The Dink Network

Desert Tiles Graphics

July 12th, 2002
v1.2
Score : 6.5 fair
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This is another version of desert tiles amde by Dethlord. The color of these desert tiles are the bright yellow. However, it gave me the feeling that you got in SOB's "Gold town" instead of a desert. To me, the saturation of the color is a little too much to look real like a desert. Yes, you expect to feel the sun all over you, but you should also get a feeling of sand and possible mirage feeling. Hence you should get such dust-like feeling. It looks too clean to me to believe it to be desert. So I am NOT going to rate it based on the desert tile name.

For tile No. 38, as an alternative new tile, it does a pretty decent job for giving the tile set a new addition. The bad thing about this is that there is no shadow caused by the presence of the hills or on the "sand" itself. I always thought the snow tiles are one of the worst tiles in original Dink because most of the snow ground did not give you any feeling of 3D real surface. But even in snow-hill tiles, you got some shadow or brightness around the boundary between hill and snow. This tile does not have any 3D feeling. If you try to fill the whole screen with the "sand" only, you might think it is a smooth floor instead of a desert! The contrast in the hill itself is a little too much. The hill and the sand just do not have a matching feeling. Some people might say my cracked land blending too much, but I would say this tile does not blend at all. Those white spots on the hill make them look more like a hill connected to snow ground instead of sand.

For tile No. 40, it is a crossover from sand to grass. As the other reviewer pointed out, it has only straight line, no round corners. In fact, you cannot make a good transition at all, because this tile does not include the corner, even a 90 degree corner! An also the transition did not take at the similar locations for the opposite sides. One transition is near the edge of a 50x50 tile, while the other side is close to the middle of the tile square! And the grass tile he chose is one of the not-so-seamless one. I really don't like to see this kind of grass to fill up the whole screen. But that's the main problem from the original Dink tiles, though. ;p

So, in short, this is a nicely done tile set, however it did not resemble well to sand, desert, or any 3D outdoor surface. The transitions between grass and sand and between sand and hill are not very good. No shadow what-so-ever to show the feeling of wildland's surface.

Unless you do like this tile set and have a great use in your dmod, this is not a practically very useful tile set. If you are looking for a desert tile, SimonK's SOB desert tile is still the best choice right now. I kind of feel sorry for his effort since he did a pretty decent, but I can only give a 6.5 score for this set.