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Games Entertainment

Free Repository for Tile Graphics? 24

Posted by Cliff from the resources-for-game-coders dept.
Hentai asks: "I want to make a game. Specifically, I want to make a good, open-source computer RPG, with the same artistic style of the early Squaresoft sprite-pushers, like Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger. I can code well enough, and I can get artists to provide character sprite graphics (which will be open-source, too), but I need background tile graphics on the same vein and caliber as those titles. Web searches invariably lead to commercial or shareware packages, or 'free to the public' tile sets that are, frankly, abysmal. I just need enough quality tiles to start with, and will happily add any new derivations to the repository. Anyone know of a good GPLed tile package that could get me started?"
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Free Repository for Tile Graphics? More

Free Repository for Tile Graphics?

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  • Crack.com's donatation (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17, 2003 @03:27AM (#5317788)
    Search for Crack.com's Abuse. They open sourced their huge library of textures.

    It's not in the style you desire though - so -1, offtopic, I guess :(

  • Contributors? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Drakker ( 89038 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @03:28AM (#5317793) Homepage Journal
    Maybe what you need are a couple of people interested in drawing tiles specificaly for your game. Most games thats use freely available tiles lack the wow factor because a lot of people have seen those exact same graphics elsewhere. Just think of the 23587825 RPG Maker games circulating right now...

    Also, when you have artists working for you, they can work to give the game a look that fits to the style and content.

    As an added bonus, sprite loving artists are often creative enough to draw stuff that you would never have imagined yourself, which can in turn really improve the atmosphere and even the story of your game.

    Freely available tiles can get you started... but its only a good solution in short term. Say, use them to create an enjoyable demo, and lure artists to your projects.

    I'm currently working on two projects (a platformer and a 2d shooter), and trust me on this, you need art that fits your game, and that has *not* been seen elsewhere.
    • Then again if you can get ppl playing your game even with generic tiles it must be something worth playing!
      Gfx is pushing out gameplay as a quality of todays games...

      • Re:Contributors? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Drakker ( 89038 )
        Just think of it another way: graphics designed to improve the gameplay. Graphics are as much of a part of the whole package as gameplay, but it should complement gameplay, not replace it. Graphics don't make a game, but they can break a game.
        • If the gameplay is good enough, gfx. can't break it!
          Just look at all the commandline games still being played, for or all the good old x11-games..
          I played xgammon just a couple of days ago!

          But I kindof go along with your argument that for most games new games gfx usually breaks rather than improves upon whats there...

  • I remember this issue coming up back when I was involved with Qbasic programming (don't laugh, there's some pretty good stuff that came out of there, all things considered). The results found were pretty much the same as yours. Not much in the way of good, free to use tilesets.

    There was a push to get such things made, but as far as I know, most people outgrew Qbasic at that point, graduating to C++ and other languages... glancing though a few Allegro sites, the lack of open tilesets is still the case.

    Time to look for some artists who want to contribute...

  • A way to create good textures is needed... (Score:4, Informative)

    by moncyb ( 456490 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @03:47AM (#5317871) Journal

    I have a few pictures I took with my digital camera which would make very good textures, only problem is I don't have a good way to make the images tileable. GIMP's "Make Seamless" plugin sort of works, but has obvious visual problems. The Resynthesizer [monash.edu.au] may work, but I haven't tried it for a while (when I did, it took lots of CPU time.

    There also need to be good texture editors. Some photo editing program where you can view the image in a tiled setting and edit it. I don't know of any. Maybe using the tile function in GIMP, editing it, and recropping the image will work?

    BTW, there used to be some public domain textures listed in gimp.org (called something like farm textures--they were taken from real photos), but I can't find them now...

    • In Gimp, Image, Transforms, Offset... and hit the button Offset by (x/2, y/2). Then use the clone tool with a feathered brush to smooth and retouch the edge transitions that form a + across the image.

      Although in cnosole style RPGs they probably want low res textures that all look nice together.

    • The Resynthasizer (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @04:00PM (#5321013) Journal
      The Resynthasizer (linked to in parent post) is an incredibly cool research project that I looked at some time ago. It takes a massive number of CPU cycles, but the imagery it can generate is beyond impressive. Take a look, if you've never seen it before -- take a texture, and it can generate "new" texture based on that data. Have a 640x480 grass texture? It can make an 800x600 grass texture. You've seen images rerendered using a different palette...but what about rerendered using a different type of image -- text made out of grass, etc. *Very* cool.

  • texturey (Score:3, Informative)

    by redwood2 ( 179115 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @03:55AM (#5317902) Journal
    Most of these sites feature lots of free content,
    but some of the really nice tiles are for sale only.
    try:
    presetcentral.com
    luxology.net
    and if you're looking for some 3d models
    turbosquid.com has a bunch and they're not THAT expensive, considering how long it would take to make some o this stuff by hand.

  • Re-inventing the wheel.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by linuxn ( 590858 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @04:08AM (#5317945)
    I'll probably get flamed for this , but still , I have to ask: Did you consider contributing to an ongoing effort instead of starting a new one? Here's one in constant need if new blood: http://www.worldforge.org/

    • Re:Re-inventing the wheel.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by flonker ( 526111 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @06:01AM (#5318176)
      I'm gonna get marked redundant just for the subject, aren't I?

      Anyway, contributing to an old project is a great way to increase your coding skills, play with coding a game, and NOT have to deal with all of the stupid stuff, because it has already been done by someone else. Take Crossfire (http://crossfire.real-time.com/) [real-time.com] as an example. You have a stable multiplayer online RPG that's been around since '92 or even longer. It runs on many un*x variants, and has some win32 stuff too, although no fully supported win32 client. If you're interested in monster AI, go ahead, code that. Everything else works perfectly fine. If you're interested in writing a new client, go right ahead. You can even take the networking code from the current clients, and write only the GUI. Hell, there have even been three Perl based 'bots that I know of. Network code, but no GUI.

      The point is, if you contribute to an existing project, you can skip straight to the part you enjoy the most, and you're much more likely to finish.

      • Re:Re-inventing the wheel.... (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Yeah, but like the guy below you says, you're still working on someone else's project instead of your own. Better to use a system that does all the crappy stuff (networking, basic graphic/sound engine, etc) for you, so you can work on creating exactly what you wanted. Lately I've become a big fan of BYOND [byond.com] which is tile based, but has a really neat language that allows you to do some very powerful stuff. And it's not just limited to RPGs either (though it's obviously geared towards that). The only real drawback is a lack of a gui client in linux (they have text mode) but we all keep Win32 around for gaming anyway, right? :)

        Check it out if you really want to build YOUR own net dream (cool acronym too).
    • This certainly isn't intended to discouage this person from working on a free project if he so chooses, but the thing about your own project is that it's just that -- yours. You can't really personalize a game that's already been designed.

      That said, the artist problem is one that has plagued me as well... most artists are fickle and unreliable at best. However, if you manage to find one that doesn't fit the stereotype, more power to you. :)

  • tutorial on "Make Seamless" GIMP filter (Score:5, Informative)

    by ubiquitin ( 28396 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @07:57AM (#5318386) Homepage Journal
    If you want to make background tiles from other non-background tile images, read through the short Make seamless tutorial [gimp-savvy.com].

  • A couple (Score:2, Interesting)

    by agentk ( 74906 )
    VRML has a standard texture set (the idea is that it is stored locally, so they don't need to be downloaded from the network). It's not that large, but there are a couple things in there and maybe you could add some. http://www.web3d.org/WorkingGroups/media/ [web3d.org]

    There is also a listing here of image libraries: http://web3d.org/vrml/txlib.htm [web3d.org] if you find some good ones you should submit them to this listing.

    Some guy also has made a ton of really strange tilable images, in a collection called Propaganda:
    http://www.ibiblio.org/propaganda/ [ibiblio.org]

    reed

  • Free Stuff (Score:3, Informative)

    by i0wnzj005uck4 ( 603384 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @10:38AM (#5319008) Homepage

    I've found the best places to look are on sites for RPG engines, like Verge [verge-rpg.net]. Generally there are links to sites with literally oodles of tile banks. You may also want to try DIV Arena [div-arena.com] and, of course, the Freecraft [sf.net] and FreeCiv [freeciv.org] projects, both of which offer free art assets.

    Hope this helps. Oh, done a google for SpriteLib lately? Or Ari Feldman?

    ... and I'm spent.

  • If you have some artists willing to create characters for you, you could probably talk them into creating a few tessellations for you as well. You could also google for 'tessellations'. I took a quick glance and it looked like there were quite a few relevant hits.

  • You're asking for the hardest part of "your" game (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Performer Guy ( 69820 ) on Monday February 17, 2003 @01:39PM (#5320161)
    The code for tile scrollers is NOT advanced. The effort is in the tiles and the artistic property. This whole business of saying "Please give me free tiles for *MY* tile scroller" is flawed.

    The tiles ARE the tile scroller, the code that does the scrolling is trivial by todays standards. This is the underlying problem with free stuff like this, the content tends to define these projects.

    What are you actually going to write? A background scroller and sprite muxer? That's old hat, and all you want is the content (the hard part) so you can go claim a project as your own. Join one of the existing efforts out there, talent is diluted enough as it is on these projects.
  • http://www.planetquake.com/gg/textures/index.html
    http://www.planetquake.com/gg/textures/open.html
    http://www.planetquake.com/gg/textures/aardtex.ht m l
    http://www.planetquake.com/gg/textures/mmgpltex .ht ml

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