Interior Tileset Errors

This is a message I thought I'd post for Goudea, relating to his most reccent addition to the spaceship interior tileset. Within it, you'll find not only a number of qualms I had with the tiles, but also some compliments as I do adore the areas I can create with it. However, with that same thought in mind, you also begin to appreciate how frustrating it is when you are trying to build with it.

For example, clicking and dragging a specific tile or corridor out sounds pretty simple. However, in this tileset's case, its next to impossible because the green highlights that are suppose to appear are either not visible or are displayed in the wrong area. Which basically turns the whole process into a guessing game, where you truly begin to appreciate CTRL+Z. The more and more you use the tiles, the better you can estimate where the tiles will show up - except with corridors. Those are just way too sporadic to place properly in the first, or even tenth try! You end up using five fingers at once, two on your left hand to hit CTRL+Z constantly, your pointer finger on the right hand to click the mouse and your middle/index fingers to cross and pray that the stupid corridors land where you want them!

Another frustrating problem with the corridors is that they never connect to the regular tiles, so you end up with little boxes appearing behind room doorways, when you just want to make a regular hallway. It looks god awful and players can just walk into this oddly out of place little room that somehow phases out the corridor they just supposedly walked in from.

Last but not least of my complaints, the regular tiles are way too large. Huge rooms are not attractive, on a spaceship, or in a building. They look clunky, they're difficult to properly decorate and they take longer to load and more space for something that would have been better suited with a simple 1x1 area. With the reccent additions to the hak, you added 'window' and 'doorway' templates, which I liked. Until I realized that to use them, you HAVE to stick to the over-sized 3x3 blob of tiles. This far into my working with the spaceship interior, I have yet to use a SINGLE window or doorway tile.

On a final note, I have to say that despite my complaints and gripes with the tile, I really do love the work you've put into it. With some experience, elbow grease and repair of the over-used CTRL+Z keys, you can make some beautiful areas. I just hope that you manage to take what I've said into consideration and fix the errors with the next update.

~ Grey.

Edit: When I say 'corridors', I'm refering to the Corellian Corvette corridors.

Hello Grey !
Thanks for the compliments and the feedback !

Unfortunately, I am aware of all these - I would say "limitations" rather than errors - in the tileset.
I'll try to answer one by one :

1)

the green highlights that are suppose to appear are either not visible or are displayed in the wrong area.

I don't know why this is happening, My guess is it's because of the height of the "black walls".

At the beginning of the project, I didn't want to bother with adding roofs for each terrain, and to make something homogeneous I decided to increase the height of the the walls up to 5 or 8 metters, I'm not sure.

And, after, when I finally added the roofs, I had totally forgotten about this, which is not useful anymore.
If it's the cause of the problem, I think it can be easily solved.

I'll make some test when I have time.


2)

Another frustrating problem with the corridors is that they never connect to the regular tiles, so you end up with little boxes appearing behind room doorways, when you just want to make a regular hallway.

So you're talking about Corellian corvette corridors, right ?

If I understand you properly :
I don't agree with you. Actually you can link these corridors to any other type of terrain which is not a crosser, a group or a feature.

In fact all the terrain like : astrolab, cargo bay, Med lab, etc ...

But you cannot link it with an air duct or a Falcon style corridor.

Anyway, there is still an issue, that corresponds to your last complain, you need to connect it to a large portion of terrain a 2*3 :

O = terrain
X = black walls
| = corellian corvette.

OOO
OOO
X | X
X | X
OOO
OOO

I'll explain why latter.

It looks god awful and players can just walk into this oddly out of place little room that somehow phases out the corridor they just supposedly walked in from.

Sorry, I am not good enough in English to understand what you meant.
Could you please reformulate ?

3)

Last but not least of my complaints, the regular tiles are way too large. Huge rooms are not attractive, on a spaceship, or in a building. . With the recent additions to the hak, you added 'window' and 'doorway' templates, which I liked. Until I realized that to use them, you HAVE to stick to the over-sized 3x3 blob of tiles. This far into my working with the spaceship interior, I have yet to use a SINGLE window or doorway tile.

This is the major issue of the previous version of Stacy's Hak.

One of our most important map builder (Hiztaar) asked me to make some smaller corridors.
Which I did.

But if you want to integrate them to the regular tiles that Stacy had created, you must use a 2*3 or even sometimes a 3*3 portion of area.

This is how the rules and the .set file (which basically connects the different tiles each others) has been done.

And, unfortunately, I had to deal with it, unless creating a totally new tileset from scratch.
Which represent a huge amount of work, at least as long as the work I put in adding all the stuff in it.

So, I had to make a choice, something "perfect" but in 12 months, or something ... ( I don't know how to qualify it, but I would say, at least good ) in 6 months.

I hope I answered correctly to your remarks.
Thanks again for the feed back.

I'll try to improve what can be improved.

Enki a écrit:
I hope I answered correctly to your remarks.
Thanks again for the feed back.

I'll try to improve what can be improved.

Yup, thats pretty much all my qualms covered. I don't think I properly expressed how much I absolutely adore the work though, it looks incredible. The corellian corridors fit perfectly with my Tantive IV remake, which will be all the more sweet when Stormtroopers blast through and the opening scene of Episode 4 begins. xD

Enki a écrit:

It looks god awful and players can just walk into this oddly out of place little room that somehow phases out the corridor they just supposedly walked in from.

Sorry, I am not good enough in English to understand what you meant.
Could you please reformulate ?

Yeah, this is refering to my problems linking the corridors to the main terrains. The ghetto solution I had to invent was creating a doorway to the normal tilesets, then placing the corridor on the opposite side so it looks like this, using your own codes;

O = terrain
X = black walls
| = corellian corvette.
. = doorway.

O.O .|

As you can see, there is a little room that branches away from the doorway, so transitions between would leave a 1x1 space of tile open behind the actual door. Looks awful, but its the only solution I could find at the time.

Anyways, thanks again!