Iris2.de

This is the UO:KR 3D Client. They faked us the same way as with the old 3D Client. But here is the World in fake 3D but the Creatures in 2D. (old was vice versa)

No real 3D. They just use a 3D-Engine, but you still have Iso-View.

O, a quick question. Those screenshots on the development log, are those build using Iris2 & custom map making tool ( aka, to finally have the ability to build a map, and items from within the client? ).

"Why are roads ugly in 2D now?"
The short answer is - it's an inadvertent byproduct of making roads in Kingdom Reborn look pretty, and it's something we plan to fix. The long answer is, well, long. Our lead designer Nick Corea (Dragonhead) answered this in more detail:

In KR, the terrain is rendered completely differently than in 2D. In 2D, each terrain type is represented as a set of tiles. Each set has variants that break up the repetitive nature of the tile set. (You can see this in many of the housing tilesets.) Each set also includes transitional edges that help make the changes from one set to another (dirt to grass, for example) look more natural. With so many different 2D terrain types, all of this leads to thousands of terrain tiles.

For Kingdom Reborn, we wanted the terrain to look more natural and blend smoothly from one type to another. We use several layers of textures to produce large areas of the same terrain, without obvious, distracting repeats. Since we did this with larger, blending textures rather than individual tiles, KR has no need for the terrain variants or transitional edge tiles. But we need to have KR and 2D work with the same data, so we needed to convert thousands of different 2D tiles to less than 200 terrain types for KR. Under this plan, the original data would be (and for the most part is) preserved.

Once the converted roads were seen in KR, it became apparent that they were hard to follow, with their edges blending too well with the surroundings. And since roads are just dirt tiles, we couldn't automatically make "roads" more distinguishable. All that "dirt" was only considered "road" based on context. Therefore we came up with a new terrain type, "road stone," that would look like worn, partially overgrown cobblestone. The KR world building team tracked down all of the roads in all the maps and replaced the centers of the "dirt" roads with "road stone". (It looked pretty darn good.)

In order to keep 2D looking more or less the same, we copied the 4 standard dirt tiles to a new location in the terrain texture list, and set them up to translate to "road stone" in KR. The only problem was that since we converted KR back to 2D, all "road stone" KR textures mapped to only ONE of the 2D "road stone" dirt tiles. All 4 variants are available, but are not yet used. This makes the road areas look repetitive and, well, ugly.

But fret not!

We are currently adding the variants to the roads as fast we can, starting with areas most populated, but it looks like we should be able to break-up/improve the look of all the roads in the game. There are other terrain tile sets in 2D (water, for example) that have a similar problem, for similar reasons. If our current roads plan works well, we will likely attack some of those issues as well.

But we need to have KR and 2D work with the same data, so we needed to convert thousands of different 2D tiles to less than 200 terrain types for KR. Under this plan, the original data would be (and for the most part is) preserved.

But the map still contained one single tileid as KR just needs 1 to address the whole texture with transitions.

I did not know that the old "dirt" roadtile was only 1 tile. thx.

One Problem: Splatting textures works good with only a few >4-8. They use 200. A lot more.

No, the old 'dirt tileset' consisted of a whole bunch of tiles for 2D with all transitions and such.

Therefor, they probably forgot to use all the other tileIds while mapping.
*guessing*