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[Zoal]

I need your help & expertise with a little something.

Say that you were making a tilesystem for DF, and it supported two layers:
- A background tile, and a foreground tile.

The foreground tile would be superimposed on top of the background tile, so that objects always display on top of the correct background. *But* you also want to be able to Tile-magic at the same time, because it's useful for a mushroom! The problem is that if you were using the alpha channel for Tile-magic, then you'd be missing the required transparency mask needed to let the Foreground-object properly composite on top of the background object.

How could this be solved, so that both Tile-magic and 2-layers are supported?
One quick idea would be to use "magenta is transparent". But that's not good, for the alpha-mask needs to be antialiased or it won't look good on top of the background. Another idea would be to have a separate "alpha file" which is grayscale, but the "tilesets need 2 files" thing isn't gonna fly.

I'm not asking about how to make this work in present-day-DF, so any idea is good.
How do other games do it?

-z

[WormSlayer]

If I was designing the graphics system from scratch, I would say forget about tile magic as we know it and just have 1 or 2 images with alpha - one for background, one for foreground. Maybe even a 3rd one  for "glow tile" type effects.

These would then of course be nicely composited over the actual world background tile, be it grass or rough stone floor.

Anyway, the way the current tiles work, if you draw something in bright green, then set the tile colour to bright red - the green bits disappear.

[Zoal]

Using two images wouldn't disrupt your workflow as an artist? Exporting and editing would be more complex in photoshop -- is there some way to work it?

[WormSlayer]

I'm already kind of working like that. The trees for example; I'm rendering the leaves and trunk separately which makes putting just the trunks on the alpha channel a lot easier.

Rough example of what I mean about using colour to have a 3rd tile magic configuration:

[soul4hdwn]

how about for the bow (before the text can be separated) have the string be the part that "disappears" on off usage.  or was that was was already going on? just sorta putting idea/fix in mind is all

[WormSlayer]

Unfortunately ( is one of those tiles where we dont get to choose the colours

I've been thinking about tile magic some more; its actually possible to get at least 6 different images from a single tile...

A + B are on the RGB channels, C is on the alpha channel.

White / White Red / White White / Black Green / White Green / Black Red / Black Black / White

Background colour could be anything, I just used white here. In fact, you could do the same Red/Green thing with whatever is drawn using the background colour, and there is also the blue channel - so potentially a lot more than 6 combinations?

Update: Or of course you could just put a totally different image on each red, green, blue and alpha channel:

[Zoal]

hax

[Ironhand]

This whole alpha vs. color vs. RGB layer thing is extraordinarily cool.
It's also a new concept to me. I've been doing it all the hard way every time.

This is at least fifteen completely distinct kinds of awesome.

This is going to expand me tile-creating potential significantly.

Looking forward to playing with it.

[keda]

woot... taking tile magic to a whole new lever there wormslayer

[keda]

apparently you can make 15 of them
1 red black A
2 green black B
3 blue black C
4 cyan black BC
5 yellow black AB
6 magenta black AC
7 white black ABC
8 red white AD
9 green white BD
10 blue white CD
11 cyan white BCD
12 yellow white ABD
13 magenta white ACD
14 white white ABCD
15 black white D

[Maldevious]

If I understand this correctly... wow. That opens up a lot of options, there.

[WormSlayer]

Yeah it's a bit weird but the more I think about it, the more possibilities occur

It may even have some use in situations where DF doesnt allow us to specify colour but always uses specific colours for certain things / states of things....

You are correct Keda - I just couldnt be bothered to make any more charts

[Bandages]

With the alpha stuff, could you make the crates in the underground look like rocks? :p

[Ironhand]

I'm not sure.

I feel like none of this stuff is gonna work quite right
unless I go back to using pure red, green and blue in the color scheme...

Or am I misunderstanding how this works?

[WormSlayer]

Pretty sure we cant do anything about the underground crates - Go and vote for Full Graphics support?

I dont think you are misunderstanding - It's cool but yeah things have to be pure tones to completely mask out so it really only has very specific uses for us unless we redo the whole tileset to use single colour tiles.

May be good for vermin? Quick example - Spider-Frog-Fish:

Not suggesting that actual combination, but that sort of thing - maybe just more optional parts to turn on and off