No, I wasn't expecting a perfect 1:1 conversion, especially with GIMP choosing the colors; I was just curious how a more complicated scene might look. I think the only way to "understand" a palette is to work with it and see how it affects the results you can produce. It's really hard to get a sense of that from a single small preview image that only uses ~half the colors.
There are also going to be trade-offs, which may or may not be consistent with one's desired aesthetic. I am curious how you arrived at the green ramps you did, for instance. What effect(s) were you able to produce with these greens that you couldn't produce with variations (or the original)? There's some discussion like that on this thread where bart was experimenting with a palette that he wanted to have more bright colors: https://opengameart.org/forumtopic/bright-fantasy-themed-palette
A few items are basically done but I haven't had time to post yet:
woodworking/carpenter shop (commissioned by pvigier, thanks!); may add more to this set
tailor/sewing shop (commissioned by pvigier, thanks!)
seeds for some of the crop assets (commissioned by pvigier, thanks!)
I have been resisting posting the above, because I wanted to make nice previews of indoor scenes, but I went down a big rabbit hole working on a collection of walls and floors. Floors are nearly done. Walls are a bit of a mess right now, but also nearly done, pending some organization. I'll also post a separate sheet with some parts/overlays/odds and ends for constructing new walls.
With castelonia, I'm working on something fun---pirate clothes! Yarrr. The first batch of those are nearly done, probably this week. But of course, a pirate is no good without a ship! I've been repurposing the ship tileset from Evol online/The Mana World. First converting it to the LPC palette and re-doing the shading to match the LPC style (eliminating dithering, adding more consistent textures), then I'd like to do some expansions (different types of sails/rigging, fancier bowsprit, different aft-decks).
Here's another test scene, just a cheap automatic palette conversion with GIMP; no manual edits or tweaks, which I'm sure would improve things. (First image is original, second is Liberated palette). I chose this image because it's large and complicated, and it uses a lot of colors that are not in the original palette, in addition to most of those colors in the original.
Overall, I think it works well. The bright colors are clearly a strength, so this palette does really well with all of the random colors of houses, doors, etc. in this image. I'm eager to try it with my food sprites, which use a lot of non-standard-palette colors. I also think the grass looks better in this conversion than in Evert's, which seems to be because GIMP is pulling from multiple ramps to choose the closest fit.
The dirt and gray stonework is clearly not working very well in the automatic recolor. I'd have to try manually, since whatever algorithm it's using to pull the best fitting colors is not preserving the contrast well.
Overall, I'm intrigued. I'll have to mess around with it for original pieces and also try manually recoloring some components.
I guess to elaborate, I'd be interested in seeing different kinds of rocks, dirt, and wood to understand how the new palette looks for those. You've nicely compacted/unified the many many browns and grays but I'd be curious how that shakes out. The paintings are very nice but they're not quite representative of the average scene.
@Samuncle, seems like ElizaWy's project has slightly different goals---both with a tighter focus on licensing and on reworking the assets in a different style. I'm sure we'll benefit from one anothers' work though :) And I would welcome your help, if you are interested!
@pvigier, I really appreciate the input.
I understand your point about licensing---I agree there are some people who will never bother (out of laziness or otherwise). However,
I also think there are also developers who _would_ use the assets but are put off by either the lack of clarity about licensing, the effort that would be required for tracking proper attribution, and/or the lack of organization/difficulty browsing the assets. I have seen this expressed in several posts on this site, on reddit, and elsewhere on the web.
Likewise, I think there is a longer tail of artists who would be willing/interested in making small edits/improvements or contributing derivative assets, but are likewise put off by the licensing issues. (Look at the RPGMaker community, which has a rich culture of small remixes and edits of their base assets). The current organization of the LPC assets---including mine---is making that kind of thing very difficult. For example, if I imagine https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-victorian-town-decorations was someone else's submission and I wanted to edit one of the tin cans, I might give up because I didn't want to credit ~12 artists, or bug the submitter to figure out who made that one tin can.
You are right that it is a lot of work, and it may end up being too much. However, I think one of the reasons (not the only one) the current assets have gotten a bit stagnant is because people are put off by the organization and licensing. For the time being, I am going to write the scripts and try this out on a small number of my own atlases. From there, I can decide whether it seems worth it to continue and/or recruit help from others.
Anyway, if you have suggestions about what organizational efforts *would* be helpful to developers, I'd appreciate it!
@ElizaWy, that certainly makes sense. I think the two projects can certainly coexist and probably benefit from one another. Are you planning to organize the images as "objects" (like in the base assets) or as "atlases" (like in most of my submissions)?
I don't use discord, sorry. If you're willing to post a WIP version or share via PM, I'd be happy to take a look!
@MedicineStorm, thanks for all that feedback and encouragement! I agree throughout.
w/r/t what to include, I'm certain the devil will be in the details of specific examples.
Another issue I thought of is how (whether?) to handle recolors. A few people on this forum (Basxto in particular) are always agitating for assets to better support programmatic recolors. Right now, I'm envisioning recolors to be treated as separate "objects" (although with systematically similar names---chair_black.png, chair_blue.png, etc.) It would be nice if there was some more... method to this. Open to ideas.
Anyway, in terms of progress, I hacked together a dice_atlas script today and started working on an example (based on this submission https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-medieval-village-decorations ). Presently this takes a Tiled map with object layer(s) and extracts individual images from rectangle or polyline objects. See the preview images.
Next up, I'll extend the script to 1) spit out a new Tiled map to re-create the atlas from the constituent images, and 2) make attribution metadata files (based on object properties in the original Tiled map).
This is kind of starting backwards from where I hope the project ends up (objects are assembled into atlases, rather than making objects by cutting them out from atlases), but it seems like a more feasible way to bootstrap the project.
I'm already realizing that 1) the number of objects will be very large; 2) because of (1), it will be a challenge to keep the naming unique but also systematic. This will probably be the source of some bikeshedding.
Hey, very excited to hear about your efforts! Would you be willing to share a draft?
Also, I hope I could make as much of my art as possible available under compatible terms, not just the upholstery! If I do go forward with this project, I'll be re-examining the licensing of each of my submissions and making sure all the original art is licensed as liberally as possible.
While restricting the authors like that does solve the attribution problem, there's lots of great art by authors other than those, and I'm not willing to give all that up. I would rather solve this problem by contacting authors and requesting DRM waivers/relicensing, and/or replacing a smaller number of assets as needed. Splitting assets up as I've described also means that CC-BY-SA art can be "quarantined" from DRM-waived/CC-BY/OGA-BY-SA art (many of my submissions are CC-BY-SA, just because there's a few CC-BY-SA items that "contaminate" the rest, which are CC-BY or CC0). I've made an effort with recent submissions to distinguish that, but it's getting to be cumbersome (see e.g. credits to https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-food). That experience partially motivated my idea for this project.
(Personally, I'm not terribly concerned about the DRM clause-waiver issue, since IMO the solution it to distributing properly-credited art as a separate download, easily accessible from the app---this seems well within the spirit of the license and likely to satisfy almost anyone who cares)
Thanks! I welcome suggestions for things to add to any of the sets!
Yes, the manequins are derived from the base assets so should fit the same clothing as them!
I'd love to do a vertical ship, hopefully re-using some/most of the tiles. That would be next after I finished fixing the colors and shading.
No, I wasn't expecting a perfect 1:1 conversion, especially with GIMP choosing the colors; I was just curious how a more complicated scene might look. I think the only way to "understand" a palette is to work with it and see how it affects the results you can produce. It's really hard to get a sense of that from a single small preview image that only uses ~half the colors.
There are also going to be trade-offs, which may or may not be consistent with one's desired aesthetic. I am curious how you arrived at the green ramps you did, for instance. What effect(s) were you able to produce with these greens that you couldn't produce with variations (or the original)? There's some discussion like that on this thread where bart was experimenting with a palette that he wanted to have more bright colors: https://opengameart.org/forumtopic/bright-fantasy-themed-palette
A few items are basically done but I haven't had time to post yet:
I have been resisting posting the above, because I wanted to make nice previews of indoor scenes, but I went down a big rabbit hole working on a collection of walls and floors. Floors are nearly done. Walls are a bit of a mess right now, but also nearly done, pending some organization. I'll also post a separate sheet with some parts/overlays/odds and ends for constructing new walls.
With castelonia, I'm working on something fun---pirate clothes! Yarrr. The first batch of those are nearly done, probably this week. But of course, a pirate is no good without a ship! I've been repurposing the ship tileset from Evol online/The Mana World. First converting it to the LPC palette and re-doing the shading to match the LPC style (eliminating dithering, adding more consistent textures), then I'd like to do some expansions (different types of sails/rigging, fancier bowsprit, different aft-decks).
Here's another test scene, just a cheap automatic palette conversion with GIMP; no manual edits or tweaks, which I'm sure would improve things. (First image is original, second is Liberated palette). I chose this image because it's large and complicated, and it uses a lot of colors that are not in the original palette, in addition to most of those colors in the original.
Overall, I think it works well. The bright colors are clearly a strength, so this palette does really well with all of the random colors of houses, doors, etc. in this image. I'm eager to try it with my food sprites, which use a lot of non-standard-palette colors. I also think the grass looks better in this conversion than in Evert's, which seems to be because GIMP is pulling from multiple ramps to choose the closest fit.
The dirt and gray stonework is clearly not working very well in the automatic recolor. I'd have to try manually, since whatever algorithm it's using to pull the best fitting colors is not preserving the contrast well.
Overall, I'm intrigued. I'll have to mess around with it for original pieces and also try manually recoloring some components.
I guess to elaborate, I'd be interested in seeing different kinds of rocks, dirt, and wood to understand how the new palette looks for those. You've nicely compacted/unified the many many browns and grays but I'd be curious how that shakes out. The paintings are very nice but they're not quite representative of the average scene.
Agreed, looks very cool! I don't love the greens of the grass either... would you be willing to share other test scenes for comparison?
Hey, very cool!
Please be sure to credit the other authors, namely Daneeklu for the chicken breast and Jetrel for the drumstick!
Thanks for your input all.
@Samuncle, seems like ElizaWy's project has slightly different goals---both with a tighter focus on licensing and on reworking the assets in a different style. I'm sure we'll benefit from one anothers' work though :) And I would welcome your help, if you are interested!
@pvigier, I really appreciate the input.
I understand your point about licensing---I agree there are some people who will never bother (out of laziness or otherwise). However,
You are right that it is a lot of work, and it may end up being too much. However, I think one of the reasons (not the only one) the current assets have gotten a bit stagnant is because people are put off by the organization and licensing. For the time being, I am going to write the scripts and try this out on a small number of my own atlases. From there, I can decide whether it seems worth it to continue and/or recruit help from others.
Anyway, if you have suggestions about what organizational efforts *would* be helpful to developers, I'd appreciate it!
@ElizaWy, that certainly makes sense. I think the two projects can certainly coexist and probably benefit from one another. Are you planning to organize the images as "objects" (like in the base assets) or as "atlases" (like in most of my submissions)?
I don't use discord, sorry. If you're willing to post a WIP version or share via PM, I'd be happy to take a look!
@MedicineStorm, thanks for all that feedback and encouragement! I agree throughout.
w/r/t what to include, I'm certain the devil will be in the details of specific examples.
Another issue I thought of is how (whether?) to handle recolors. A few people on this forum (Basxto in particular) are always agitating for assets to better support programmatic recolors. Right now, I'm envisioning recolors to be treated as separate "objects" (although with systematically similar names---chair_black.png, chair_blue.png, etc.) It would be nice if there was some more... method to this. Open to ideas.
Anyway, in terms of progress, I hacked together a dice_atlas script today and started working on an example (based on this submission https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-medieval-village-decorations ). Presently this takes a Tiled map with object layer(s) and extracts individual images from rectangle or polyline objects. See the preview images.
Next up, I'll extend the script to 1) spit out a new Tiled map to re-create the atlas from the constituent images, and 2) make attribution metadata files (based on object properties in the original Tiled map).
This is kind of starting backwards from where I hope the project ends up (objects are assembled into atlases, rather than making objects by cutting them out from atlases), but it seems like a more feasible way to bootstrap the project.
I'm already realizing that 1) the number of objects will be very large; 2) because of (1), it will be a challenge to keep the naming unique but also systematic. This will probably be the source of some bikeshedding.
Hey, very excited to hear about your efforts! Would you be willing to share a draft?
Also, I hope I could make as much of my art as possible available under compatible terms, not just the upholstery! If I do go forward with this project, I'll be re-examining the licensing of each of my submissions and making sure all the original art is licensed as liberally as possible.
While restricting the authors like that does solve the attribution problem, there's lots of great art by authors other than those, and I'm not willing to give all that up. I would rather solve this problem by contacting authors and requesting DRM waivers/relicensing, and/or replacing a smaller number of assets as needed. Splitting assets up as I've described also means that CC-BY-SA art can be "quarantined" from DRM-waived/CC-BY/OGA-BY-SA art (many of my submissions are CC-BY-SA, just because there's a few CC-BY-SA items that "contaminate" the rest, which are CC-BY or CC0). I've made an effort with recent submissions to distinguish that, but it's getting to be cumbersome (see e.g. credits to https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-food). That experience partially motivated my idea for this project.
(Personally, I'm not terribly concerned about the DRM clause-waiver issue, since IMO the solution it to distributing properly-credited art as a separate download, easily accessible from the app---this seems well within the spirit of the license and likely to satisfy almost anyone who cares)
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