I did screw up one other thing: The Neutral Female face wasn't properly cut out. Its super minor though. This was just a last-minute addition I added so you could replace the Spellcast closing eyes animation if you REALLY wanted to do so.
And immediately I see that walk is messed up somehow... damnit... I don't think its lpctools that did this, though. Pennomi and Laetissima's Happy works fine over the other one, so its not lpctools that's the issue.
UPDATE: As far as I can tell, this is only an issue with the preview and not the actual sheets. Not sure how that happened. I can clean up the preview later.
Yeah I don't like the format for the "special attack" being "run" either. It doesn't make any logical sense. Run should be a separate action. If you REALLY want consistency, what you should do is set run as a separate action, and for other assets you use, simply insert the walk animation for a missing run animation. Alternatively, if you keep them in separate files as BenCreating suggests, you can just check if a run file exists, and if it doesn't, only use walk.
I didn't catch it, but yeah, the walk animation is actually only 4 frames, not 5. Its 1 stand frame and 4 walk frames. 4 frames is actually pretty standard from what I have seen, I think classic RPG Maker uses 4 walk frames as well.
If anything, I think "howling" makes more sense as a "special attack". But that's up to you. I could see a magic wolf enemy use a howl for a spellcast of sorts (or for a special action; wolves in RPG's often use howling for a support buff), otherwise it could just be a taunt.
Yeah that's basically my thought. And there's no realistic solution to that problem. Because there's no way to make a "base" you can build off of, you need to create a lot more stuff from scratch to create a variety of unique enemies.
Sure, you can create new Wolf variations, but its hard to make something brand new out of that. Maybe something like a Cerberus or Hellhound could be a wolf variant, though. So there are ways to make some potential varieties from existing assets, but you can't make a slime from a wolf. Or a proper minotaur. (Best bet for a Minotaur right now is using the Minotaur head on character sprites.)
Using character sprites for Goblins and Orcs helps to reduce the requirements a bit, but then they're a lot smaller than a common "enemy" sprite you might see in other games. Creating a larger one effectively requires you to, again, redraw it from scratch.
And that's not even delving into big ones like dragons or other such things.
Not really necessary for the most part, but it could be a simple bob.
- Taking Damage
Hard to say. Taking damage might be useful, but it can be reflected with a red overlay or something like that as well. We don't necessarily need a "I took a hit" animation.
- Death/defeat
Similarly, not really necessary for enemies. Typically enemies just "fade away" when being defeated. This is not necessary and completedly optional.
- Basic Attack
- Spellcasting Special Attack
At least Basic Attack is obvious. A special attack isn't really all that necessary.
- Optional Auxiliry Action (just a slot for an additional attack or atypical feature. many monsters won't use this slot but it's available if needed)
I'd argue this would be the "Special Attack". Not sure what else would fit this category.
4-directional attacks would be nice, but isn't necessary.
I think overall, people just haven't been as interested in making enemies. Personally its the same for me. I haven't even theorized much on how much non-human enemies I would want anyway, but it is something I need to explore more.
Its kinda hard to set a standard with an open format. The best thing to do is to probably commission a few extra things. See if anyone is interested in taking commissions for LPC style enemies and making them larger.
Ugh I managed to get this done just in time. It took longer than I expected to finish the "Formal" pants. I thought I could reuse the other frames, but I ended up redoing most of them from scratch.
Based on what I dug up, I'm pretty sure these pants are the original ones Redshrike made. The ones the ULPC has been using mostly have been Wulax's. The Redshrike pants were edited by Bluecarrot16 into the "formal" pants and included in his Gentlemen release. These never got recolors before, but they have them now. I kept the original colors as well, though, and stuck with the idea of them only using 3 palettes and looking "flatter" than the other pants assets.
The stripes weren't as hard as I thought they would be.
I know some people are going to say "but its already the New Year!" not for me lol. Its still 45 minutes to go!
Anyway, going to take a break for a bit. That said, while working on this I made progress on two other things:
1. I finished the "Male" versions of Eliza's Socks and Shoes. I opted to leave them out here to have a full "Socks & Shoes" update later. I also started working on porting my boots with my Kimono release to all frames, but I'm nowhere near done with those yet.
2. Plate Legs are all done now except Run and the Combat Animations.
I kinda want to bring this up. These lpc-character-bases, when I came back around here again, REALLY got lost in the shuffle. Its not easy to find it anymore. I did find it once, then I lost it again. Usually you find the original base assets when trying to do a search, or you find just a ton of general LPC stuff. Plus, it doesn't say "v3 character basis" in the release name either. Its just lpc-character-bases, which gets confusing because there's multiple versions of LPC character bases.
All of the non-ULPC bases did already exist in the codebase for the ULPC, though. That's also why there was a card there addressing this (https://github.com/sanderfrenken/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gen...). So that's where I started from. That said, as you did address and I did as well, the main reason I went with Eliza's run is, well, not only did it look better, but she already had assets designed for it while the others really didn't. Plus, I noticed the leg positions weren't that different from the original run animations anyway, it was moreso the body that changed here.
What I didn't consider when doing this, though, was the "ease of use" in implementing the assets. To me, it didn't look that much harder to do this run animation or the other one. Regardless of which run animation was used, both were still fairly complicated and intimidating. I guess the V3 bases version is a bit less mostly because the body shape doesn't change as much, but in that version, the head moves more (I guess the head isn't as important though).
I get where you're coming from now, but at the time, I wasn't seeing much of a difference between the two of them.
But yeah, its perfectly understand you don't want to add much to these assets. I don't blame you for that at all. I spoke with Sanderfrenken as well to ensure we added some clarifications that anyone adding custom assets doesn't have to feel obligated to add all frames all at once, just add what you're comfortable doing.
I will try and get you those head offsets at least, though. That will at least ensure we can easily add new head assets to these frames even if the body assets will take longer.
I did screw up one other thing: The Neutral Female face wasn't properly cut out. Its super minor though. This was just a last-minute addition I added so you could replace the Spellcast closing eyes animation if you REALLY wanted to do so.
EDIT:
By the way, all these are up on the ULPC now:
https://liberatedpixelcup.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-...
Apologies, I checked the wrong one.
And immediately I see that walk is messed up somehow... damnit... I don't think its lpctools that did this, though. Pennomi and Laetissima's Happy works fine over the other one, so its not lpctools that's the issue.
UPDATE: As far as I can tell, this is only an issue with the preview and not the actual sheets. Not sure how that happened. I can clean up the preview later.
Yeah I don't like the format for the "special attack" being "run" either. It doesn't make any logical sense. Run should be a separate action. If you REALLY want consistency, what you should do is set run as a separate action, and for other assets you use, simply insert the walk animation for a missing run animation. Alternatively, if you keep them in separate files as BenCreating suggests, you can just check if a run file exists, and if it doesn't, only use walk.
I didn't catch it, but yeah, the walk animation is actually only 4 frames, not 5. Its 1 stand frame and 4 walk frames. 4 frames is actually pretty standard from what I have seen, I think classic RPG Maker uses 4 walk frames as well.
If anything, I think "howling" makes more sense as a "special attack". But that's up to you. I could see a magic wolf enemy use a howl for a spellcast of sorts (or for a special action; wolves in RPG's often use howling for a support buff), otherwise it could just be a taunt.
Yeah that's basically my thought. And there's no realistic solution to that problem. Because there's no way to make a "base" you can build off of, you need to create a lot more stuff from scratch to create a variety of unique enemies.
Sure, you can create new Wolf variations, but its hard to make something brand new out of that. Maybe something like a Cerberus or Hellhound could be a wolf variant, though. So there are ways to make some potential varieties from existing assets, but you can't make a slime from a wolf. Or a proper minotaur. (Best bet for a Minotaur right now is using the Minotaur head on character sprites.)
Using character sprites for Goblins and Orcs helps to reduce the requirements a bit, but then they're a lot smaller than a common "enemy" sprite you might see in other games. Creating a larger one effectively requires you to, again, redraw it from scratch.
And that's not even delving into big ones like dragons or other such things.
Bookmarking. Could be neat to add in support for the new animation frames as well.
In terms of Animations:
- Moving
Obviously this is pretty standard.
- Idle
Not really necessary for the most part, but it could be a simple bob.
- Taking Damage
Hard to say. Taking damage might be useful, but it can be reflected with a red overlay or something like that as well. We don't necessarily need a "I took a hit" animation.
- Death/defeat
Similarly, not really necessary for enemies. Typically enemies just "fade away" when being defeated. This is not necessary and completedly optional.
- Basic Attack
- Spellcasting Special Attack
At least Basic Attack is obvious. A special attack isn't really all that necessary.
- Optional Auxiliry Action (just a slot for an additional attack or atypical feature. many monsters won't use this slot but it's available if needed)
I'd argue this would be the "Special Attack". Not sure what else would fit this category.
4-directional attacks would be nice, but isn't necessary.
I think overall, people just haven't been as interested in making enemies. Personally its the same for me. I haven't even theorized much on how much non-human enemies I would want anyway, but it is something I need to explore more.
Its kinda hard to set a standard with an open format. The best thing to do is to probably commission a few extra things. See if anyone is interested in taking commissions for LPC style enemies and making them larger.
Sanderfrenken merged the latest PR now so all updates are now here:
https://sanderfrenken.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gene...
Ugh I managed to get this done just in time. It took longer than I expected to finish the "Formal" pants. I thought I could reuse the other frames, but I ended up redoing most of them from scratch.
Based on what I dug up, I'm pretty sure these pants are the original ones Redshrike made. The ones the ULPC has been using mostly have been Wulax's. The Redshrike pants were edited by Bluecarrot16 into the "formal" pants and included in his Gentlemen release. These never got recolors before, but they have them now. I kept the original colors as well, though, and stuck with the idea of them only using 3 palettes and looking "flatter" than the other pants assets.
The stripes weren't as hard as I thought they would be.
I know some people are going to say "but its already the New Year!" not for me lol. Its still 45 minutes to go!
Anyway, going to take a break for a bit. That said, while working on this I made progress on two other things:
1. I finished the "Male" versions of Eliza's Socks and Shoes. I opted to leave them out here to have a full "Socks & Shoes" update later. I also started working on porting my boots with my Kimono release to all frames, but I'm nowhere near done with those yet.
2. Plate Legs are all done now except Run and the Combat Animations.
"culminating in this submission https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-character-bases which standardized a bunch of minor inconsistencies between the bases and subsequently this submission https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-clothing-updates which updated all the existing clothing to match."
I kinda want to bring this up. These lpc-character-bases, when I came back around here again, REALLY got lost in the shuffle. Its not easy to find it anymore. I did find it once, then I lost it again. Usually you find the original base assets when trying to do a search, or you find just a ton of general LPC stuff. Plus, it doesn't say "v3 character basis" in the release name either. Its just lpc-character-bases, which gets confusing because there's multiple versions of LPC character bases.
All of the non-ULPC bases did already exist in the codebase for the ULPC, though. That's also why there was a card there addressing this (https://github.com/sanderfrenken/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gen...). So that's where I started from. That said, as you did address and I did as well, the main reason I went with Eliza's run is, well, not only did it look better, but she already had assets designed for it while the others really didn't. Plus, I noticed the leg positions weren't that different from the original run animations anyway, it was moreso the body that changed here.
What I didn't consider when doing this, though, was the "ease of use" in implementing the assets. To me, it didn't look that much harder to do this run animation or the other one. Regardless of which run animation was used, both were still fairly complicated and intimidating. I guess the V3 bases version is a bit less mostly because the body shape doesn't change as much, but in that version, the head moves more (I guess the head isn't as important though).
I get where you're coming from now, but at the time, I wasn't seeing much of a difference between the two of them.
But yeah, its perfectly understand you don't want to add much to these assets. I don't blame you for that at all. I spoke with Sanderfrenken as well to ensure we added some clarifications that anyone adding custom assets doesn't have to feel obligated to add all frames all at once, just add what you're comfortable doing.
I will try and get you those head offsets at least, though. That will at least ensure we can easily add new head assets to these frames even if the body assets will take longer.
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