[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Betr: (PR#6932) Re: Re: Artistic polish

["Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa" <vasc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=6932 >

On Mon, 24 Nov 2003, Raimar Falke wrote:

> <URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=6932 >
>
> On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 02:19:38PM -0800, thomas@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > >I requested animation graphics from the civfanatics civ forum,
> > >got about 60 views and no replies. The guy who made custom gfx for their
> > >latest "Game of the Month"'s declined to contribute because of
> > >anticipated time consumption. In another thread, that crowd seem to
> > >think that Freeciv sucks, partic
> > larly because of lacking AI
> > >diplomacy. They probably favor Win32 and single-player style games.
> > >We should accomodate such people by creating a real smallpox
> > >solution, native win32 client, and adding code to support animation.
>
> > rule editors and gfx convertors would get us further along the
> > way. The main issue however is getting the message across. Apart
> > from some newsposts at Apolyton and some linuxgames sites. Apart
> > from that, Freeciv h rdly gets promoted.
>
> IMHO we should just add support code for the civ3 format. We can use
> the available graphics for private use. Then we can ask the authors if
> they want to put the graphics into GPL and so let their tileset become
> the "offical freeciv" one. This way the author has no extra work and
> just have to say "yes". If noone says yes we just can't distribute the
> graphics in the tarball. But if we support a "~/.freeciv/tilesets" dir
> were you put the tileset once this isn't a problem either.

We should add Civ3 tile support yes. The map looks better than with
the Civ2 style and it is much, much simpler to add than something like
the SMAC terrain style.

However don't get your hopes up for graphics. Last time we did that for
Civ2, it came out that most of the "public" tilesets used copyright tainted
graphics. Turns out most of the time the mod artists only change parts of
the graphics to have less work. Then they distribute copyrighted and
unique graphics publically without distinction. Making a complete tileset
is not easy and takes a lot of effort.

Then there are the problems of uniformity and clarity. Many tilesets
either don't look consistent or are visually distracting enough so you do
not understand what the tiles mean. Came in point: Hi-Res.

---
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa @ Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa