First of all, I just wanted to say hello to the community. I'm newly registered but have been somewhat following the development of TurboSliders since earlier versions. I really like some of the work I've seen come from other community members and would like to do my part to help in the furthement of TurboSliders in any way that I can.
Okay, here's an idea for a track editor that's probably already been thought of, but if it's not possible, I'd like to know why not. Ok....rather than having all these tiles, and the work associated with creating new ones, etc., etc..... why not make it possible to just import a graphics files and use that as an overlay for a track? For example, one could paint a track, and bleachers, and pit areas, and vegetation, etc., in photoshop or whatever and then import that final .png file (or whatever) into a track editor such as the default one that comes with Turbo Sliders, or Digilusion's track editor. That could be the top "visible layer".. the one that the player sees and races on. Underneath could be a "physics layer"... the one that gives properties to the visible layer above it. For ease of use, we could still use all the current tiles and whatnot, but we could put pavement tiles under the paved areas of the "visible layer" and sand tiles under the sandy places of the "visible layer" and water tiles under the water places of the "visible layer". Then we could use wall tiles and surround the part of our visible layer that looks like bleachers. It wouldn't matter whether you painted it to look like bleachers, or a hot-dog stand, or your house... because you could surround it with tiles that gave the physical properties of a barrier. Effectively, whatever it is, you can't drive THROUGH it. Following me?
For future versions of track editors, tiles could be done away with completely and replaced by 2d polygons that could be given physical properties (e.g: drag a polygon around the visible areas that look like a road, right-click the polygon, and select "dry pavement" from a drop-down list of possible physical properties.) This could definately work and it has been done long before.... I remember in 1993, when I was in 3rd grade, that a pre-MechWarrior 3d polygonal IP multiplayer shareware game for the Macintosh, called Avara, existed and it was wildly popular. I used to create maps for it using a text-editor called Claris Works (now called AppleWorks) that could also do BASIC vector graphics... basic like MS Paint. All I had to do to make a red 3d cylindrical tower that was 14 feet tall was to drag a circular oval into my picture document, fill it in with red using the paintbucket, create text within the oval and type in something like" height: 14' " Then, VOILA! a 14' red cylinder appeared in-game. An editor for TurboSliders wouldn't have to be much more complex because we're not even talking 3d here.... Avara even had properties for event triggers, and elevators, and flying platforms, and spinning warp-portals, in a program not half as complex as Microsoft Word!
I love TurboSliders, and in so many ways, it brings me back to the times when games were great because developers were limited graphically and therefore had to create games that were purely FUN. On the other hand, we don't have those kinds of limits now, and in a game like TurboSliders, I'd like to be able to stretch my artistic fingers and use some of my graphical skills to augment my tracks in a very simple, effective manner. I'm not saying that TurboSliders looks bad...its graphical style is nice...but rather than putting it up to the developer to continually create new tiles, why not just create simple objects with simple physical properties, and let the track designers take care of the artistic considerations? Let me know what you think.
Great Track Editor Idea!
Moderator: Forum Moderators
Hi and thank you for your feature requests!
Making the track from polygons would be quite a big change to the code so don't expect that to come any time soon. I understand how good an idea it would be, though. Maybe if the game is ever moved to third dimension
.
But about painting the track to look like whatever one wants - that is actually already possible. It is not easily done but you can do it if you want to. Here is how it could go:
1. Make a normal track with editor and save it. (Assuming a track with no bridges etc., they complicate things a bit). It is good to have lightmap off.
Below I assume that the name of the track is yourtrack and its pattern file is yourtrack-pat.png.
2. Using any graphics program, draw the track as you like it to be seen. If you want, you can take a screenshot of the track and work with it or start completely from scratch. Save the image for example with the name yourtrack-img.png in the same directory where the trk file is.
3. Open the trk file with any text editor (Notepad is ok). Remove all lines starting with "A " but leave pattern and everything else.
4. Add these lines where the As previously were. Assuming here that the size of the track is 640 x 400:
TileDefinition yourtrack-pat.png yourtrack-img.png
Tile 1 0 0 640 400 0 0 640 400
End
A 1 0 0
This creates one big tile from your image, using the original pattern, and adds it in coordinates 0,0 (without centering).
5. Save the trk file. You should now be able to use the track in the game. Unfortunately, editor cannot save custom tile definitions so if you open and save the track after this with the editor, you have to add that tile definition again with a text editor.
Another way to do this would be to start with yourtrack-img.png and make the pattern file afterwards (it must be a 256-color paletted image where each color index means specific terrain.)
Making the track from polygons would be quite a big change to the code so don't expect that to come any time soon. I understand how good an idea it would be, though. Maybe if the game is ever moved to third dimension
.But about painting the track to look like whatever one wants - that is actually already possible. It is not easily done but you can do it if you want to. Here is how it could go:
1. Make a normal track with editor and save it. (Assuming a track with no bridges etc., they complicate things a bit). It is good to have lightmap off.
Below I assume that the name of the track is yourtrack and its pattern file is yourtrack-pat.png.
2. Using any graphics program, draw the track as you like it to be seen. If you want, you can take a screenshot of the track and work with it or start completely from scratch. Save the image for example with the name yourtrack-img.png in the same directory where the trk file is.
3. Open the trk file with any text editor (Notepad is ok). Remove all lines starting with "A " but leave pattern and everything else.
4. Add these lines where the As previously were. Assuming here that the size of the track is 640 x 400:
TileDefinition yourtrack-pat.png yourtrack-img.png
Tile 1 0 0 640 400 0 0 640 400
End
A 1 0 0
This creates one big tile from your image, using the original pattern, and adds it in coordinates 0,0 (without centering).
5. Save the trk file. You should now be able to use the track in the game. Unfortunately, editor cannot save custom tile definitions so if you open and save the track after this with the editor, you have to add that tile definition again with a text editor.
Another way to do this would be to start with yourtrack-img.png and make the pattern file afterwards (it must be a 256-color paletted image where each color index means specific terrain.)
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TriggerDeft
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 3:49 am
It sounds like I can make that work, and it doesn't really sound too difficult, but we'll see. Thanks for posting such specific directions. Now, my next question is this... if I use a custom tile image and make the track the way you described, and then start a server using that track, if people who connect to my server auto-download my track, will they also download the correct image file so that everything looks correct to them? I realize that last sentence has awful sentence mechanics, but hopefully it's understandable.
Secondly, when I was referring to polygons in my description above, I believe I used the term incorrectly. I was not referring to ACTUAL polygons but to a tool that would allow you to select 2d areas like the "polygon" selection tool in most drawing programs (like photoshop). It'd be like a bounding a box, like when you click and drag on your desktop, only it wouldn't have to be rectangular.... hence the "polygonal selection" I was trying to refer to. I know it'd be easier for me to describe if I knew the correct terms. In this way, you could drag a selection "box" around your roads and then tell the editor that everything inside that "box" is to have the physical properties of pavement. So, there'd be nothing 3d happening. Was that more clear?
Secondly, when I was referring to polygons in my description above, I believe I used the term incorrectly. I was not referring to ACTUAL polygons but to a tool that would allow you to select 2d areas like the "polygon" selection tool in most drawing programs (like photoshop). It'd be like a bounding a box, like when you click and drag on your desktop, only it wouldn't have to be rectangular.... hence the "polygonal selection" I was trying to refer to. I know it'd be easier for me to describe if I knew the correct terms. In this way, you could drag a selection "box" around your roads and then tell the editor that everything inside that "box" is to have the physical properties of pavement. So, there'd be nothing 3d happening. Was that more clear?
Yes, it works that way. There is one difference, though. Normal tracks are downloaded to the tracks/download directory but non-standard tracks are downloaded to tracks/download/<date> to make sure that extra files do not collide with other files. But anyway, it should work.TriggerDeft wrote: if I use a custom tile image and make the track the way you described, and then start a server using that track, if people who connect to my server auto-download my track, will they also download the correct image file so that everything looks correct to them?
Yes, I understand. But if all that is to be made work in 2D, there wouldn't in fact be that much work left to make it more in 3D, tooSo, there'd be nothing 3d happening. Was that more clear?
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