#2049 Missing fort and fortress images
FreeCol can display three different colony sizes (small, medium, large) for four levels of fortification (none, stockade, fort, fortress). It does this by selecting a resource in the form:
model.settlement.<size>.<fortification>.image
(omitting .<fortification> if none). Thus there are twelve distinct images that could be displayed. However we are missing three of them.
model.settlement.small.fort.image
model.settlement.small.fortress.image
model.settlement.medium.fortress.image
We currently work around this by using the immediately larger size image for the same fortification level, but a better solution would be to provide the missing images. Note that these are indeed valid possibilities--- while it is impossible to build advanced fortifications with a small population, once they are built it is possible to move sufficient population away that the colony is reduced in size category. Accordingly, I would suggest to anyone who works on this that the fort/fortress part remain the same size but the enclosed "town" part of the graphic show the difference in population.
On the dev tracker you (I mean developers in general) wrote about the idea to separate Fortifications and colony. This exact Idea, I wished to suggest myself, what with my plan to create different styles for different factions, that, depending on the number of of PoP-treshiolds could make 100s of images! But there would be an additional trick or two to that soultion... .
>>>I would suggest to anyone who works on this that the fort/fortress part remain the same size but the enclosed "town" part of the graphic show the difference in population.
I rather prefered (And, AAMOF, to hell with political correctness - I still prefer - lest you can give some arguments against it ) to make the Fortifications shrink with population.
Two reasons: First with the full, all size set of Forts images etc, the game will become more mod-friendly, allowing the people to set different tresholds of regiured population withought runnig out of graphics.
Second, While working on the graphics i gave it much thpught and came to conclusion that those images are just symbols, and the stockades "grow" with the town anyway. And while in the real life they don't shrink when populatuon decreases, the houses in the real lif also do not just disappear. Adding the possibility for a small, tight Fort with just few houses i it to exist, would add to game's diversity and thus realism.
(Naturally, I guess you can have what you would probably consider the best of both worlds - let the town shrink but the fort retain it's size while allowing smaller Fort sizes to exist to be used in custom rulesets... .)
Doh. I had a browser-resend incident, duplicated this BR, and now there are comments on each. Copying the comment from the other one here:
Date: 2011-01-04 23:32:51 CST
Sender: burschik
For additional bonus points, split up the current images into the town
part, the fortification behind the town and the fortification in front of
the town part. You can find the original images (with layers) here:
http://freecol.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/freecol/graphics/trunk/Colonies/
Do you wanna implement this in the upcoming relase?
If we get the graphics, then yes. Otherwise no.
Someone with Photoshop would need to check all files there: https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/code/HEAD/tree/graphics/trunk/Colonies/
Thanks for finding this. I can now open all files in Photoshop.
As far as I an tell, the files ending in 50.png are the exact same as the 50.psd files (size-wise that is). There are a bunch of layers for buildings and such, but that's the only major difference. That goes for all the .png files.
It is the base file that is truly important as it contains a much larger file that can be saved as a .png. I saved these an non-interlaced non-cropped PNG file for each directory.
These are nice. I'll see how to best use them (also requires a bit of coding).
I saw there are many more than 7 files with colonies in SVN (but could not look inside the psd), are there other colony-fortification-combinations?
Could you see if there are separate layers for the fortifications, which could be extracted, so we could recombine these with different colony sizes?
That would seem possible. In all of these files, pretty much everything is a layer. There are different layers for each part of some buildings, for example.
Some fortifications have quite a few different layers for the actual fortifications themselves, including examples of stand-alone elements that are later combined to make the whole fortification set.
I more carefully looked at the images you extracted and its a bit more complicated than I thought. The grass and shadows on the buildings are different, depending on if there is a fortification or not.
I'd like to keep as much of the available art as possible, even though not all combinations will be there. That means more work, as we need separate images for:
Then we could align these correctly, such that we can then do compositing (either in new game code or prerendered).
I'd then resize and pad them, such that they are whole tile overlays, all same size, like the forest images (currently they are all different sizes and drawn like resource icons, which makes them difficult to align correctly).
Btw., it would be nice if you had some savegame for me, where I could see all combinations, to test how it looks ingame and do the alignments.
Let's get this over with.
Committed in git.b463a53. Thanks for cleaning this up.
Just in case, if you happen to have higher resolution versions of these images -- the game would support these for zoomed in map viewing.