Alright, I'm horrible with coding and such, so hopefully someone here has the knowledge to understand what I'm getting at.
Currently, the only things that are biome-compliant are the grass color (top of the block) and foliage color.
Side-of-the-block grass remains the same natural green color, as it is not tied in to any pre-existing biome-compliant gradient (e.g. GrassColor.PNG/FoliageColor.PNG).
Would it then theoretically be possible to look into how Notch coded in the biome color gradients, and in turn, create our own line of code to tie in a 3rd .PNG (SideGrassColor.PNG, which would just be GrassColor.PNG copied, pasted, and renamed), and have it work for the side-grass?
As I said above, I know nothing about coding, but if I did know stuff, you can bet your butts I'd be looking in to adding some lines of code to allow a "SideGrassColor.PNG" to be tied to the grass block's side panels.
^--Essentially, for side-grass coloring, all we'd have to do is make a copy of GrassColor.PNG and rename it to something like SideGrassColor.PNG, then add in some code to whatever file handles biome grass/foliage color. Once the grass part of the side-of-the-grass-block texture has been grayscaled to be biome-compliant, hopefully a successfully coded in tie-in would allow the side-grass to change color and match the top of the grass color.
Yea, the problem is the code isn't open source. We can't really modify the code and distribute an .exe of the game to everyone.
The only thing you can do is try to decompile the code and then make something that "hooks" into it while running/booting for changes. Which is a pain.
The reason he didn't do Side-grass was because he didn't figure out how to only change the color of PART of the texture, instead of the entire thing, in time for the update. You'd have to have grass all the way down the side of the block for it to look right.
That would be one way to do it, but it would mean that each grass would have it's own block and we would have 3 stacks of different kinds of dirt blocks probably.
My guess is Notch was just out of time; implementing the same color on the sides would be as easy as having another block for the dirt under the grass and overlaying the two, and only applying the color change to the grass part.
Notch knows how to do it, and I'm sure it'll happen soon enough.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
DB's Texture pack: 70% Complete (~95% of Phase 1)
-Terrain: 99% (99% of Phase 1)
-GUI: 90% (90% of Phase 1)
-Icons: 80% (80% of Phase 1)
-Mobs: 10% (100% of Phase 1)
Well, that's actually that's a pretty obvious observation. The issue is that Notch needs to work out how to change the grass saturation levels without making the dirt look stupid. I've already thought of this myself. Oh yeah, and the code isnt open source...
Anything in the black areas gets coloured, anything that's transparent doesn't.
Also allows texture artists to easily change this to fit their grass.
Which would simply be coloured as so.
Well, the dirt part of the grass block is the same as the dirt block. (I assume that's to keep the block from changing when grass grows on it, though there's nothing that requires it to be the same) To me, the easiest way to code the side of the grass blocks to change color with the biomes would be to make the grass block side texture an alpha texture that gets overlaid onto the dirt texture. It would allow texture packs to decide how much grass they want on the sides of grass blocks and it would always match the top. Of course, doing that would increase the processing needed to render a grass block, but hopefully it wouldn't be too much of a performance hit. After all, we're dealing with 16x16 pixel textures by default.
It would be similar to Dude's suggestion, but using the alpha channel of the image rather than having a separate image acting as a mask. That is, after all, the point of alpha transparency.
Anything in the black areas gets coloured, anything that's transparent doesn't.
Also allows texture artists to easily change this to fit their grass.
Which would simply be coloured as so.
EDIT: Oh, wait, I misunderstood. You mean a separate file that uses the black part to decide where to apply the gradient
Currently, the only things that are biome-compliant are the grass color (top of the block) and foliage color.
Side-of-the-block grass remains the same natural green color, as it is not tied in to any pre-existing biome-compliant gradient (e.g. GrassColor.PNG/FoliageColor.PNG).
Would it then theoretically be possible to look into how Notch coded in the biome color gradients, and in turn, create our own line of code to tie in a 3rd .PNG (SideGrassColor.PNG, which would just be GrassColor.PNG copied, pasted, and renamed), and have it work for the side-grass?
As I said above, I know nothing about coding, but if I did know stuff, you can bet your butts I'd be looking in to adding some lines of code to allow a "SideGrassColor.PNG" to be tied to the grass block's side panels.
For information regarding the "GrassColor.PNG" and "FoliageColor.PNG" I've referred to, please click here
^--Essentially, for side-grass coloring, all we'd have to do is make a copy of GrassColor.PNG and rename it to something like SideGrassColor.PNG, then add in some code to whatever file handles biome grass/foliage color. Once the grass part of the side-of-the-grass-block texture has been grayscaled to be biome-compliant, hopefully a successfully coded in tie-in would allow the side-grass to change color and match the top of the grass color.
Get what I'm saying?
The only thing you can do is try to decompile the code and then make something that "hooks" into it while running/booting for changes. Which is a pain.
Notch knows how to do it, and I'm sure it'll happen soon enough.
-Terrain: 99% (99% of Phase 1)
-GUI: 90% (90% of Phase 1)
-Icons: 80% (80% of Phase 1)
-Mobs: 10% (100% of Phase 1)
Yeah, exactly. He simply ran out of time before he was able to.
Anything in the black areas gets coloured, anything that's transparent doesn't.
Also allows texture artists to easily change this to fit their grass.
Which would simply be coloured as so.
It would be similar to Dude's suggestion, but using the alpha channel of the image rather than having a separate image acting as a mask. That is, after all, the point of alpha transparency.
EDIT: Oh, wait, I misunderstood. You mean a separate file that uses the black part to decide where to apply the gradient
That would actually be brilliant
Part of the dirt.