Graphics Pack NOW AVAILABLE!!!
Yeah, I finally finished it and I'm tired. Tomorrow I'll make a dedicated thread for it, but for now, I'll just give you all a nice happy linky-link.
http://db.tt/RgMxt3Gd <--There it is! (updated April 20th)
Extract it in your "[usename]/Salem" folder provided by Ender's client, and then run it and you're off to pixeltopia. Yayyyy pixels!
...Wait, if I love pixels so much, then why did I just spend a week eliminating 90% of them?
Anyways I'm tired and my work here is done.
Old post below:
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This past week I've been working on making a graphics set of my own to satisfy the needs of my poor laptop's integrated graphics card.
My goal has been to balance two conflicting factors:
-High performance
-Still looks good
Looking through Salem's unpacked resource files, I am continually appalled by the ludicrously high resolutions being applied to the most trivial of objects. Default terrain textures are 128x128 pixels, which is really quite a lot of pixels when you sit down to think about it.
128x: Allows for wonderfully smooth and detailed biome boundaries. Sooo pretty!
64x: Indistinguishable except when zoomed in
32x: Looks a tad pixelated, but few noticeable distortions
16x: Pixels are obvious, but the overall character of a texture is preserved
8x: Many textures lose important details, and things look blurry overall. This is where I'm at!
4x: Why are you even bothering?
2x: You call this a texture? I've got a word for it...
1x: Pure Minimalism.
Between 16x and 8x is the "**** Threshold", and 8x8 is where I decided to do my work. This requires an artistic tightrope walk which is rather more difficult than just globally reducing texture resolutions, because you run into problems where the lines between features end up being as fat as the things they were supposed to delineate. If you aren't careful, a field of flowers becomes a greenish blur, wooden floors become an inconsistently stripey mess, and cobblestone is indistinguishable from gravel. (Other textures like "grass" are a piece of cake though.)
Making sure an 8x8 texture looks good and preserves the character of the original tile takes a lot of tweaking and testing, but I believe the overall results are favorable. Here is an example of a forested area that I've completed all of the terrain textures for:
Maybe I've been staring at pixels too long and my sense of beauty has become distorted, but I don't think it looks half bad.
This is the intersection between Autumnal Woods (leaf.res) and Mixed Forest (fen.res) with a stream running through it (water.res).
Note: (The trees, stumps and rocks are from Chiprel's 32x graphics pack, and are not my work, and the cliffs look unchanged.)
As you can see, I have also included a grid pattern in the textures because the tiles DO have in-game effects and you need to be able to see them. At the same time, I felt that a black line would be a bit much given how few pixels I have to work with already. The grid-lines are on the Left and Top edges of the tile, and so the intersections are not perfectly correlated with the vertexes of the terrain, but I feel that this is acceptable given that you can only dig or place dirt if you have access to the tile to the SE of a vertex anyways. So although the grid intersections are off-center, they are off-center in a way which makes them more accurate. Wrap your head around that!
So yes, that is what I have been working on, for the benefit of all. I should be finished with the terrain-Tiles soon and then I can begin work on tweaking the terrain OBJECTS. Those have high resolutions and performance costs too, especially when illuminated by a torch or campfire...