Everything looks really good, especially the fire/smoke, tho it could use some sort of ground telling us its a lantern, cos atm it looks as the other poles tha's holdning the ground and other stuff up. Another thing that bothers me is the pink/skin-looking colour uve used at some places, you should consider changing it and maby add just a little more contrast into the picture, cos at first I thought it was a JPEG cos of the simmilar colours.

Yeah, I do need to play around with the colours more but PictureWars always seems to use low contrast anyway, so it's more of an attempt to fit in than anything else that said, I like the contrast of your edit. The pinky colour used is because I wanted to keep the colours fairly saturated and needed to describe wood, and I quite like how it interacts with the ground, but I might tweak it a little.

Who are you on picture wars? I must say this is very nice, but often maps like this are hard to play on, especially if lazy members don't bother the fix the ground where they've been.

I'm not anyone on the actual picture wars forums, I just play on DRLFF and am internet buddies with Lizard (or Lizzrd as he is on PW), and we're thinking of having a "high quality" match. I personally don't think nearly enough effort is put into the pixelling side of things in most PW matches but I appreciate the realism behind such a statement. Putting the terrain back after you move can be a pain, but I think playing in a more interesting setting is worth it, tbh. I think there's the same difference between a detailed map and a "standard" PW map and illuminated text and crappy paperbacks (or at least a nice hardback with a dust cover), sometimes it's fun to be indulgent, especially when it comes to pixelling

I'll definitely add some detail to the background, but the deeper ground is going to stay as a block colour as it's intended to show blocked line of sight into that part of the terrain. That said, I need some way of backing the building backgrounds more interesting without harming readability of what's "solid" ground and what's background, ideas there would be appreciated

I want to see our tiles

I should do another one or two then, I suppose

Nice to see all this progress made in my absence.

I'm confused as to why "crazy" shaped tiles are labelled difficult here.
Obviously you have to fetch the data a different way but if you overlay the images with alpha you only need to know the 2D offset at which the tiles tessellate and if that alternates. For iso tiles, you use placement_x = ((coord_y - coord_x) * block_pixel_width / 2) and placement_y = ((coord_x + coord_y) * block_pixel_width / 4) where the block_pixel_width is the "diameter" of the tile from the furthest apart opposing corners. Similar rules can be made for hex tiles and the like (though hex tiles have an alternating x offset each row), and I'm sure the same could be said for "crazier" shapes. The person setting up the board could be able to define the shape to be used with a mask (1 bit image) and the offsets, and have an example presented to them as to what the server would tessellate those objects as with the rules provided so they could tweak that beforehand.

Sure, it's not as nice as just multiplying the numbers but programmatically it's not much worse, and could make for some awesome collabs. The hexquisite tilesets could be emulated with the "void" tiles you described earlier

I played around with housing designs for far too long, but I arrived at something I liked (just shy of shabby overall, with little bits of tech greebling here and there) after much deliberation and am very happy with how it looks in-game:

I think the problem with some of those rocks is that the end result of the "painting" phase wasn't artefact-cleaned after sharpening so crazy things happened.

I started on an edit but I shouldn't procrastinate what I'm working on any more and I got frustrated quickly with the light source issues O_o in case anyone's interested, I've included it:

The index section should highlight areas where my clusters still suck.

Oh, by the way I did another rock from scratch after wating those videos, Arne. The overall shape sucks but I'm happy with the texture for ~20 minutes, though there's so much I'd patch up if I took another pass (heaps of banding and artefact issues <_<)

it's unsuitable for use as Cortex Command terrainDebris by the looks of things; very likely just because it's at a different viewing angle.

Semi-relevant for all the 50% dithering.