[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#2369) iso-view eye candy

["Raimar Falke via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 04:12:12PM -0800, Jason Short via RT wrote:
> 
> To answer a question I've received...
> 
> Eye candy is an idea Daniel had a little while ago, to give isometric
> tilesets the same variety that non-iso tilesets have.  Non-iso tilesets
> have lots of different copies of each tile, because that's the way the
> blending between tiles is done.  This is bad and meeans a lot of work
> must be duplicated - but it does allow for a lot more variety.  For
> instance the trident desert tiles have cactuses, skulls, rocks, and
> grass scattered around.  By contrast, isotrident's desert is very plain
> - just mile after mile of sand.
> 
> The eye candy patch allows sprites to be declared which will overlay the
> terrain tile.  For instance in the desert the skull and cactus each have
> their own sprite, which is drawn on top of the desert at pseudo-random
> intervals.  Daniel has also created support for this in isotrident
> (although there is nearly unlimited room for improvement here IMO).

Why is a second way introduced here? Why not use the non-isometric
way? I.e. have 16 versions of the same terrain and use one depending
on the neighbors? If this isn't possible I'm for implementing the
isometric eye-candy also for the non-isometric case.

> Daniel's original patch produced the folling screenshots:
>   http://dspeyer.student.umd.edu/candy.jpg
>   http://dspeyer.student.umd.edu/nocandy.jpg
> This also includes his multi-dither patch, which is now split off.  The
> effect is subtle, but pervasive.  I recommend toggling between the two
> to see the effects.  Look particularly at the desert tiles, which IMO
> have by far the best eye candy graphics.
> 
> My update of this patch changes things slightly.  Now, more than two
> eyecandies are possible.  But it is not possible for eye candies to be
> drawn one over the other.  The former is good.  The latter is necessary
> given the former.  To see this in action, apply the patch, copy the
> eyecandy.* files into your isotrident directory, and run any isometric
> client.  Toggle the "Eye candy" view option to see the difference.

        Raimar

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