Custom Minimap Tiles for Mapping

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Custom Minimap Tiles for Mapping

Postby imrielle » Mon Feb 10, 2014 1:17 am

I am working on tweaking the minimap tiles for much, much smaller map files, to use with various mapping projects (your own, Pistolshrimp's, the Tribe's, whoever's - really don't care what they are used for).

Here are some example screenshots, merged into one image:
Image

Foldersize for topleft minimap (9x9 tiles) before: 160KB, after: 36KB

Download link: http://www.sendspace.com/file/mwjqhs
These go into (on win7): C:\Users\YourName\Salem\custom_res


This is the current upload. I am still tweaking these, as suggested:

iamah wrote:here's the same patch comparison
Image
I'd experiment with darker colors or something to see if the map icons could show up more... they seem a bit too similar in texture now


The similar texture part will most likely not change - these do use identical "textures", the icons and the tiles are both flat, one color things. This was done so that the map tiles will be as small as possible - the more colors used, the larger the files.

What I am tweaking are colors. The current uploads colors were pulled out of the default tilesets so that they would match as closely as possible, however, for certain ones, they do need to be darker - particularly what I refer to as the "puke forest" biome - I think it might actually be called the autumnal forest or some such. The default colors are eye searing. Here are the current, somewhat darker colors:
Image

Thoughts, feedback and suggestions are welcome. If you'd like a quickly tossed together preview of the tiles loading faster in an actual map, here is the small 350'ish tile area I mapped for size/speed/crash testing purposes (none of the biomes crashed the game, btw, swamp is missing from this, but one of my legion of mappers was near enough one to test that, too): http://vixyn.us/salem/map1.html
These also load into the Salem Map Tool pretty much instantly. :ugeek:
Image
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Re: Custom Minimap Tiles for Mapping

Postby Droj » Mon Feb 10, 2014 11:56 am

neat, I was thinking of tweaking the colour index myself to lower the overall bandwidth cost. =)
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Re: Custom Minimap Tiles for Mapping

Postby alloin » Mon Feb 10, 2014 2:05 pm

I never had problems with filesizes & bandwith problems.
Can't you just let photoshop render the files with lesser colors ?

I might rewrite some code & make a public map now for the new world, depends if someone else is gonna do the same or not.
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Re: Custom Minimap Tiles for Mapping

Postby imrielle » Mon Feb 10, 2014 2:36 pm

alloin wrote:I never had problems with filesizes & bandwith problems.
Can't you just let photoshop render the files with lesser colors ?

The filesize isn't exactly a bandwidth issue for me, its more of an "its takes forever for my home PC to merge a lot of large maps" issue. My home PC is not a monster, sadly, with only a 3.2Ghz Dual Core CPU and 4GB of ram. While I can use my work PC (which we recently updated to an i7-4960X, 32Gigs of Ram) - I go into work maybe once a month and do most of it from home.

alloin wrote:I might rewrite some code & make a public map now for the new world, depends if someone else is gonna do the same or not.

I'm planning on an online map, but I'd happily just hand tiles over to you, or work with you on it.
Thats what these tiles are for, really. They're smaller and load into the different map tools much faster, so merging maps etc is faster. Means I spend less time working on maps and have more time for watching porn playing the game.
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Re: Custom Minimap Tiles for Mapping

Postby pistolshrimp » Mon Feb 24, 2014 12:03 am

Closing out my thread. This may be relevant to have in this thread tho.


Chiprel wrote:Imrielle hai! Something for you below ;)

Installing:
1. Download and install: http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html (using 1.1.12 for win myself)
2. Download quicklisp and save it on D:\ ( http://beta.quicklisp.org/quicklisp.lisp )
3. Run cmd. Go to D:\ and type sbcl. After that type: (load "quicklisp.lisp")
Image

3a. Now type: Image

3b. Now type: Image

4. Close the window and go to yourUSER/quicklisp/local-projects and unzip salem-layer-util in there so it looks like on pic. (https://github.com/boshaw/salem-layer-util/archive/master.zip)
Image


Decoding/coding:
1. Put res directory on D:\
2. Now run cmd on D: drive and type sbcl then type: (ql:quickload "salem-layer-util")
Image
3. Now to decode all files in 'res' folder type:
(slu:run :mode :da
:skip-old nil
:verbose nil
:args '("res" "dec"))
Image
Image
4. Now you have all decoded stuff in 'd:\dec'. Edit whatever you want and check point 5.
5. To encode it back to .res files type:
(slu:run :mode :ea
:args '("dec" "new-res"))
Image
Image
6. Put files back to custom_res and have fun.
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