenbernie

@rogercooper said in Battle for Craglorn - Alpha/Early Testing Thread:

@tannenbernie The Reiksguard seems to be on the short side. You might want to change his pose and make him the same height as the spearman.

Ya that seems to be a general problem. If you look at these three, then i would say the Reiksguard and the Lancer are of equal size while the spearman is much bigger. Reason is that all three have only 72px of room. The Lancer shares the room with his horse, the Reiksguard raises his sword which steals much of the room. Only the Spearman fits well into the 72px square so he is biggest.

Actually i have no idea yet how to solve that. A Rider on horse is of course bigger than a foot soldier, but both can only have the same 72px square. So the Rider himself will always be smaller. Also depending on pose and weapons the foot soldiers will look different size when all brought to same 72px.

Is there a common solution to that problem, any hints?

Thx and cheers

TheDog

@tannenbernie
Yes dont bother with trying to have correct size images.
A Giant and a Goblin will appear about the same size, but the iconography should be good enough to distinguish the two, although the the Giant should obviously be bigger.

If you dont like the above, then truncate the lower half of the horse and the Giants lower torso to give a bit more realism in the image sizes.

Cernel

@tannenbernie The common solution here in TripleA is not giving a damn about it, which is probably what you'll have to do if you'll have wildly differently sized creatures (How many pixels for a Goblin if an Ogre is 72?), yet I wouldn't discourage you from keeping all non-giant on-foot humanoids realistically scaled. It's not a crime to leave a lot of pixels non-used... In the particular case raised by @RogerCooper, you could keep dimensional consistency between Spearman and Reiksguard by making the Spearman smaller, leaving a lot of transparent pixels (contrary to the suggestion of @RogerCooper of making the Reiksguard bigger instead).

Besides, I don't know if you have pikemen or anyway warriors having very long weapons which would be very challenging to fit too.

By the way, you are leaving the images background transparent right? I assumed that the grey background was just for showing here.

My main suggestion is not getting bogged down too much by perfectionism: try to finish all images and have it done, then you can go back anytime tweaking whatever.

RogerCooper

@tannenbernie I thought the pose of Reiksguard looks a bit odd and his sword is the length of his entire body. But don't worry about art details too much.

Tannenbernie

Good arguments!

Ok i will follow your advice and forget about that atm.

@Cernel: No, no transparency yet. I dont know anything about graphic stuff, so i will have to get into it slowly step by step.

TheDog

Try this, an Icon Editor called Greenfish icon editor pro its free, I use it
http://greenfishsoftware.org/gfie.php#apage

Cernel

@tannenbernie It does not have to be transparent, though a non transparent square is unlikely to look good unless it is something abstract.

For non abstract units, I think that the best alternative to a transparent background is a circular background, which anyway requires transparency given that image files are rectangular (or square).

For example, you could have an 80 pixels per axis background like this one,
+80.png

over which you could draw the units you want (like these ones).

If you don't want to learn how to handle transparency just yet, you can use this image, being careful to keep your drawing within the monotone gray zone,
++80.png

as it will be very easy to then turn the black outside the circle to transparency.

However, having a transparent background is preferable because it is neutral and is much easier to add a background than to remove it so giving you the option to decide about the background thereafter with ease, comprising opting for keeping it purely transparent.

Tannenbernie

Good advice from both of you. I agree, it will be much better with transparency, so i am willing to go for that for my final version.
As for my version 0.2, half of the models with background are finished so i will just finish the rest too. Even without transparency the map will be much more fun to play that way.

I will probably look into greenfish already while workig on 0.2, to see if i get a hook on it.

@edit:
Oh one more thing:
I found that i can make the background the same color as the map territories, belonging to the respective race. So the Empire background is the same grey as the empire territory, so it looks like tranparency as long as you do not go on allied territory.

Cheers

TheDog

@tannenbernie
How goes the project?

.
A Connection issue FOT9 to FOT10

Tannenbernie

@thedog Hi there

Thx for the connection bug, i also found a few. I have finished replacing the symbol-armies with better-looking figurine-armies. Also the game is now 2vs2 which seems much better for the balancing.

My plan is to fix the last few connection bugs and then bring on a new version of the map. With the better graphics it should be better playable.

Now the question: How do i do that? All that github stuff is so confusing. New version, new release, new whatever. At the moment i am still confused and do not really know how to bring on a new version. Maybe a tip for me?

Thx and cheers,
Bernd

TheDog

My preferred method of delivering updates is Google Drive, its quick and very easy to share a zip.
See here
https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/3326/1941-global-command-decision-official-thread?page=1

I always point the downloader back to the first post. So the downloader knows where to go.
Serialize your versions ie. v005 v010 v015 etc

For GitHub, hopefully you have a separate folder for GitHub uploading/syncing (dont user your development/downloads folder)

Also I hope you are using GitHub Desktop
https://desktop.github.com/

Tannenbernie

@thedog Ok i will take your advice and look into Google, GitHub is just too strange to me.

Short question on the connections-file. I had been under the impression that changing the file and then reloading the map would do the trick. But the bug is still there. Do i have to reload the connections somewhere to activate the change?

TheDog

Yes just adding in
<connection t1="FOT9" t2="NO10"/>
should work

However, on your GitHub download the xml was called battle_for_craglorn.xml.xml
note the duplicated xml, remove one of those, try that.

When testing your Google Drive share use 'anyone with this link' and use say Firefox (a browser with no direct access to your Google Account) to test the download.

Tannenbernie

Ok i am basically ready for my version v0.2.
I have added everything but the connection problem.
If i can fix the problem in next 1-2 days then i will bring it into v0.2.
If not then the bug will stay and i will try to fix it for next version.

What i found is that the "connection.txt" does nothing. I did even completely delete it and the game would still start. I has all the connections including the buggy one.
No matter what i change in the connections.txt, it does nothing to the game. I did just delete some connections but when starting the game they were all there.
So it seems that the information from the connections.txt has already beed read in and is used somewhere in the other files. I have just no idea how to re-read it in again to make changes work.