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In the process of doing so, i've learned just how complex creating seemingly simple textures can be, and how closely the client is tied to the existing tile set. See, the client has several different grass tiles, some with daises, some without, some as alpha and some as opaques. Some tiles have several different images on them, each of which are referenced by a range of different 2d0 files. Yup, its some real complex shit. Its here that we also discover some strange and interesting shit.
Now the grass alpha tiles are designed to create natural looking edges to paths, dirt and such like, so as the straight lines of the opaque tiles are covered. This makes the enviroment look more pr0, and less like it was conceived by an austic 12 year old. However, when you look at the Isla Prima map, you find a whole bunch of these overlays sitting where there's entirely no need for them....
From the shape thats marked out, I suspect this was intended to be a space on which a house was going to be placed, but which the map builder never completed. However, i'd be interested if anyone knows the background.
Anyhow, back to my new grass texture, as can be seen from the above, it doesn't look too crap. And here's the actual tile in all its close up glory....
Plus one with a lot of gai daises.....
Now if you're wondering whether I drew all that by hand, um nope! What I did was to use a feature of photoshop/gimp called a
'brush' to create a single tuft of grass, then set the dynamics to produce lots of randomly spaced tufts of random sizes, shades and orientations.
Only problem is that the grass doesn't match the alpha tiles. Worse still, when you examine the alpha tile, its 256x256 pixels and not the 412x412 used by the opaque tile. As a result if you try and draw realistic grass on it, it ends up looking all blocky and crap....
Ofc, this ain't so much a problem with the stock EL grass tile as its already fairly simplistic. Whilst its better quality than the alpha tile, the difference isn't so great that its that noticeable. However, its definitely an issue when using a higher quality grass tile
I suspect the reason why the overlay tile is much smaller than the opaque is because iys a DXT3 type image, which is a lot slower for a gpu to render than DXT1 type used for the opaque. As a result, I suspect it was deliberately made smaller to compensate for that increased render time. However, that seems somewhat pointless when you've a whole pile of wasted alpha tiles on your map doing absolutely nothing. Its also seems kind of strange reducing quality of grass in order to save gpu effort, when some of the more complex images (tree branches and leaves) seem to omit the mipmaps that would allow a far greater saving.
Anyhow, the interesting thing is whether its possible to increase the size of the grass alpha tiles (therefore improving overall image quality and making shit look a whole lot nicer) and to compensate for this by removing redundant alpha tiles (like the ones found in Isla Prima), optimising tree branches and leaves by adding mipmaps, plus reducing the pixels in those tiles with less complex textures, eg stone, paths, dirt.
