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[Baughn]

Actually, I figured out that (because it's comparing two constants), doing this bit of tileset switching in the shader would have absolutely no cost at all.

So there's nothing for me to implement. The infrastructure I'm already working on can already handle it.

As for pre-mipmapped images.. sure, that's trivial to implement, if you want it.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, if it's even more trivial to have conditional tileset switching then...

wait...

Did anyone else think "palette cycling" just now? Since the number of tiles we can use will be more or less unlimited, we could easily animate water, especially with shaders. Animate trees and grass too, by swapping out relevant tile sheets between frames. Can that be done, Baughn?

[Baughn]

Not by this method, but in general sure, yes. We discussed it a few pages back.

Oh, and the number of tiles aren't unlimited; they're limited by available graphics memory. Given that they take four bytes per pixel, this might be more of a limit than you think. It won't be a problem given sane artists, though.

[KillHour]

Well, since all this stuff is getting implemented, I'd like to bring up something I suggested awhile ago.

How about an option for HQx scaling?  It would look significantly better than Lanczos, IMO.

[qwert]

Not by this method, but in general sure, yes. We discussed it a few pages back.

Oh, and the number of tiles aren't unlimited; they're limited by available graphics memory. Given that they take four bytes per pixel, this might be more of a limit than you think. It won't be a problem given sane artists, though.

Hrm, given no overhead my card can support 16 777 216 16x16 tiles 

EDIT: It's an HD 5870, and DXDiag claims it to have 4070MB, but from what I can tell it is only a 1GB card

Still well over 4 million tiles in any case.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Mine would hold 9765625 16x16 tiles then. What kind of monster GPU are you packing, anyway?
(er, also remember that 4GB isn't what Google thinks. In GPUs, HDDs and RAM, a GByte is 1000000000 bytes.)

[WormSlayer]

As for pre-mipmapped images.. sure, that's trivial to implement, if you want it.

But the PNG format cant contain MIP levels, only DDS and the like do?

Edit - Wow I just had a flashback to me hand-crafting mip levels for Quake 1 textures

Different tiles for different zoom levels? Would that be possible?

The scaling on zoom thing is one of the reasons I'm thinking about making a 3D tileset. While it wont help so much with tiny, zoomed out tiles being hard to distinguish, it should mean any mid-large tile size will look nice without having to make multiple versions of every tile.

[Baughn]

I'd just have to require that you store it somewhat like how it looks in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MipMap_Example_STS101.jpg.

Also, in GPUs and RAM, a GByte is 1024^3 bytes.

[WormSlayer]

Doh of course! I've even used that method of mip mapping before :F

[Tywuzhere]

This looks awesome, downloading it right now, and I'll give it a shot. My monitor should handle it, but we'll have to see.

[Aklyon]

This sounds more like a future graphics thread now, but I'm not complaining. It all sounds Awesome.

[ginsweater]

The scaling on zoom thing is one of the reasons I'm thinking about making a 3D tileset. While it wont help so much with tiny, zoomed out tiles being hard to distinguish, it should mean any mid-large tile size will look nice without having to make multiple versions of every tile.

Maybe you could just take more detailed control over filtering? That's one of the big advantages of shaders in 2D graphics IMO - you're not locked into bilinear scaling. You can actually control which mipmap your shader samples if you like - use the textureLod() function instead of texture().

Signed distance maps are popular for "vector"-looking graphics, for example, and there are tools available to make them from high-res black-and-white images. Maybe you could use an SDM for a really nice smooth outline, and add a low- or mid-res bilinear-filtered color map?

That would require some way to provide additional texture inputs to the pixel shader beyond the current color/alpha tile maps. Baughn, have you thought about that at all? I know you're making a bunch of changes to the texture atlasing...

Multiple inputs would also allow foreground color masking, which I think people have mentioned here before. And personally, I'd be excited about the possibilities that would be opened up by adding depth maps to the tiles.

Spoiler: Photoshop mockup to explain what a depthmap is (click to show/hide)

[WormSlayer]

Maybe you could just take more detailed control over filtering?

And personally, I'd be excited about the possibilities that would be opened up by adding depth maps to the tiles.

After checking out those hqnx examples KillHour posted above I dont see why not as long as they dont eat too much gpu time.

I guess I'm having a slow day, but what could we use depth maps for?

[Aklyon]

z-levels below graphics?

[WormSlayer]

Z-level below just gets it's own 3 or 4 tiles. At the very least we may be able to make it look less weird. Still a great shame we cant have more than 1.5 z-levels visible at a time...

Only things I can think of are stuff like dorfs standing in ground mist and shallow water sort of situations?