[Mod Advice] Making better tiles

from Elemental Forums

I have been doing a lot of tile creation lately and I think there are a lot of important things we should all share with each other. The least apealing part of the vanilla cities is widely agreed to be the abyssal style spaces between one improvement and another. I recently noticed that we can make a 1x1 tile that spreads itself over a 2x2 space, creating no gaps between tiles. It seems an odd mechanic, but I worked out a way to get my whole city to feel big a and robust by making sure that every tile used the full 2x2 space provided.

The aesthetic possibilities are a great relief to me as I am sure it is to many of you. I plan to make a Robust Tile Mod that changes out all the current buildings for more pleasing cityscapes that have more than just one guy hammering the ground in a given tile.

I would be interested to see what kinds of tiles others are creating for cities, because no one has posted any castle pics or anything since we first got the editor.

I am also quite pleased that we can create our own particle effects and use them on our cities. My only worry right now is that my beautiful tiles will take up too many resources ingame.

Has anyone else any tile wisdom they wish to share?

1,761 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I have a question. When I did a new tiledesign file, put it in the mod folder, used an old internalname (to overwrite the old tile design) nothing happened. In fact, I wasn't able to change out any existing tile, using a mod (only core file changes worked, and I don't want that). My question would be; can you provide a working example of a replaced tile?

As for tile wisdom, well, first (just so you know) a player can turn off all the particle effects from the options menu in-game. Also, apparently they fixed some massive FPS "leak" internally from tiles, https://www.elementalgame.com/journals

I'd be very willing to help with this project, if you feel that doing all the tiles yourself is too much work. I think the way cities look is one of the major flaws with the game. Edit: Have you considered placing roads between all buildings?

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Have you tried filling the spaces between tiles (i.e. the edges of a single tile) with roads (dirt or paved) at all?  For instance, at the top edge of the tiles is a road texture, split in the middle so the bottom half of the road is visible. All bottom edges of tiles would be the same road texture with the top half of the road texture in the active tile space.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Here is some examples of how I made buildings fill the city as opposed to just connecting things with roads. I feel roads wouldn't make sense for this kind of fantasy game, we tend to forget that roads were primarily an afterthought in most ancient cities. Here is a grouping of three buildings I have finished so far:

http://screencast.com/t/YWQ1Y2NlYzg

I am wondering how many people I should use for each tile.

http://screencast.com/t/ZGJjYjI3

The best part about building over the tile size is that your spires will interlock and create new buildings in every combination.

(complex results from simple interactions.)

http://screencast.com/t/M2FiMzZiN

This is how I imagine a fantasy city to look.