Spring RTS Engine

Is there any special way to make tiles seamless? I can use Photoshop quite well and can create quite seamless tiles but it would be useful to know if there was an better way.
Also is 128^2 the normal tile size used, or is 256 a good size too?
Thanks

harm's stiles 99 is a good one, but not the best way to tile things by a long shot.

Google a bit.
There are tons of tutorials and plugins available for that kind of work, as tileable textures are needed everywhere (from website backgrounds to game textures to visulisation...)

About the size: It entirely depends: larger normally looks better and is bigger, but otoh, you have a harder time to make a larger tiles that are low-profile enough (as the eye WILL notice remarkable texture features and find them repeated, whick destroys the subtility....


A good way would be a small tile (like 64x64) repeated into a larger tile (lets say 256x256) while being slightly processed, lets say by a symetric perlin noise multiplicator.

umm i assume u know how to create whatever texture your looking for and then offset it (if you dont just ask) but then depending on the texture there are many techniques to making it seemless

my favourite is to copy the layer (pre-offsetting) then offset the top layer and erase down to the lower. then using the heal brush blender and magic tool to get rid of the seems..

im told that some textures photoshop automatically makes tile-able but im yet to find these.

EDIT: oh yeh the size.. well it depends but so long as u keep the features unnoticable.. it depends how big the chunks are that your going to use the tile in.. i,e. if its a 1 tile map go for 256

I believe the format used 128x128 tiles, so I would assume anything that is a multiple of that would assist in compression, anything smaller and the mapconv won't treat them as repeating tiles.

I am wrong, keep reading.

Just to clarify, it would work with smaller tiles, but it would treat each clump of 4 orhowever many as just 1 tile, which would still save space if that tile was used in large groupes alot. However they show up realy obviolsy as tiles... personly I use 512 tiles cause its infact like useing 16 difernt 128 tiles, and hence gets rid of teh repetition look a bit.

aGorm

The trick I usually use is to take the image I want to tile and split it into 4 parts. You then take the right top corner and put it in the bottom left, then repeate for all the other corners until they have traded up. Now you have a texture that tiles perfectly on the outside but has the tiling mistakes on the inside of the image where they are easy to see and edit. If you edit out all the tiling irregularities with your photoshop mastry then you will have a perfectly tiling texture.

For spring mapping built tiles that are multiples of 32x32. IE 64x64 is good, 128x128 is good, even odd dimentions like 128x96 will work because you are essentially just creating an image that the spring mapcompiler can break into 32x32 tiles.

SwiftSpear, thast called using the offset tool... (just so you know theres an easy way... its near the botom of the list of filters in photoshop, and i expect other progs have a similar function)

aGorm

k thanks for your help

Filter->other->High pass


Set the radius right and it gives you smooth looking tiles every time.

haha took me almost 1 and a half hours to make a grass tile
Oh man, making a map is DAMN hard. Here's the result I got btw:



if there's anyone who doesn't feel it looks like complete crap you're free to use it however you want

Cyberwal wrote:haha took me almost 1 and a half hours to make a grass tile
Oh man, making a map is DAMN hard. Here's the result I got btw:



if there's anyone who doesn't feel it looks like complete crap you're free to use it however you want

Dude, grass tiles are hard. The scale seems a little oversized for spring, but that's a great tile for games like halflife or halflife2.

Thanks :)