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[Manveru Taurënér]

Looks good! Well worth it imo with being able to show equipped gear (especially for the future when full animal people civs may be a thing),even if some of them would look slightly off. Do wild animal men (the subterranean and savage biome ones) have clothing in game? They look a tad too civilized to represent those groups properly, but more to do with the color than the clothes themselves I suppose. Would some kind of loincloth thing be a suitable intermediary?

[Meph]

The cavern civs are naked, except for spears, blowguns or shields.

[Superdorf]

Those trees are very nice; I approve.

As far as the top-down/three-quarter clash goes... eh. It's a little odd-looking without shadows. Much less so with. I'm fine with it, for now.

Do the sprites for "normal" races like dwarves and such come clothed whether the creature in question is clothed or not?

[Meph]

Currently we decided Yes. Because the clothing colors show you the profession. Showing the correct clothing with correct colors would mean you have a wild mix of colorful dwarves, but no idea who is who. It's also not so important if someone wears a shirt, vest, robe or cloak... but for the military, we show armor/weapons, because those do make a difference.

[Death Dragon]

There are about 200 of them in the game and they are rarely seen, so some kind of automated process to create them would be nice. I made a little test with 1 basic body, copying over the skin/hair texture and the head from an animal. The results look like this:

Will the sprites be automatically generated by the game using these modular pieces or are you just talking about pre-making the sprites using an automated process?
I'm wondering how this graphics set will handle the randomly generated races that are supposed to come with the magic release.

[Meph]

I make the creature sprites manually, the equipped weapons/armors/shields would be added automatically.

Procedual stuff gets frankensteined together from pieces, a sprite per possible bodypart etc.

[Cruxador]

Well, I'm of the opinion that since this is meant to be the actual official graphics for the game, it should represent what's going on in the game, rather than merely an abstraction. ASCII is already a perfectly good abstraction for people who care if things are represented accurately but just want icons.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Well, I'm of the opinion that since this is meant to be the actual official graphics for the game, it should represent what's going on in the game, rather than merely an abstraction. ASCII is already a perfectly good abstraction for people who care if things are represented accurately but just want icons.

Hmm. Yeah. Is facial hair and missing limbs and so on all included in the sprites? I always find it much harder to imagine that the clothed, bearded dwarf in front of me is representative of a clean-shaven, naked dwarf with one leg, compared with 'd'.

Meh, but that's just me. The 'I must have Graphics!' crowd is vocal enough for me to understand it's my choice to switch on ascii.

[Meph]

Well, I'm of the opinion that since this is meant to be the actual official graphics for the game, it should represent what's going on in the game, rather than merely an abstraction. ASCII is already a perfectly good abstraction for people who care if things are represented accurately but just want icons.

Me too. But it's a joint venture of what Tarn can code, what Mike deems stylisch, and what Kitfox can pay for.

Making everything according to the raws might not always work, look good or be affordable. (because it might end up with thousand upon thousands of variations)

As an example, showing professions for animal men would mean making 40.000 sprites.

Well, I'm of the opinion that since this is meant to be the actual official graphics for the game, it should represent what's going on in the game, rather than merely an abstraction. ASCII is already a perfectly good abstraction for people who care if things are represented accurately but just want icons.

Hmm. Yeah. Is facial hair and missing limbs and so on all included in the sprites? I always find it much harder to imagine that the clothed, bearded dwarf in front of me is representative of a clean-shaven, naked dwarf with one leg, compared with 'd'.

Meh, but that's just me. The 'I must have Graphics!' crowd is vocal enough for me to understand it's my choice to switch on ascii.

We want to do hair styles/beards, and I will certainly suggest injuries at least for dwarves. It would be too much work for every creature, but maybe it's possible to come up with a system for civ-members. That being said, we haven't even spoken to Tarn about the injuries, it's just something in my notes.

Edit: I'm just happy that we will be able to do stuff like this:

[LordBalkan]

Yeah, I'm really not liking that solution either.
Still trying possible improvements though:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Meph and Mayday, thats getting awesome!
Thank you both for this great art.

Now, I have a few questions:

- The mini-grid rooms with both wood and bags are the stockpile represantation, am I right?
There is a small (?) chance to add some kind of way to differ each one of them depending on wich material are stocked in it?
Say, yellow for food, green for rough material, gray for weapons and so on...
Or... a way to add inscriptions on it? Don't know, something like "Food Pile 2", "Gems pile 34", "Wood Pile".... you get it, right?
OR EVEN both the ideas? hahah just dreaming high...

- (And this is just a visual thing heheh) the beds.... They look soo small... the pillow is representing more the bed then the bed itself. I mean, the tables (which don't have much more details I know) looks wider then the beds, and they both ocupy the same amount of pixels, right?

Heheh just laying my thoughts here.

BTW, this last soft-slopes are the BEST, it is a shame that will be a trouble to multilevel view...
Also, about the inside walls, the shades kindda do the trick to understand that they are not a hole in the ground. Again, it is bad that its too difficult to maintain the complete wall visible as Meph already said.

And thats it!

Looking forward for more updates from you guys!!

[Cruxador]

Obviously, there are practical limits on what can be done. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about, for example, clothing the sprites of animal people such as the olm men who will almost never appear clothed in game. I'm also talking about things like coloring dwarf clothes arbitrarily on profession rather than respecting their actual colors, since inheriting colors from the raws is already in the game in other forms, and being able to see the color is the whole reason that a player would choose to color their clothes in the first place. At least that one, unlike the never-nude nudists, has a gameplay justification, but it's still far less important than allowing players to successfully color their uniforms and then have colored uniforms.

And to reiterate in a general sense, the whole point of going with WYSIWYG graphics over ASCII-based icons is that what you see reflects what you get as accurately as possible.

[Meph]

Yes, stockpiles. We had the idea with icons, and borders around specific stockpiles.


but colors is also a great idea. I'll add it to the list.

The beds are too small considering the size of dwarves, yes. Maybe we can do this:
(7 pixels oversized to the north)

[Pillbo]

@Pillbo that's more a matter to discuss with Kitfox. I'm sure if people limit themselves to releasing such remakes of the stock tileset to the Steam Workshop, there's nothing morally questionable about it. Any legal problems are not my speciality though.

As far as the repaints idea, I wasn't imagining people putting out their mod packaged with your edited sprites included. I was thinking the game could do it, more like- someone makes a mod of new type of mushroom, and they point the raws at the built in sprites for stock mushrooms with a red filter over top, so you get visually distinct objects that fit right into the look of the stock art.

This is just run through the Color Replacement Tool in photoshop:



Otherwise I imagine some people will make mods like this:


Not that I have any idea how easy something like that could be.  You guys talking about the automatically changing sprites got me thinking about it.

[LordBalkan]

Hahaha!! Hey, Icons  ! That's why your the designer, not me!!

Yeah, those are better beds indeed.
Ty for your kindness! Any others thoughts will be stocked here in future as well.

[Superdorf]

Well, if you're clothing all your civ members (regardless of actual clothing) I see no reason not to do the same for animal people. It does differentiate them from their non-sapient cousins nicely.

As far as the actual look of the animal-people sprites goes... well, it works, only the biggest animal people (like, say, that elephant man) have these really enormous heads compared to their bodies. It's kind of cute, actually... but maybe not what you were going for? I dunno.