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[Criperum]

PTW

[Meph]

Oh, I'm sure that will be just lovely to handle! Since it looks like we can't be pleased with the small creatures even when we agree on how they look. I don't envy you.

Maybe Toady can make the game color your sprites based on the creature's body material? That already works to a certain extent, right?

Oh, I'm pretty hardened up when it comes to user feedback. I love getting it, but I have no issues ignoring it when it makes no sense. Even if a sprite (or mod feature) would look/work perfectly as indented, there will always be people that simply have a different personal taste.

Maybe; it would be cool to use ingame colors, but they only effect parts of the sprite. How should the game know which parts are the skin, or the feathers, or the hair, if we don't make a pre-set for every creature manually. It's possible but would mean a lot more work.

[Cruxador]

Maybe; it would be cool to use ingame colors, but they only effect parts of the sprite. How should the game know which parts are the skin, or the feathers, or the hair, if we don't make a pre-set for every creature manually. It's possible but would mean a lot more work.

It's probably still worth it for common creatures like dogs, though, and it wouldn't be much more work for many single-colored creatures, of which there's a few - Llama, sheep, horse, and donkey could work that way in the sprites Mayday posted. In fact, cats and dogs fit that criteria anyway.

[Jiri Petru]

Re: bloody corpses...

You don't need bloody corpses. There is already blood splatter in the game, which I suppose will be rendered. So if someone kills a character, you render the blood and corpse separately and it looks all proper. If someone dies of old age, you just show the sprite and there's no blood splatter.

Basically, don't include blood in the sprites, is what I'm saying. It's redundant.

[Starver]

Maybe; it would be cool to use ingame colors, but they only effect parts of the sprite. How should the game know which parts are the skin, or the feathers, or the hair, if we don't make a pre-set for every creature manually. It's possible but would mean a lot more work.

Frankenstein everything, but at least with a single creature you can plausibly match each overlay (from the entire body of a given fur colour to the perhaps single-pixel of eye-colour, if you so wish) so that it matches perfectly rather than your 'attempt to make the &/FB sensible from endlessly permutative nonsensical body layout list' dilemma.

Although the phrase "If I wanted to go there, I wouldn't start from here" comes to mind.

[Putnam]

Maybe; it would be cool to use ingame colors, but they only effect parts of the sprite. How should the game know which parts are the skin, or the feathers, or the hair, if we don't make a pre-set for every creature manually. It's possible but would mean a lot more work.

I can think of two ways for this:

1. separate sprites for each color, with the graphics raws selecting the tissue that the color will be taken from;
2. separate alpha channels or similar for each color, which i literally can't decide if it's less or more work (and would require moving away from BMP which... okay, that's actually not a bad thing at all)

[Meph]

Putnam: If the color changes are put in, it would be different alpha channels. Too many extra sprites otherwise. Just the beard/hair styles X possible colors on Dwarves alone would be 3700 sprites.

[Cruxador]

Yeah, it would probably be a tiff or something. But it's not a particularly difficult thing to do technologically. Just tedious. What might take a bit more skill is making it look good, but fundamentally, you just paint a shading channel on a mask (it seems to me that index transparency would be fine, but it's not like alpha* is that expensive) and then you paint each colored zone with the appropriate raw-dependant channel. You can have whatever number of channels you like with tiff, which is why it's often used in remote sensing, and as opposed to a rgb or argb format like png or indeed bitmap. As for workflow, I don't see it being that hard honestly now that I'm thinking about. Can't you just paint a greyscale sprite in a shading channel, and then paint the colors at full saturation underneath it just to denote zones? I guess you can use rbg if there are things without raw color values but it's still basically just greyscale and underlay.

*which technically refers to the channel for transparency; although you might be able to coloration that way, doing it as a normal color channel (like the red, green, and blue channels) would, by my reckoning, be simpler both for the people and for the hardware.

[Starver]

AFAICT, the suggestion was like one of mine: (Red Beard/Brown Beard/Blonde Beard/...)  +  (Wan face/dark face/ruddy face/...) + (ditto hair...) 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Overlaid onto bodyplan (clothing variations included) Include hands with face, unless you start with naked/nevernude/Action Man bodies and 'dress' over them, anyway.  Anyway, many options, but additively combined not multiplicatively (once you have sort sort out the head/facial hair colour*style mess) in creating each and every ensemble.

(i.e. for, say, 60 different beards (5 colours, 3 lengths, 4 'styles'?) and 60 different hairs (ditto), 'only' 120 one-or-other overlays are needed, not 3600.)

That said, different alphas is the way I'd go. Functional arbitrary colour-planes that can contain immutable (or XORed to the rest) line-details, another plane to define with 'skin' tone, other swathes as needed (back to the job-type 'sash' idea), of course the transparency-alpha zone(s) for the background but either greyscale or augmented with a second alpha for half-transparent black/grey for cast shadow effects (omitted for the vampirically-effected?). Beard length/etc could be cascading ("beard-alpha value 1" displays upon any beard, "beard-alpha value 3c" is only evaluated for use if long beard of style 'c' is required), as could optional highlights and edgings. And 'zombie effect overlay' alphas could feature both your visible-body-internals and an over-riding transparency-to-background for the deepest of such wounds.

(edit: Oh, and animation frame(set)s of the layers as well. I meant to mention that possibility to!)

Would require a very bespoke sprite-rendering function, to compile and combine to the nigh-infinitely variable singular sprite to the desired instantiation. You may be able to get away with drawing the sprite-and-variations in something like GIMP's arbitrary layer/bitplane handling, but an equally bespoke editor with the exact same WYSIWYG select-and-display capabilities (also an automated flicker-through a permutation of combinations, for sanity-checking for clashes) is probably more useful, and can code-share with DF for absolute certainty.

But all that's probably pie-in-the-sky thoughts, both options. Just thinking out loud. And reinventing someone else's wbeel, as well, no doubt. (That Cruxador's post happen during, I notice as I try to Submit.)

[Liamar]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Might I suggest making dogs in this position:

Due to the nature of tiles the stillness of the pose will be easier on the my eyes than the perpetual sniffing/playing pose.

[Magistrum]

Raised paw dog would be nice, agreed. Would need to see how it would look in 32px goodness though.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Raised paw dog would be nice, agreed. Would need to see how it would look in 32px goodness though.

Wouldn't it look kind of weird sliding along with one paw raised?
Well, if animation is coming, I guess it doesn't matter.

[Cruxador]

If animation is coming, a doggo snuffling around following a trail would be extra cute.

Although I agree with whoever said that it might make more sense to give that pose to hunting dogs specifically.

[Meph]

Just as a reminder: The idle animations I posted are just mock-ups, to see how you guys would like those.

[Criperum]

Meph, do you know the game is being rendered by sortware renderer or hardware?