Old Border Shandalar: Add rotating Adventure battle backgrounds

[vanja-ivancevic]

• Adds folder-based Adventure battle background pools with any number of JPG, JPEG, or PNG files, random selection, and no immediate repeats.
• Automatically syncs plane-declared background URLs from skin/battle-backgrounds.txt into the selected plane's cache without adding a user setting.
• Selects default pools by overworld terrain or point-of-interest type, with biome-specific variants for castles, dungeons, caves, and common locations.
• Adds battleBackground folder overrides for reusable enemy definitions, individual enemies placed in TMX maps, and points of interest.
• Resolves backgrounds from the individual TMX encounter, enemy definition, point of interest, category and biome, generic category, then the existing single-image fallbacks.
• Preserves existing plane configurations and bundled, common, current-skin, and default-skin fallbacks when custom folders are absent or unavailable.
• Keeps the Old Border background artwork hosted outside the Forge distribution and documents the folder layout and configuration for other Adventure mod authors.

[tool4ever]

I like the idea, though this adds yet another ~20MB of extra assets to download for every user

Since these seem rather optional imo it's time to think about how they can be downloaded manually like some of the other parts

[vanja-ivancevic]

I agree. If other modders want to add backgrounds, the bloat will continue to increase. Additionally, this is 20MB of data that vanilla Shandalar players won't even use. One approach could be making it optional in the settings via an auto-download feature, handling backgrounds similarly to how we handle card art, like hosting them separately for users to download. Personally, I would like to have them activated by default for Old Border Shandalar, as it enhances the experience. Perhaps when a user switches to and loads that specific adventure mode, the assets could download in the background. Most users likely wouldn't mind an extra 20MB of cached art, especially since we already cache card art this way. Maybe we can have the game download all images in given folders on a server, that way modders can add/remove bgs without updates too… Do you have any preferences?

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[tool4ever]

Well some of the lists for the ingame downloaders already point at your domain anyway
so it might make sense to supply them from there
not sure if they can be called via adventure mode but ideally each plane would have its own list with links for its optional assets 🤔
depending on which location you choose some overlap from #11387 is possible

[liminalwarmth]

This is cool, and I would definitely use this feature. If you did package it into the new tabs interface I'm proposing, display would be a logical place to stick it, since there are other settings there that are similar, as tool4forever pointed out.

The tabs definitely become more useful as more GUI options get added, as I'm finding with the additional enhancements I'm doing on local that I haven't pushed upstream until there's more discussion about some of the existing pending changes.

More of an advanced feature, but it would also be neat if plane authors could assign (and distribute) background overrides for specific combat encounters or creature archetypes (if this doesn't already exist).

[vanja-ivancevic]

1. I really like your suggestion of tabbing the settings. We have way too many settings right now in one list.
2. I was thinking about have these custom BGs just as a default setting for the plane's modder to design as they want, with fallbacks in place, as they are sort of a core visual game experience of plane. I don't fully see the need of enabling or disabling more backgrounds. As such, I would suggest to keep it out of settings for now.
3. I 100% agree with your suggestion to have custom BGs for certain POIs and even enemies. I will look into what the best way to do this would be.

[Jetz72]

Still iffy about third party content URLs for assets being included in the main repo. It's not unprecedented, but it's also not unprecedented that such a site proves unsustainable. Ideally we could someday shift to a system where entire Adventure planes can easily be downloaded and installed as complete packages, and then there's no risk of the user getting an incomplete experience. But for now I think this implementation is alright, pending confirmation on iOS handling.

[Jetz72]

@shoeless Will this work with the new iOS support? I saw in that PR that several instances of Gdx.files.absolute got swapped out.