How to create your own textures (tiles).

Tiles comes in groups of 16. If you have more than 16, you need to divide them to other group. Resolution of default H tile is 128 x 128, 8bit 256 colors but you can do also 512 res tiles. In group of 16 tiles, they all share the same Color Palette. Color Palette in default tile has colors 252 - 255 for city night lightning effect. For example you use normal daytime colors for the 252-255 color indexes, sprinkle these colors along the tile where you want the night lighting to show up, then at night time they will be shown as these values:

position 252 will turn to colour 115,171,155 (RGB values)
position 253 will turn to colour 183,127,183 (RGB values)
position 254 will turn to colour 171,179,139 (RGB values)
position 255 will turn to colour 171,171,171 (RGB values)

Tile information is located at texture.bin, each tile “set” (or group) contains maximum of 16 tiles.Tiling filename Microprose “standard” we all should be using is using the following rules:

<1*resolution> <4*name> <3*direction> .pcx
resolution is as above, H, M, L, or T name is just a name - but only 4 chars. Direction is used for tiling.

The first two give the set, e.g., 00 for beach section etc. The next one is a HEX number 0-15 with 10=A, 11=B etc. You make this up by using the direction of the “other feature” included in the tile. So, say its a forest road.

You do the following

Add 1 if there is a road going out of the square to the north
Add 2 if there is one going east
Add 4 if there is one going south
Add 8 if there is one going west
So - with no roads - you get 000
with a road coming from the north, but ending in this square you get 001
A road going east-west you would get 2+8 = 10 = A ⇒ 00A
A T junction pointing south would be 2 + 4 + 8 = 14 ⇒ 00D
A crossroads would be 1+2+4+8 = 15 = 00F

Similar for coast - where land is the “other” factor, or say a forest/plains tile - use forests as the main, and the “plains” as the “other” factor.

When we have made new tiles to add, then use tbin2txt.pl to produce the text file from default korean texture.bin like:

./tbin2txt.pl texture.bin >korea.txt

in the end of korea.txt, add your own textures like:

SET 4
HDYNE100.pcx 0 0
HDYNE101.pcx 0 0
HDYNE102.pcx 0 0
HDYNE103.pcx 0 0
HDYNE104.pcx 0 0
HDYNE105.pcx 0 0
HDYNE106.pcx 0 0
HDYNE107.pcx 0 0
HDYNE108.pcx 0 0
ENDSET

Now were ready to create the mytextures.bin, use the perl txt2bin.pl with command line:

./txt2bin.pl korea.txt >mytextures.bin

To create M, L and T tiles we suggest you run the runtiles batch file we created. Inside the zip is readme.txt which should guide your tile creation process. After you have made M, L and T tiles from the original H tiles, just add your new .pcx tiles to texture.zip, copy new texture.bin (mytextures.bin) to the texture dir and fire up Tinstall.exe to rebuild terrain with new textures as it creates new fartiles.raw file. (tbin2txt.pl and txt2bin.pl scripts in here).

Thats it, good luck.

Use Paint Shop Pro to create one 16 million color image where you add one tile from every tile-set, then reduce the colors to 256 and save the palette to for example “new-fartiles.pal” filename, also save the image to be used later. This image should be then resized for example to 16×16 resolution to make it nice and small. Then take the mkpal.pl perl script and run it like this:

./mkpal.pl new-fartiles.pal >fartiles.pal

Now you have brand new fartiles.pal file. The new-fartiles.pal PSP palette's image is also to be used in the T tiles color palette.

Download the Runtiles packet, unpack the Runtiles.v1.1.rar to \temp directory (any dir, we refer to \temp). Copy all your new H tiles to \temp directory, then place the fartile palette PCX file (new-fartiles.pal image) to the same dir. Rename the fartile pcx file for “xfartile.pcx”. You must start 4dos.com to get the for loop support, basic windows command.com will not support this. Just run 4dos.com in your windows dos screen. You know when the 4dos is running when you see something like this:

4DOS EMS swapping initialized (144K)
4DOS running under Windows 3 in 386 enhanced mode

4DOS 5.0 DOS 7.10
Copyright 1988-1994 Rex Conn & JP Software Inc. All Rights Reserved

Of course if you already are using 4dos, you dont need to re-run it. Then run “runtiles.bat” from your 4dos.com DOS screen and sit back. if all goes well, after the process you should have the original H tiles and also M, L and T tiles, where T tiles use the color palette from xfartile.pcx image.

Again, if you find something wrong with this tutorial, or can provide some information to improve it… please email us!

When you are creating new textures, please make sure you will make full terrain type tile-sets at once, its simply too troublesome to finish just some tiles and go back to create “missing” tiles weeks later when they are needed. So what are full terrain tile-sets? Lets assume you have desert, vegetation and mountain terrain types… so our Full terrain tile-sets contains these elements:
[Desert textures]
- basic terrain type tile(s).
- road/river/city tiles.
- coast tiles.
- transition tiles to vegetation and mountain types, including roads/rivers/coast/default (no features).

[Vegetation textures]
- basic terrain type tile(s).
- road/river/city tiles.
- coast tiles.
- transition tiles to desert and mountain types, including roads/rivers/coast/default (no features).

[Mountain textures]
- basic terrain type tile(s).
- road/river/city tiles.
- coast tiles, if required for mountain, be very careful when checking this.
- transition tiles to desert and vegetation types, including roads/rivers/coast?/default (no features).

You see, you gotta be thorough with the tiles that you remember include everything, its not that simple to add tiles to the texture.bin later when you have done screw up earlier. Now that you have all textures created, you must use the Microprose “standard” for naming the tiles if you want to keep CATE and Terrainview working with them. When you have standard tile-set made, it only takes less than 60 seconds for CATE to tile 16000 segments with your tiles! No standard == do it yourself…

Here is couple of tile creation tutorials.

Zaggy's Tile Meistering Tutorial by Zaggy

Road Tile Creation by rom

Tutorial for drawing a river on a given tile by rom

How to convert the RGB images back to PCX

Creating a full tilable sets

These tutorials are by OpenSkins, much credit to Zaggy how granted us permission to provide the tutorials here.

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