These are incredible!

The only word I can think of: magnificent!

But I have a few questions if you don't mind. What about the missing animations for example? I mean slash, thrust, cast, etc. Are you planning to make those too, or are the defaults compatible with these? (BTW it's awesome that you have made jump and run! And sit, that was VERY much needed!)

What about accessories? You've mentioned that you've moved the head, but does this mean that default cloths still work? Or do we need to modify them? (It's really great that you've 17 clothing items, but it's not clear to me that these are specifically modified to fit these characters or you have just created a useful set of cloths.)

How about weapons and other tools? (Basically the same question here, do they still fit or do they need some adjustments?)

To summarize, I'd like to use these in a fantasy-themed game, so I'll need cast, slash, thrust animations, some extra "cloths" (like body armour for knights for example), helmets (I'm sure I'll have to modify those for certain), and weapons like sword, axe or bow which fit to the hands. I'm wondering how much work is needed for these if I'm about to use your LPC character set as a base (which I really would like to).

Cheers,
bzt

ps: oh, and the facial expressions, those are absolutely awesome, I definitely want to use those!

ps #2: maybe it would worth separating the base character and the accessories into two directories, and then there could be an asset set for modern day, one for fantasy, one for sci-fi etc., and all of those could use the same, common, naked character set with the skin variants, animated hair, facial expressions etc. Right now it's difficult to adapt your set to a game, unless it is played out in modern day. (And vice-versa, adding a knight's armour would only make sense for fantasy themed games, but not for modern day.)

I'm sure Eliza will answer later in more detail, but...

Most of the existing assets will not work with these bases without some adaptations. I believe the walk animation is similar but not identical, though I haven't compared frame-to-frame. Existing headgear may work, but positions will need to be adjusted; additionally, Eliza has chosen to make the head smaller, so most hair, hats, helmets, etc. will need to be adapted somewhat to fit the smaller head. Finally, the "masculine" bodies here are more similar to the "teen/androgenous" bodies in the existing asset collection, so existing "male" assets would need to be edited to work with these bases. Conversely, the new  assets that Eliza has added here (e.g. overalls, animated hair) will not be straightforward to port to the "old" assets, because of the aforementioned differences.

The other animations are not included here; I think Eliza is planning to draw completely new slash and thrust animations (she has posted WIP versions elsewhere before). These new animations will of course require any assets to be animated anew. 

Right now the more comprehensive collection of character assets is here: https://github.com/sanderfrenken/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gen... . All assets in that collection are compatible with one another and essentially all assets therein include all animations. Clothing are mostly fantasy or medieval, all using the same common base. Most everything you mention (clothes, armor, helmets, weapons) are included there. Notably, none of the assets in that collection include the jump, run, or sitting animations though. There are also some minor "bugs" in the original character bases which we have been working on fixing here: https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-bases . I would like to see existing assets extended to include "run", "jump", and "sit" animations, but this will be a slow process.

Since Eliza has chosen to leave behind most of the existing assets (making some other opinionated changes along the way as discussed above), it is likely that two parallel sets will continue to develop going forward---one based on Eliza's assets, another based on the original character bases. 

Extraordinary works of art :)

Thank you for your answers!

But sadly those did not answer my questions. I think the modularity this new set has is the way to go, but ATM there are too many assets missing to be actually usable in a game (let alone in a fantasy game).

@bluecarrot16: "Existing headgear may work"

I'm pretty sure they do not. Not only the head is placed elsewhere, but the size is different too, as well as the hair. Of that I'm certain, so that's not the question. I'm asking about the rest, all the non-headgear stuff (like cloth, armour, weapons etc.) What about those? Are those still compatible?

"Conversely, the new assets that Eliza has added here (e.g. overalls, animated hair) will not be straightforward to port to the "old" assets"

I'm not interested in porting back to the "old" assets. If (and more likely when) I switch to these newer set, I'd like to re-use some of the "old" assets with this new base, and not the other way around. Because I can't expect this set to have all the "old" assets overnight, so I will surely need to port some of the "old" stuff to this new base.

"Right now the more comprehensive collection of character assets is here"

Thanks, I know, that's what I'm using now, but to be perfectly honest with you, I like these much better. Here we have exchangeable heads with facial expressions which is an uber-mega-killer feature. And I like the approach that many of the assets and accessories are working for both male and female bases (results in a lot smaller atlas, which means smaller memory footprint for the game).

@ElizaWy: "I also have an archery animation based on the original, cutting down on the frames, and a backwards compatable casting animation in the works"

That's really great news! So we can expect to have all the "old" animations plus sitting, jumping and running. That's just perfect!

"As for the walk-- I want the heads from the broader, original male body to match the heads here"

Yes, I got that. What I'm asking is, can I re-use for example the leather jacket and trousers from the "old" assets with this newer walking animation? And have you changed the position of the hands (so can I re-use for example the longsword walking animation as-is with this newer walking animation)?

Finally please consider creating separate directories for the sets:

base - body, heads, hair, etc. All that's common and work with all themes
modern - t-shirts, jeans, other cloth etc. for modern day themed games
medieval - bows, swords, armours, etc. for fantasy themed games
space - phaser guns, spacesuits, hazmat-suit, whatever, for sci-fi themed games
...etc.
The point here being that one don't have to look up all the assets, for example if someone is planning to create a fantasy themed game, they could safely ignore the assets under "modern" or "space" folders. Note, these are just examples, I'm not suggesting these categories, all I'm asking is please separate assets by theme.

Cheers,
bzt

I agree that having modular heads is advantageous. It would have been possible to achieve that without making all the existing assets obsolete. In fact, that is what we have been working on over here https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-bases if you read some of the discussion.

I also agree that having assets work for multiple bases is advantageous, but that either 

a) is already achievable, e.g. for the heads (e.g. in the set of modular heads I linked above, we place the male and female heads at the same positions, allowing hair/hats to be re-used between bases), or 

b) comes at the expense of having distinctive body shapes. Compare the male and female bases here to the ones in the original set---the masculine base here has much narrower shoulders and thinner legs. To say nothing of the pregnant or "muscular" bodies... if you want those different body shapes, they will require different (re-drawn) assets.

I don't think you read my response very carefully about whether existing assets will work, as I said the same things as you above. Anyway it's easy enough to check, here are some examples. My conclusion is that the hands seem to be in the same position, but the body shape is different as described above. So longsword yes, jacket/mail/armor/etc., no. I think Eliza is planning to adapt or re-create some of these assets, but realistically not all of them. 

Overall, I am just sad to see a "fork" created, where a lot of the community's previous efforts will be abandoned and/or have to be re-created, and mostly for trivial reasons. It leaves me in a quandry---should I do a bunch of manual work to adapt my existing assets to use these slightly-different bases? Or just soldier on with the old bases, missing out on whatever additions people make on these new bases? Either way someone is missing out, and it didn't have to be this way. 

To be clear, I don't begrudge Eliza for pursuing her projects, that's of course her prerogative and it's part of FOSS that there will be forks. But this is such a tiny community, I just wish we could work together.

@bluecarrot16: yeah, all of these should have been possible with the original LPC assets, but the point is, it wasn't done. On the other hand Eliza did an awesome job here with modularity (and with the additional animations).

Take this for example: in the LPC character generator, there's a duplicate of each and every melee weapons, which is very annoying to me, and something Eliza made unnecessary with her sets.

"In fact, that is what we have been working on over here https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-bases if you read some of the discussion."

Sadly that linked page lacks sitting, jumping, running animations, so it is not as complete as Eliza's. Eliza's set might have missing lots of assets for now, but all in all I think this is the best, and most well-thought revision of the LPC assets so far.

"Overall, I am just sad to see a "fork" created, where a lot of the community's previous efforts will be abandoned and/or have to be re-created, and mostly for trivial reasons."

I can feel you and I totally agree. There are way too many incompatible forks already. But this is because the original LPC is not well-defined, lacking guides, has no good specification, and all previous forks are lacking important things too (if they weren't then people wouldn't feel the need to create a new forks all the time).

IMHO what LPC is really needs at this point is standardization. I like Eliza's guides in this regard (it makes it absolutely clear how to create new, compatible assets, and easy to follow). IMHO such detailed, specifies-everything-to-the-last-pixel guides should be added to the LPC style guide, because what's there is way too vague, lacking important aspects (like the LPC spritesheet with what animations are supported), and therefore opens up the way to incompatible forks.

And maybe it's time to join efforts and create a standardized, LPC-NG specification and collection, and make the other forks read-only? (Or at least give a big red warning something like "For LPC assets submitted after 2022-XX-XX, please use these guides (link) as well as these collections (link) and the LPC-NG tag", something like that). I understand that converting everything to this new LPC-NG standard is a HUGE task, but I'm 100% certain it needs to be done, and sooner the better. Any delay will just make this harder and would allow even more new incompatible forks to be born.

Cheers,
bzt

Hi @ElizaWy,

First, congrats for your win on the LPC Art Challenge!

I'm reading through the forums looking for suggested animations, and also I'm trying to check games to anticipate how popular they might be. That latter part is not easy.

Anyway, here are my preliminary findings: when cast/slash/thrust/bow that you're working on gets finished, you'll have all the most common use cases! Which is great news! It looks like the most required animations that were missing from the original LPC are jumping and running, which you have already covered.

FYI, it also looks like having a Sokoban-like mini-game is very popular (as far as the might-need-a-character-animation concerned). For that, it would be great to have a push animation too. Basically same as walk, but with hands in front. But it is not as common as the others, just a nice to have.

This is just for your information, because all the really needed animations are already covered or planned. I just want you to know that the push animation is the only candidate left that might be worth considering.

Cheers,
bzt

@bzt: Just to point out: running and jumping exist for the original bases, they just lack assets making them less useful. The real win here is not that Eliza included these, but that she made some actual assets to use with them. Regarding a push animation, I have that one, but for the original bases and only for a clothed male sprite (because I stupidly didn't derive it from the character base, but from the completed sprite); I'm recreating that so it's more modular and re-usable. When it's done (including the clothes to go with it) I'll post it. Do note though that "walking with your hands in front of you" looks like your character has super strength because they're not leaning into the push, unless they're pushing a trolley or something that's meant to be pushed around without effort.

Anyway, not to derail this thread, which is supposed to be about the submission. This is great, and I'm happy to see this finally posted up here. It's been a lot of effort over a long time, and highly anticipated.

That said, I probably won't be using most of it directly, because it's missing some important (for me) animations and assets, and because I actually prefer the original head and chunkier male body. Different body types are a good thing to have in general, since people come in all shapes and sizes, so it's nice to be able to mix them. It's a nightmare for asset creation though. I'll probably end up back-porting the guides and references to the original assets, since that's useful to me.

These look great! I think the LPC assets have really grown over the years in providing a good compatible set of game images, including lots of flexibility for the characters, and it's great to see future developments.

I did have some comments about the licencing - from the Github repository it says "Licensing is CC-by-SA 3, with a universal exception waived for DRM." and "CC-by-SA 3, DRM waived". However the OGA-BY 3.0 licence (which the assets are licenced under here) is a variation of CC-BY 3.0, not CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Also I'd say it's important to explicitly give the licence on the repository please (either name+link, or even the full licence text), so it's absolutely clear what the licence is. I see BlueCarrot16 has said something similar in https://github.com/ElizaWy/LPC/issues/1 , although I'd go further and say it's better in my opinion to explicitly use the same licence as https://static.opengameart.org/OGA-BY-3.0.txt rather than creating some new custom licence - note that OGA-BY doesn't just remove the "effective technological measures" clause but also the "may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that restrict the terms of this License or the ability of the recipient of the Work to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License. You may not sublicense the Work." OGA-BY 3.0 also clarifies that you can relicence as CC-BY 3.0.

Lastly I wonder, if the relevant authors have agreed to relicence the relevant original LPC graphics, is it possible to take the chance to consider relicencing to allow later license versions? This is in relation to the recent thread about copyleft trolls ( https://opengameart.org/forumtopic/turns-out-there-are-copyleft-trolls-now ) (well, there isn't yet an OGA-BY 4.0, but allowing "or later" at least futureproofs for if an OGA-BY 4.0 is created, and in the meantime allowing CC-BY-SA 4.0 and CC-BY 4.0 would allow people to use those licences).

Sorry if it sounds like I'm making a lot of demands - but given the talk about this forming a basis of being a next generation LPC, I feel it's important to clarify the licencing.

@Evert: "Just to point out: running and jumping exist for the original bases"

Most definitely not. Not mentioned in the style guide, not listed on the assets page, missing from the base assets submission, and not generated by the universal character generator either. Also missing from every single submissions as well as from every accessories. If running and jumping are truly in the original LPC, then they are hidden from me remarkably well.

@ElizaWy: "To address your question about..."

Thank you, these are exactly the kind of answers I was looking for! (I'm a developer, not a designer. I can't draw new sprites, but I can move and reposition existing ones, so this is good news for me.)

"...animation actually is also on my list..."

I'm not so sure that's a good idea. Adding a new animation means EVERY SINGLE assets has to be expanded, in all directions, with all frames, otherwise it's unusable in a game. That's a huge amount of sprites which could escalate to an unmanageable amount pretty quickly.

If I were you, I would consider adding a new animation twice, and I would try to keep the number of animations to the necessary minimum (without sacrificing game features).

"climbing ladders"

Ok, this is a nice to have and probably even more needed than push.

"'hold above head' Zelda-like still pose"

IMHO only a marginal few game would use this, so I'm not sure it would worth the effort

"shield-block pose"

So far I was able to solve this by using a few frames from the middle of the "slash" animation played forth-and-back.

"some sort of flinch pose for taking damage"

If I may suggest it would be better to expand the "hurt" animation in all 4 directions instead. Then "damage" could be playing the first few frames forth-and-back, while "death" would be playing the entire animation once. IMHO that would be better than introducing an entirely new animation.

Cheers,
bzt

Very nice!

@ElizaWy: Fair comment about the run cycle; I had noticed that it was very different from the original (and, I think, better). I mainly wanted to point out the existence of the original.

Regarding a "stuff over head carrying animation, basically a walk with the arms raised, Zelda-style", funny story: I have that one too, based on the original LPC walkcycle (guess what sort of game I'm going for with that one). I'll clean that up and post it, in case it'll be useful (my guess is not really, I'm sure you can do a better job than I can if it needs to be adapted for your bases). What I don't have is a "lift" animation to transition to the carry animation.

@bzt: "Most definitely not." Ok, might I suggest checking your attitude when someone points things out to you? Of course they exist, I've been using them on-and-off for a couple of years now. I said the animations exist. I didn't say they're in the base assets (most LPC stuff isn't since it post-dates the competition), I didn't say it's in the generator and I didn't say they have additional assets available for them. They don't, it's just the bases (and that's a problem - no one uses them because there's no other assets for them, no one is making assets for them because no one is using them).

For your reference: https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-male-jumping-animation-by-durrani (ok, so it's actually male only; Eliza fixed that a while back, https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-jump-expanded), https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-runcycle-and-diagonal-walkcycle.

Bro I can't wait to play this :D

@Evert: "Ok, might I suggest checking your attitude when someone points things out to you?"

I do apologize if I make a mistake; however here I don't see I've made one. There's nothing wrong with my attitude, I was pointing out facts to you. No offense intended.

"I said the animations exist"

Yes, but that's not the same as being part of the base. The actual submissions you've linked have never made it to the universal character generator nor to the other LPC submissions (in contrast to bowing, which was also added by a separate submission and yet, does appear in every submission ever since). Therefore it is not correct to say "running and jumping exist for the original bases" simply because LPC submissions do not have them; hope this makes sense to you.

But it doesn't really matter, because Eliza have integrated these animations already in this set, so we should be grateful to have them! I am 100% sure, on that we agree! :-)

Cheers,
bzt

yeah, all of these should have been possible with the original LPC assets, but the point is, it wasn't done

Except a lot of it WAS done over here! https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-bases . I have created headless version of all the existing bodies (for all animations in the universal spritesheet generator---cast, walk, slash, thrust, shoot, and hurt, plus jump), as well as modular heads and a set of scripts to combine them and to create arbitrary recolors. That effort has been ongoing (though intermittently), for months, during which time there were periods of robust discussion about how to proceed, how to fit that work into the existing framework established in the generator repository https://github.com/sanderfrenken/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gen... , etc. I bear some blame for not uploading the results promptly, but eh, nobody is paying me to do this kind of housekeeping. This conversation has convinced me that I should upload that work ASAP, which I will try to do this weekend.

Sadly that linked page lacks sitting, jumping, running animations, so it is not as complete as Eliza's.

https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-bases does include jumping animations for all bodies; it lacks only sitting, running, and idle animations. But this submission lacks slash, thrust, shoot, and hurt/die animations, and also the (broad-shouldered) male, muscular, pregnant, and child bodies, so...

Take this for example: in the LPC character generator, there's a duplicate of each and every melee weapons, which is very annoying to me, and something Eliza made unnecessary with her sets.

I think you are concerned about a problem which doesn't really exist. There are two issues with that example: 

1) the reason for duplication of weapons into "male" and "female" versions is mostly to accommodate differently-shaped cutouts for male and female bodies, so that the weapon (part of which appears in front of the body and part of which appears behind) can be represented by a single layer. I think we have basically realized that this is a brittle and unnecessary strategy, and it's better to just have both a "foreground" and a "behind" layer for objects that are in front of the character in some frames and behind the character in others. I have been using this strategy for all recent weapons I've drawn. 

2) the images in that example are not actually different.... I think that particular duplication is a historical accident. 

So again, I really think the only assets that are feasibly shared between the two bodies are hair/headgear and pants.

• Sharing pants between the male and female bodies required sacrificing the broad-shouldered male body.
• Hair/headgear was effectively already shared, since I have described and extensively used scripts to place the same hats/hair on male and female body. See https://opengameart.org/forumtopic/release-lpctools-tools-for-manipulati... , https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-pirates , https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-helmets-mega-pack , https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-hair , etc. I get your point about wanting to minimize the number of distinct textures for performance, but I think that can be achieved without totally breaking backwards compatibility. 

There are way too many incompatible forks already.

I don't really know what forks you are referring to here. By "fork," I mean a competing line of effort which cannot easily exchange work. This splits the community of contributors/artists and causes duplication of effort. 

• With respect to the characters, there is a de facto standard here https://github.com/sanderfrenken/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gen... with tons of examples and assets that all work well together. There are problems, but it is being continuously improved and developed. Consider that the "main" branch. Eliza's characters are a fork, in the sense that they are derived from the original assets, but there were changes made that make her character bodies incompatible with many existing assets, and vice-versa. As far as I can tell, this is the only "fork" of the characters. 

  It's true there are some "bugs" in the existing character assets---things like 1px differences in the position of heads between male/female bodies, unintended movements in some animations, pixel errors in parts of the body that are not intended to move, etc. A collaborative effort was underway here https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-bases to fix those "bugs," incorporating modifications and fixes from multiple members of the community.  This is not a fork; it's more like a patch release. 

• With respect to tilesets, Eliza's collection is also a fork, in that she is duplicating some (but not all) assets, arranging them differently with some opinionated stylistic differences, and using a different color palette... it's a friendlier fork because work can still be (somewhat) easily exchanged between her project and other LPC-compatible tilesets, either by reversing the color palette changes or just freely combining the assets (even though the colors will be different). By contrast, something like this https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-16x16-tiles-extended is more of a hard fork, because it's a lot harder to combine the 16x16px tilesets with the 32x32px ones. 

my new one-handed slash,

I am strongly -1 on re-implementing the "slash" and/or "thrust" animations, for all the reasons above (re-implementing these animation means all the old assets need to be re-implemented... why?), plus the additional reason that Eliza's more dynamic animations are going to be more work to animate. I have made this point elsewhere, but briefly, one of the reasons the original animations were so stiff was to minimize the amount of effort to make new items for them. The chest almost never rotates, so much motion can be copy-pasted. It's always going to be a ton of work to draw lots of animations (and there are already a lot of animation frames at play here), so anything we can do to reduce that burden would be good, IMO. Eliza will tell you that her animation guides will trivialize this effort, but that's just not true. I agree that they will be helpful for standardizing animations, but for anything where the body moves in 3D or changes shape, the object will need to be re-drawn. 

I will note that most of the clothing in this submission is generated by selecting and re-coloring parts of the body itself... with a few exceptions like the overalls. This is a clever trick and works well to minimize the amount of effort for animation. But it's not representative of how much work it will be to animate things like jackets, cloaks, capes, armor, etc. that are not just skin-tight, uniform patterns. We have to be honest about that work when we propose re-doing huge parts of the catalog. 

@marko: completely agree with everything you said. 

@bzt: you should heed Evert's suggestion; whatever your intentions, your comment came across as confrontational and snarky, which makes it harder to have a conversation. We're all trying to work together here, so please assume others have good intentions and remember that written words online can easily come across as harsher than intended. 

There was a simple misunderstanding---Evert was saying that run and jump animations existed before Eliza's submission here, not that those animations were included in the "LPC Base Assets" distributed prior to the competition https://opengameart.org/content/liberated-pixel-cup-lpc-base-assets-spri... ; obviously they were not. I don't even know how to respond to your comment that "Yes, but that's not the same as being part of the base." Maybe our terminology is failing us, since "base" means at least two things:

• The "LPC Base Assets" generally refers to this submission https://opengameart.org/content/liberated-pixel-cup-lpc-base-assets-spri... , e.g. the art that was commissioned before the competition and which served as the basis for all other art. To be clear, the character animations therein included only walk, slash, hurt, and cast (referred to as "spellcast"). 
• "Character bases" refers to the animated naked humanoid bodies, whether from the above submission, or others e.g. this one https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-bases . I try to call these spritesheets "bodies" rather than "bases" to reduce confusion, but I still make mistakes...

During the competition, wulax drew the "thrust" and "shoot" animations. After the competition, the "universal spritesheet" (originally it was just a giant GIMP .xcf file) and eventually the spritsheet generator website were made, and this kind of standardized the layout of the spritesheets that is used in the current generator https://sanderfrenken.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gene... and for most submissions since. 

More recently, people drew jumping and running assets, but they didn't get into the universal spritesheet generator. Honestly, this is just something that we hadn't gotten around to adding, mostly because it would require "expanding" the height of the spritesheet that the generator assembles, which would require some (not too difficult) changes to the code. More importantly, it would require making a few arbitrary decisions, which is hard ;-) This is discussed a bit in the thread on this submission page: https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-bases

* * * 

In summary, I am glad for many new things in this submission (and Eliza's related work)---new run animations, sitting poses, expressions, animated hair, and the animation guidelines. These are cool and useful contributions, and I'm very happy to see them!

I am disappointed that, in addition to these additions, Eliza made unrelated changes that make it difficult or impossible to combine those improvements with the existing body of work. As I said, she is perfectly within her rights to do this. 

And I am very sad to see people look at this and say "hey, look at all these great improvements that Eliza made, her LPC Revised is is clearly better, we should all use that! Everybody should use LPC Revised going forward and everything should be built from that!" Because it means, at best, that our efforts are divided, with some people building on the LPC Revised characters and others on the original LPC characters---with the result that lots of work gets duplicated or proceeds incompatibly. At worst, everyone jumps onto LPC Revised, perhaps not realizing the large body of existing assets that are being effectively discarded in the process. 

* * * 

Here is the best way forward I can see to incorporate Eliza's improvements into the mainline collection here https://github.com/sanderfrenken/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gen... :

• Incorporate Eliza's updates to the female base on this page into https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-bases . Abandon the smaller heads.
• Use Eliza's "masculine, thin" base on this submission to replace the "teen/androgenous" base here https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-bases. 
• Create headless "run" animations for the adult male, muscular, and pregnant body types based on Eliza's run animation here
• Create headless "sitting" and "idle" for the muscular and pregnant body types (the "Be seated" pack includes sitting poses for the adult male, and I know Eliza has done idle animations for the adult male base too since I've seen them on Discord). 
• Expand the layout of the "universal" spritsheet to include the following animations, top-to-bottom, with 4 directions each: cast, thrust, walk, slash, shoot, hurt, jump, run, idle, sit.
• Adapt the "animation guides" to the adult male, muscular, and pregnant body types and other animations. (Evert, it would be great if you were interested in doing some of this!) FWIW, I think the animation guides can basically be derived from existing clothing; the main work will be painstakingly checking them for consistency and eliminating bugs, as Eliza has done here. 
• Slowly adapt existing assets to include these animations, and/or add new assets that use these new animations.

@bluecarrot16: "Adapt the "animation guides" to the adult male, muscular, and pregnant body types and other animations. (Evert, it would be great if you were interested in doing some of this!) FWIW, I think the animation guides can basically be derived from existing clothing; the main work will be painstakingly checking them for consistency and eliminating bugs, as Eliza has done here."

Yup, I'm on it. I'm going to clean up my "push" and "carry overhead" animations and post those up (they'll probably be male only and a single skin tone, but the latter can be easily fixed), then I'm moving on to the guides doing exactly what you suggested. I'll post an update on the forum, it seems off-topic here.

I just noticed Eliza did a sneaky thing with the girl in the pink top in the preview image: the body is facing right, but the head is facing front and the eyes are angled to the left. It works really well, and shows off one of the real benefits of having the head modular. When I tried this, I found that the same trick doesn't work so well for the north-facing frame and using the left/right facing head; it looked better with the diagonal head (from the diagonal walk/run cycle), but that of course lacks other assets to go with it.

I do have a question about the run cycle. I mentioned above that I like it better than the old/original one, but I do wonder how well it works if the character is running with something like a shield or a weapon in hand? Arguably that's not a very realistic situation to be in, but it'll happen in games more than it does in real life. I don't think the arm pumping will work as well in that situation?

Finally, a different off-the wall idea inspired by the modular head: blending animations for the legs, torse+arms and head. If these all exist as separate layers, it should be possible to play the "walk" animation for the legs at the same time as the "swing" animation for the arms, so your character can swing his sword around while walking. It won't be as good as a purposefully drawn animation, and it requires a bit of tinkering in code (to get the head bob in the swing), but it could be pretty neat. May work better with the stiffer original animation though. Any thoughts on this?

Dear Eliza,

Could you please upload one guideline for the missing animations? Let's say the centerline with contours for example? No need for all, just one per animation would be enough. I really would need these to finish the initial guideline sheet so that I can start converting existing assets.

Thanks,
bzt

@ElizaWy: "Not at the moment, I'm afraid. I'm working on terrain right now, and I can't jump back and forth."

Oh, I see, I'll wait then. Keep up the good work!

"Making a guideline actually takes longer. It just looks like a simple line, but there's a lot of thought and QA that goes into each one."

I'm well aware, that's why I've asked so politely. It's just I have to know the coordinates of the hands in every animation frames in order to make the old assets compatible. I hope you understand why I asked and why I need this. You should know, I don't want to rush you, quality work like you did with the run and jump animations is a lot more important! Take your time!

Cheers,
bzt

I've seen you have added the "climb" animation. Looks amazing, well done!

Merged into the spritesheet proposal, which is looking now like this (note: the arrangement must follow the current LPC sheet, so I've added "jump" and "run" below that. Other animations are considered optional, those have brighter backgrounds, and added to the empty spaces on the right. Since "climb" has only one direction, it seemed only logical to add it to the same row as "hurt", which also has one direction only.)

What do you think?

Cheers,
bzt

Great asset.  Started working on the player customization screen using this set.  Linguistica Language RPG Character Creation (youtube.com)

Wow you went through all the hard work of adding Mae and Female gender and many skin tones. Most people will do 1 and color it gray. Incredible!