Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.

Designing the Graphics

Xconq is fundamentally a graphical game; fortunately, you don't have to do gnarly graphics hacking to get the pretty pictures! The basic graphics handling is built into the interface subroutines of Xconq. What you do have to do is to choose or design the basic images.

Xconq will always attempt to generate some sort of default display for your new game design, but it's likely to be pretty ugly. So your goal here is just to make the display look good. First off you should decide about the overall appearance. Do you want things to be generally light or dark? Garish or subtle? Conventional or exotic? This is a good time to cruise the image libraries and to look at the graphics of other games. Sometimes the theme decides a lot for you - how could you display anything other than a red star on a Soviet tank? You also need to think about whether you want to concentrate on b/w or color displays, although again Xconq will try to do something reasonable for both.

You have to choose three sets of images: terrain patterns or images, unit icons, and side emblems. The terrain patterns have to tile properly, since they may be used to fill in large areas, while both unit icons and side emblems are single icons. You can optionally choose solid colors for terrain, and to "colorize" unit icons and side emblems.

Once you have chosen and specified a set of images, you have to try them out in various combinations in real games. What you'll most likely discover is that they don't always mix like you imagined. That cool-looking emblem for a side disappears against the background of space, or two unit icons are nearly indistinguishable on the map. At this point, you have to start making some choices. Either substitute some different images, or design new ones of your own.

Color choices are tricky. Again, the total effect can be quite different from what you imagined, plus you should be careful about the variety of displays that your game runs on, or you may be getting complaints about how your "olive" more closely resembles "puke gray"!

Here is an example of unit icons:

(add (infantry town city) image-name ("soldiers" "town20" "city20"))

In general, an icon name should describe the literal appearance of the image, instead of the type that you want it to represent. The "soldiers" icon, for instance, just shows a row of soldiers; in one game the icon can be used to represent infantry, in another, armies in general, and in another, the national guard. There is an "infantry" image also, but it is the standard "crossed bandoliers" symbol, and is really only sensible for specialized military games.

Here is an example of a terrain pattern:

(terrain-type plains
  (color "green") (image-name "plains") (char "+")
  )

The "plains" is defined in lib/terrain.imf, as basically a blank 8x8 tile with two pixels turned on, which textures things somewhat:

(imf "plains" ((8 8 tile)
  (color (pixel-size 1) (row-bytes 1)
   (palette (0 7969 46995 5169) (1 0 25775 4528))
   "00/40/00/00/00/04/00/00")
  (mono "00/40/00/00/00/04/00/00")))

For extra fine control on color displays, you can also set the colors of unseen terrain and the grid separating cells, via the globals grid-color and unseen-color.

Note that some display systems (such as the X Window System) allow users to customize most or all of their colors, so individuals may override your choices. Not much you can do about that though!


Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.