Importing Avernum 5 Graphics

[Ishad Nha]

At long last I have the Windows versions of the A5 graphics, now I am trying to import them to the BoA world. As the A5 graphics for floors and hills are a bit bigger than their BoA counterparts, this will not be straightforward.

I have two basic approaches:

(one) just shrink the thing to fit, this leaves a few black spots that need cleaning up.

(two) take a sample based upon the centre of the graphic.

[Timmy, Power Gamer]

On the one hand, if you do shrink the images then they'll lose quality. On the other hand, cropping them will leave you with less image.

 

There isn't a right or wrong choice here, but my opinion would be to shrink and fix-up the images. I work with smaller graphics like this, and I think they'll be much better off in this sense.

 

My reason for thinking this is that even with the original quality of the actual A5 graphics, it'll be lacking in 2 regards.

 

1. The connecting panels would be incomplete or awkwardly spaced, thus meaning you'd have to either crop the images to make a 2:3 ratio, or edit the graphics to make them look like they fit. This won't be that big of a deal, but it may sacrifice the same quality you were trying to keep.

 

2. The images won't be the same size as their surrounding images. Because a square in Avernum 5 is larger than a BoA square, you'd either have to make the background squares bigger, or make the image appear to fit if you're keeping the same scale of the tiles. If not, you may have certain places that may be the same amount of pixels, but still appear to be bigger, have different quality, or just seem out of place.

 

It's a worthwhile endeavor if you really like A5's graphics. It's always nice to have a few new tilesets. Good luck with whichever you pick, neither are going to be that difficult or easy.

[nikki.]

GF and A4 use the same sized tiles as A5, and they've been ported with success. It souldn't be anymore difficult to port A5 than it was to port A4, and I know from personal experience that it was seriously easy to do so.

 

Edit: I realised I didn't say how I did it. All I did was open the graphic in MSPaint, use the stretch tool to shrink in to about 88-92% of the original size (the variation is there because some creatures are bigger than others in A4), and then copy and paste each pose into a new BoA sheet. The hardest part is finding the right percenatge size.

[Celtic Minstrel]

I agree with Gale that shrinking is much better than cropping. At least that will preserve the smooth transitions between tiles.

 

As for Nikki... that's very useful information for the creature graphics, but I believe he is talking about the floor graphics.

[nikki.]

It should be the same. You may have to tinker with the numbers slightly is all.

[Ishad Nha]

One area where I have struck real problems with shrink to fit: the tile has straight lines in it, like GF4 bookshelves and so on. This causes an internal problem, obviously distorted lines.

 

As for the external problem, getting the edges to line up correctly, the GF4 1250 bitmap was a problem here when I tried to take a sample from the edge of the graphic.

 

I had relative success with floors that were free of straight lines.

 

As for objects, things that are not terrain, floor or items, they are usually smaller than BoA terrain, hence there is no problem at all.

 

Edit, as for the quality problems, few people in the BoA community are professional artists. Thus any quality problems will still leave a graphic that is far better than anything the average BoA designer could do on their own.

 

I will have to research the ratios for shrink and fit, maybe there is one that will work.