Today, I'm working on a bit that will simplify liquid tiling. Instead of drawing each tile and referring to them all one at a time from the source, I'm just loading in a mask for the liquid, colorizing and saving it for later use at startup. This means, instead of having 16 tiles for every liquid in the game (8 for visible, 8 for map), I just have to have 16 tiles, period. The game makes the colors itself.
This is important because one of the biggest complaints with the videos was the blocky graphics. Smoothing them out is not as simple as some people seemed to think it would be. The easiest/fastest way to do it would be to create tile graphics for every possible slope of liquid surface, but with at least 8 possible liquids in a world, maybe more, that quickly runs into many, many tiles, which would take a long time to draw. This way, I just have to draw a basic set of tiles and colorize them ahead of time. The biggest drawback is that adds up to a lot of tiles; over 1,000 by my reckoning per liquid, but compensating for that is that each is only 32x32 pixels.
Well, we'll see how it turns out.
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