The "Whole ne UI" may be a bit of an overstatemen here, but hey' it's just 35$. So what's the worst that could happen. 10 new screens such as the Throne room, the European Dock, the Title screen etc, might come in handy.
I think the results may be interesting.
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-03-24
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I miss the old wooden AI but couldn't seem to get the legacy wooden AI mod working sadly.
A more modern UI would be interesting but I'm not sure if it can be solved with a bunch of images as how it's implemented in the game plays a big part.
Eg I would have loved to have put in the old Colonization Europe screen as a mod for myself but I think the FreeCol Europe background is a small paper pattern in title formation and may not support a large image sadly.
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Are you serious? I'm in all likehood the most conservative old Col nerd around here. But the graphics from that game is VGA. Itwouldn't fit! A new set of wooden graphics is the best we can have in Free Col.
Maybe we've came to the end of what can be achieved by trying to do be both old Col and Col2 at the same time. Maybe from here on out the old Col should receive the Master of Magic treatment. And Free Col should get a brand new 3D graphics.
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-10-05
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lol.. mate haven't you heard of the resize button, not to mention using proper upscaling tricks. ;)
Colonization for Windows had higher resolution backgrounds that were twice the size of the old the DOS version (see attached comparison image) so they'd upscale even better too. Speaking of the Master of Magic remake I don't know if you're on any of the MoM Discord groups but there's a fellow there making gorgeous AI upscaled versions of the old Wizard portraits to insert into the remake when it comes out (as some people hate the new Wizards MuHa are painting). Those old Wizard portraits are far smaller resolution than the Colonization backgrounds and the results look excellent.
Yeah but who's going to do all the work for a 3D remake of FreeCol? Even Mike hasn't really been here in ages. The project looks like it's not even being worked on anymore. Let's put things into perspective here... I'm sitting here sadly wondering if the FreeCol has finally reached the end of its life as the last of the team disappear and here you are at the same time saying "hey guys you should drop everything and remake the whole game in 3D!" haha. If I were you I'd start praying that the project isn't dead instead of praying for 3D remakes lol.
Glad that you've mentioned MoM. It is an excellent example. It has got the new pixel art and it is getting remade in 3D! And that's exactly my plan for Free Col. The advantages of a 3D engine include but are not limited to the ability to create a pool of assets to which different artists would be able to contribute over the years which makes it perfect for such an extremely long-haul project like Free COl. It will also take care of the 2D versus Iso and last but not least it will allow real upscaling and downscaling of the map.
I sure did hear of pixel art. Been doing it since the 1990s and that's how I know those tricks in 2021 are nothing but a crutch. You can still get away with this in a browser game like FoE but FreeCol needs as well as deserves better. And the random once-per-decade contributions, especially the ones consisting of assets 'stolen' from commercial games, which we cannot include in the Free Col package, will get us nowhere. Best of all, there is absolutely no conflict between the 3D graphics engine and using the good old Pixel art for FF's, backgrounds, Colonizopedia, etc. Let's have both!
Why don't we cut the charade. Did you talk to the guy, did he agree to redraw the Original Col art for us? Is that your surprise for our project, as well as the reason why you are being so direct? Please by all means feel free to surprise us! You can tell the gentleman, his contributions are gratefully welcome :)
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-11-15
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We have high resolution versions of most of the existing graphics. I think FreeCol would be improved immensely by just using what we already have.
Switching to 3D is possible, but will probably not happen until we have 3D models and good textures for almost everything (units, terrain etc). However, please note that any 3D model can be used right now in FreeCol if we just make a rendering with isometric projection.
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I could send you some Blender models both by me and other CC-0 or royalty free sources so that they do not get lost and can be used in future for Free Col graphics.
For what it's worth I intend to keep contributing and fixing some issues the goog old way. The fields are one example. Oh, and new trees certainly wouldn't hurt, because the new forrest, while effective, is none too pretty.
So you are saying it is possible to have 3D engine in Java game? This is interesting! As you know I am not tech savvy and everywhere I Google search 3D Engine for a new game, Unity pops up :)
I've already used a little bit of rasterized 3D for Freecol, BTW for the 2 sets of trade Goods. But the game is still using only one. And yeah I've been trying to do that just that with new colony images, I'd like to have at least two colony styles; Hispanic and northern. Ideally there should be a different style one for each nation. But it has proven to be a far larger task than I have anticipated.
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-11-15
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Yes, it is definitely possible. The hard work would be making all the 3D assets -- and making them good enough that a switch to 3D would be worth the development time (for me at least).
The work to add proper 3D to FreeCol is still massive -- even when using libraries meant for tile based games.
In any case, we should start by having high quality renders of 3D models in our existing 2D engine.
BTW, FreeCol is written in Java. We would not be using Unity as this would force a rewrite of the entire code. If we wanted something like Unity, it would be a library like jMonkeyEngine or libGDX.
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I forgot how to swap the files in the repository myself; Strange that there is only one type of fields. No even and odd like most terrains and small size only.
Gee, It's been a while :)
I hope it looks OK in the game!
I've got only this one but it's not hard to make, it won't loose much on rescalling. It's just some dirt and some turf :> Where are the BIG terrain graphics located anyway. I was looking for them, but once again, I couldn't find them. That is why once again I did only the 128x64 version. I'm, considering making fields deluxe for each terrain types. I you want it can be in 256x128.
Could we have more variety of center tiles. like Center1, Center2, Center3 etc? This could allow for making the terrains look much more diverse with very little effort; Especially on the large maps.
I've made some new terrains before, even a nearly complete new set. It was lost tragically to a disc failure and I never got around to submitting a full one. It has proven very difficult to do right. Greener grass might seem to look better on its own, but it also makes the small imperfections of intersecting borders significantly more visible...
I've got only this one but it's not hard to make, it won't loose much on rescalling. It's just some dirt and some turf :> Where are the BIG terrain graphics located anyway. I was looking for them, but once again, I couldn't find them. That is why once again I did only the 128x64 version. I'm, considering making fields deluxe for each terrain types. I you want it can be in 256x128.
I don't know if the new terrain graphics have higher resolution versions available. Older terrain graphics, units and a lot of other stuff do have that:
The code has supported high resolution images since 2004, but it was not a good idea to increase the resolution for the distributed images at that time as high dpi screens were uncommon (the download size of the game would have been much larger with almost no benefit). Now, however, small 4K screens are much more common.
Could we have more variety of center tiles. like Center1, Center2, Center3 etc? This could allow for making the terrains look much more diverse with very little effort; Especially on the large maps.
Yes, this is possible (and easy).
Somewhat more work: We could also change the rendering method. An alternate method of rendering the base terrain would be having large repeating textures. We could then use clipping for applying that texture to the correct tiles -- and have automatic alpha blending for the transitions between base terrain types. Another possibility is using the same method as Wesnoth. that is having images for specific combinations of tiles.
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Alpha blending. I LOVE IT! The position-sensitive tile system is also interesting. Perhaps a combination of both methods?! Whatever works best. This new method would be especially useful to enable efficient adding of new terrain types and varieties of the existing ones!
How long would it take to implement this? If you need some help, why don't we hire some Indentured servants from outside. There is plenty of talented young Java coders looking for gigs on Fiverr and such... :)
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-11-22
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In theory it should be possible already to add higher resolution versions for nearly all images.
It only requires adding a second key for some use into the right config file and adding something like ".a2" to the end (might be a different letter but there is a few examples in existing config for all images where I could get a higher resolution version). The code will load both versions at init and then use the most appropriate size before scaling. Sadly the scaling code could not be made perfect because of AWT/Swing problems, that is why I would suggest always having the standard size available and then optionally adding exact double size, maybe half size, maybe quadruple size. For testing you can resize the map with +,- and should also try the --gui-scale=... command line option (I hope I remembered the option name right).
There should be a similar mechanism for adding alternative images of tiles through more such keys with a different key suffix (see config file for example). This may not be supported for all tiletypes, but should be easy to verify and extend when images are available.
As for changing how the tiles are combined, I'd not put much hope into extending the AWT/Swing stuff to get nice looking or even consistent blending between OS/Java versions. Its a strangely restricted API that may or may not GPU-accelerate something and switch over to a different blending formula thats unspecified. A long time ago I had the idea/dream to replace all the image handling and map drawing with something like LWJGL to have more precise control and possibly better performance. I had given up on that, but would still think that would be the better way forward. Though, I'd suggest you stay with 2D to keep code simple. This is all dreams though and I think seeing an actual release would be more urgent.
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I'm OK with 2D for the time being, though I'm eagerly looking forward to the upgrade of the Tile system, since I believe we've reached the limits of the current setup. Providing new 256x128 Isometric graphics won't be a problem.
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Speaking from my years of experience, you know what my biggest difficulty was? Connecting them goddamn tiles! The flat tiles are easy peasy once you get the seamless iso picture right. The Hills and the Mountains are a quick fix. But borders, rivers and beaches is where problems really begin. Whenever I'd add the Alpha blending to my image (It's a fancy way to say I've been using the rubber tool in Photoshop with <100% opacity, you know, just to make the graphics look at least halfway decent rather then like something drawn by a child in Microsoft Paint, I could never, no matter how hard I tried, get those pieces to connect perfectly in the game, until I gave up and quit in dismay.
If there was a fool-proof built-in engine way to take care of this, it would solve most of my issues with graphics and I would be able to provide a brand new 256X128 iso 2D set probably within weeks.
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-11-27
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I have been analyzing the terrain graphics we have right now, and found that several images have pixels where they should not. The drawing algorithm is based on the assumption that there is no overlap between center and borders images. One example is “savannah/center1.png” that extends beyond the center tile (see "problemA.png" for the resulting problem).
This problem is easily fixed for our current graphics: The map looks better after simply removing the out-of-bounds pixels (see "solutionA.png").
@misiulo: I am guessing the difficulties of getting a good transition for rivers (and other terrain types) was caused by the graphics you made having unintended overlap.
Another place we have unintended overlap is while zooming in on the map. The reason for this is that we resize the images using smoothing -- which should not be done on base tiles (this is a regression as the code for separate handling of base tiles was removed). See "problemB.png" for the renderind issue, and "solutionB-1.png" with the simplest solution (just deactivating smoothing while resizing).
I have noticed another possible regression: Units are no longer displayed behind the trees, hills and mountains from neighboring tiles. Was this an intended change or a regression?
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Yes resizing is a bitch. It ruins the seamlesness for example. The one solution for 2D I know is to have 2 (or more) sizes premade. BTW, my newest creation:
There are some artists on Fiverr doing really good work ridiculously cheap;
How about I pay this person to create a whole new UI for Free Col: https://www.fiverr.com/ziardmohomed/design-your-game-and-application-ui?context_referrer=gig_page&source=recommended_in_sc&ref_ctx_id=e8b32acbc692406135e0d22b3a7601b8&context=recommendation&pckg_id=1&pos=2&mod=cr&is_pro=false&context_alg=gig_views_graph ?
The "Whole ne UI" may be a bit of an overstatemen here, but hey' it's just 35$. So what's the worst that could happen. 10 new screens such as the Throne room, the European Dock, the Title screen etc, might come in handy.
I think the results may be interesting.
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-03-24
I miss the old wooden AI but couldn't seem to get the legacy wooden AI mod working sadly.
A more modern UI would be interesting but I'm not sure if it can be solved with a bunch of images as how it's implemented in the game plays a big part.
Eg I would have loved to have put in the old Colonization Europe screen as a mod for myself but I think the FreeCol Europe background is a small paper pattern in title formation and may not support a large image sadly.
Are you serious? I'm in all likehood the most conservative old Col nerd around here. But the graphics from that game is VGA. Itwouldn't fit! A new set of wooden graphics is the best we can have in Free Col.
Maybe we've came to the end of what can be achieved by trying to do be both old Col and Col2 at the same time. Maybe from here on out the old Col should receive the Master of Magic treatment. And Free Col should get a brand new 3D graphics.
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-10-05
lol.. mate haven't you heard of the resize button, not to mention using proper upscaling tricks. ;)
Colonization for Windows had higher resolution backgrounds that were twice the size of the old the DOS version (see attached comparison image) so they'd upscale even better too. Speaking of the Master of Magic remake I don't know if you're on any of the MoM Discord groups but there's a fellow there making gorgeous AI upscaled versions of the old Wizard portraits to insert into the remake when it comes out (as some people hate the new Wizards MuHa are painting). Those old Wizard portraits are far smaller resolution than the Colonization backgrounds and the results look excellent.
Yeah but who's going to do all the work for a 3D remake of FreeCol? Even Mike hasn't really been here in ages. The project looks like it's not even being worked on anymore. Let's put things into perspective here... I'm sitting here sadly wondering if the FreeCol has finally reached the end of its life as the last of the team disappear and here you are at the same time saying "hey guys you should drop everything and remake the whole game in 3D!" haha. If I were you I'd start praying that the project isn't dead instead of praying for 3D remakes lol.
(Click to expand)
Last edit: Blake 2021-10-06
Glad that you've mentioned MoM. It is an excellent example. It has got the new pixel art and it is getting remade in 3D! And that's exactly my plan for Free Col. The advantages of a 3D engine include but are not limited to the ability to create a pool of assets to which different artists would be able to contribute over the years which makes it perfect for such an extremely long-haul project like Free COl. It will also take care of the 2D versus Iso and last but not least it will allow real upscaling and downscaling of the map.
I sure did hear of pixel art. Been doing it since the 1990s and that's how I know those tricks in 2021 are nothing but a crutch. You can still get away with this in a browser game like FoE but FreeCol needs as well as deserves better. And the random once-per-decade contributions, especially the ones consisting of assets 'stolen' from commercial games, which we cannot include in the Free Col package, will get us nowhere. Best of all, there is absolutely no conflict between the 3D graphics engine and using the good old Pixel art for FF's, backgrounds, Colonizopedia, etc. Let's have both!
Why don't we cut the charade. Did you talk to the guy, did he agree to redraw the Original Col art for us? Is that your surprise for our project, as well as the reason why you are being so direct? Please by all means feel free to surprise us! You can tell the gentleman, his contributions are gratefully welcome :)
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-11-15
We have high resolution versions of most of the existing graphics. I think FreeCol would be improved immensely by just using what we already have.
Switching to 3D is possible, but will probably not happen until we have 3D models and good textures for almost everything (units, terrain etc). However, please note that any 3D model can be used right now in FreeCol if we just make a rendering with isometric projection.
Why are we still using my horrible MS Paint graphics for stuff like plowed fields while putting better images in mods? :-O
I could send you some Blender models both by me and other CC-0 or royalty free sources so that they do not get lost and can be used in future for Free Col graphics.
For what it's worth I intend to keep contributing and fixing some issues the goog old way. The fields are one example. Oh, and new trees certainly wouldn't hurt, because the new forrest, while effective, is none too pretty.
So you are saying it is possible to have 3D engine in Java game? This is interesting! As you know I am not tech savvy and everywhere I Google search 3D Engine for a new game, Unity pops up :)
I've already used a little bit of rasterized 3D for Freecol, BTW for the 2 sets of trade Goods. But the game is still using only one. And yeah I've been trying to do that just that with new colony images, I'd like to have at least two colony styles; Hispanic and northern. Ideally there should be a different style one for each nation. But it has proven to be a far larger task than I have anticipated.
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-11-15
Yes, it is definitely possible. The hard work would be making all the 3D assets -- and making them good enough that a switch to 3D would be worth the development time (for me at least).
The work to add proper 3D to FreeCol is still massive -- even when using libraries meant for tile based games.
In any case, we should start by having high quality renders of 3D models in our existing 2D engine.
BTW, FreeCol is written in Java. We would not be using Unity as this would force a rewrite of the entire code. If we wanted something like Unity, it would be a library like jMonkeyEngine or libGDX.
I forgot how to swap the files in the repository myself; Strange that there is only one type of fields. No even and odd like most terrains and small size only.
Gee, It's been a while :)
I hope it looks OK in the game!
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-11-16
Nice :-)
Do you have higher resolution versions of those images? ...or have they been made specifically for this size?
I've got only this one but it's not hard to make, it won't loose much on rescalling. It's just some dirt and some turf :> Where are the BIG terrain graphics located anyway. I was looking for them, but once again, I couldn't find them. That is why once again I did only the 128x64 version. I'm, considering making fields deluxe for each terrain types. I you want it can be in 256x128.
Could we have more variety of center tiles. like Center1, Center2, Center3 etc? This could allow for making the terrains look much more diverse with very little effort; Especially on the large maps.
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-11-21
I've made some new terrains before, even a nearly complete new set. It was lost tragically to a disc failure and I never got around to submitting a full one. It has proven very difficult to do right. Greener grass might seem to look better on its own, but it also makes the small imperfections of intersecting borders significantly more visible...
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-11-21
I don't know if the new terrain graphics have higher resolution versions available. Older terrain graphics, units and a lot of other stuff do have that:
https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/code/HEAD/tree/graphics/trunk/
The code has supported high resolution images since 2004, but it was not a good idea to increase the resolution for the distributed images at that time as high dpi screens were uncommon (the download size of the game would have been much larger with almost no benefit). Now, however, small 4K screens are much more common.
Yes, this is possible (and easy).
Somewhat more work: We could also change the rendering method. An alternate method of rendering the base terrain would be having large repeating textures. We could then use clipping for applying that texture to the correct tiles -- and have automatic alpha blending for the transitions between base terrain types. Another possibility is using the same method as Wesnoth. that is having images for specific combinations of tiles.
Alpha blending. I LOVE IT! The position-sensitive tile system is also interesting. Perhaps a combination of both methods?! Whatever works best. This new method would be especially useful to enable efficient adding of new terrain types and varieties of the existing ones!
How long would it take to implement this? If you need some help, why don't we hire some Indentured servants from outside. There is plenty of talented young Java coders looking for gigs on Fiverr and such... :)
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-11-22
In theory it should be possible already to add higher resolution versions for nearly all images.
It only requires adding a second key for some use into the right config file and adding something like ".a2" to the end (might be a different letter but there is a few examples in existing config for all images where I could get a higher resolution version). The code will load both versions at init and then use the most appropriate size before scaling. Sadly the scaling code could not be made perfect because of AWT/Swing problems, that is why I would suggest always having the standard size available and then optionally adding exact double size, maybe half size, maybe quadruple size. For testing you can resize the map with +,- and should also try the
--gui-scale=...command line option (I hope I remembered the option name right).There should be a similar mechanism for adding alternative images of tiles through more such keys with a different key suffix (see config file for example). This may not be supported for all tiletypes, but should be easy to verify and extend when images are available.
As for changing how the tiles are combined, I'd not put much hope into extending the AWT/Swing stuff to get nice looking or even consistent blending between OS/Java versions. Its a strangely restricted API that may or may not GPU-accelerate something and switch over to a different blending formula thats unspecified. A long time ago I had the idea/dream to replace all the image handling and map drawing with something like LWJGL to have more precise control and possibly better performance. I had given up on that, but would still think that would be the better way forward. Though, I'd suggest you stay with 2D to keep code simple. This is all dreams though and I think seeing an actual release would be more urgent.
I'm OK with 2D for the time being, though I'm eagerly looking forward to the upgrade of the Tile system, since I believe we've reached the limits of the current setup. Providing new 256x128 Isometric graphics won't be a problem.
Speaking from my years of experience, you know what my biggest difficulty was? Connecting them goddamn tiles! The flat tiles are easy peasy once you get the seamless iso picture right. The Hills and the Mountains are a quick fix. But borders, rivers and beaches is where problems really begin. Whenever I'd add the Alpha blending to my image (It's a fancy way to say I've been using the rubber tool in Photoshop with <100% opacity, you know, just to make the graphics look at least halfway decent rather then like something drawn by a child in Microsoft Paint, I could never, no matter how hard I tried, get those pieces to connect perfectly in the game, until I gave up and quit in dismay.
If there was a fool-proof built-in engine way to take care of this, it would solve most of my issues with graphics and I would be able to provide a brand new 256X128 iso 2D set probably within weeks.
Last edit: Misiulo 2021-11-27
I have been analyzing the terrain graphics we have right now, and found that several images have pixels where they should not. The drawing algorithm is based on the assumption that there is no overlap between center and borders images. One example is “savannah/center1.png” that extends beyond the center tile (see "problemA.png" for the resulting problem).
This problem is easily fixed for our current graphics: The map looks better after simply removing the out-of-bounds pixels (see "solutionA.png").
This raises the question how we can avoid such problems in the future. Some possibilities:
@misiulo: I am guessing the difficulties of getting a good transition for rivers (and other terrain types) was caused by the graphics you made having unintended overlap.
Another place we have unintended overlap is while zooming in on the map. The reason for this is that we resize the images using smoothing -- which should not be done on base tiles (this is a regression as the code for separate handling of base tiles was removed). See "problemB.png" for the renderind issue, and "solutionB-1.png" with the simplest solution (just deactivating smoothing while resizing).
I have noticed another possible regression: Units are no longer displayed behind the trees, hills and mountains from neighboring tiles. Was this an intended change or a regression?
Yes resizing is a bitch. It ruins the seamlesness for example. The one solution for 2D I know is to have 2 (or more) sizes premade. BTW, my newest creation:
Nice image :-)
Seamless scaling can be supported in the engine like it was earlier. The trick is just not having interpolation on the edges.
However, premade sizes can be made to look much better than any automatic scaling we can do.