Make painting cliffs terrains easier

[manuq]

From Jackie Codes presentation in GodotFest, there is an easier setup for cliff tiles. It is well explained in this other video of Jackie.

Our levels had issues in the past because the cliff terrains leave inconsistent tiles that had to be adjusted one by one.

[wjt]

This is in my notes from that talk! You beat me to filing the bug.

[manuq]

This is in my notes from that talk! You beat me to filing the bug.

I did it for the elevation tileset in the template, becase I'm afraid we'll need a migration script for the actual tileset (haven't checked).

[wjt]

Problems I see for migrating the main elevation tileset:

1. I bet that there are places where we have the clifftop tile without the clifffront; and where we have the clifffront tile without the clifftop. Maybe we can ignore these but we'll need to migrate them somehow.

2. There are cases where we have the "wrong" cliff-front tile for cosmetic reasons; for example, the door at the end of lorequest 1 stealth:

3. The real spanner in the works is the cliff_mines tiles:

For these you probably don't want to always have both the clifftop and the clifffront. Not sure what to do about these

[manuq]

Problems I see for migrating the main elevation tileset:

All 3 are good points, @wjt, and they show how this may be an oversimplification that turns the elevations a bit inflexible.

For 1. I bet the same, I think we should treat those as bugs, but yes the main problem is how to migrate them. Maybe they need to be spotted & fixed before any migration happens.

For 2, you are right, I don't see any way to support those intentional cosmetic decisions that the current tileset allows, other than having 2 sets of tiles (the simple one and the existing one) both using the same PNG texture. Or maybe if the cosmetic decisions are only for this "door" case, we should fix it at the door asset, or making all wall sides isometric. By the way I didn't realize we had these! And the door I placed in this Void level needs those "wrong" tiles then:

For 3. I actually wonder if we should treat mines as a decoration layer on top of cliffs. Checking with GIMP I see that they are drawn on top: I have set the cliffs PNG as a layer on top of the cliffs + mines PNG, with "color removal" mode, and the result is a mines-only asset:

Just like we do with this grass decoration:

As we add more decorations (bookshelves maybe?) it seems a bit redundant to repeat the cliff texture.

[wjt]

For 2, you are right, I don't see any way to support those intentional cosmetic decisions that the current tileset allows, other than having 2 sets of tiles (the simple one and the existing one) both using the same PNG texture. Or maybe if the cosmetic decisions are only for this "door" case, we should fix it at the door asset, or making all wall sides isometric. By the way I didn't realize we had these! And the door I placed in this Void level needs those "wrong" tiles then:

TBH I don't think the door + cliff combination looks particularly good with either the vertical or slanted cliffs beside it.

Here's a wildcard option: make the door a scene tile in the tileset and configure it with the relevant terrain peering bits so that vertical walls are either side of it?

---

Mine decorations: yes I think that would be much better.

[manuq]

@jgbourque your input here will be very welcome too. This is an "easy to use" VS "hard but flexible" discussion.