1 and 2. You're totally right about the tilted head; I think as a general rule we should avoid the number/amount of head tilts, since right now hair and hats can be added only drawing the 3 directions plus the "hurt" cycle.
3. Agreed about previewing the animations; I'd like to add gif generators to the shell tools and the "character creator."
Something that our more code-inclined colleagues could help with: a very simple HTML5 game where you can upload different versions of the spritesheets and then control the character moving around the environment, triggering the different animations. Basically a very simple sandbox to get a feel for the different animations working together
4. I think this is a really good idea. Are there any substantive differences other than the breast sheet between "male" and "female" bases? (I know there are various 1px differences in the head position and such that are probably accidental). It would be nice if everything other than shirts could just be unisex. We could apply the same logic to the pregnancy bases I think, where they are just unisex with an overlay.
5. This is a fine idea. Ideally we can make tools to do this (and also to stitch sheets back together)? I think we should agree on a standardized file naming convention and a standard single-file assembly order as well (like the current standard), but this will give some flexibility.
6. Off-site version control would be good, we need someone to take charge of this though and enforce those guidelines. File/folder naming conventions will also be important. I can take a stab at it, starting with castelonia's generator as a base.
6.5 I agree that we should switch to making automatic recolors; that will just require a bit of code and some curation.
It's a big improvement, for sure! I still think the motion blur is necessary for the chop animations---you're just trying to convey dramatic movement in very few frames, so without motion blur, the animation will always look pretty choppy---like a game running at low FPS. You're right it will need to be different for each weapon, but it's not that hard. I'd be happy to give it a try if you'd like. Castelonia was also interested in this.
Do you think I should make a submission for these animations at this state or I wait the definitive version?
EDIT: Is anyone interested in the script I used to generate the animation?
Yes! Submit early, submit often! You can always update, and use the Bump Requests thread to move the submission back to the homepage if you make a major improvement. Definitely upload the script(s) too if you can.
Okay, I don't think the layering doesn't make that much sense in general, I don't see a general way of doing it, body parts behave differently in different animations.
I'm confused :p Are you saying the layering is a bad idea? If I understood Evert's original comment, the layering would solve two problems:
1. Sometimes the arms go over the head/face, so right now you need a "cutout" on hats, hair, etc. so the arms can show through. If the front arm was on a separate layer, that cutout wouldn't be necessary. Relatedly, for the bow shoot animation (and others), in frames where only one arm is moving, the artist wouldn't have to re-draw the torso
2. You could combine the upper body and lower body from two different animations (e.g. as you pointed out, for Skorpio's two-hand gun animation, artists could just replace the torso and arms and the shell tools could fill in the lower body with frames/layers from the walk animation)
Where are the animation fixes located? And what exactly did they fix.
Where do you want me to upload the reworked spritesheets? In a new submission on OGA? Here? In a particular git repo? In all cases, I will upload them on my repo.
pvigier, please upload to a new submission on OGA; that will make attribution/record-keeping much easier. We should probably set up a git repo for this little project so we can have a "working copy" of the animations and don't branch off/duplicate work accidentally.
Tools
Speaking of automation, I'd really like to see tools with a UI. The shell scripts we have are great, but in my experience, many artists won't use anything without a visual interface.
Pretty much agree with Basto about this. I envision two sets of tools:
Command-line "build" tools, which take a partial spritesheet and construct a full spritesheet (possibly with multiple layers) with all animations, duplicated/mirrored images, etc. These would be descendents of JaidynReiman's ruby scripts and/or Basto's code for the heads
Graphical "character creator" tools, which assemble multiple spritesheets (possibly in layers) for a base, clothing, weapon, etc. These would be more similar to guarav0/JaidynReiman/castelonia's generators. It might be helpful if there was a command-line version of these as well, which could be incorporated into a build process. Refactoring such that the logic for assembling sheets is contained in a small node.js module that can be built for browser would be one solution.
I think it's most important that the "build" can be used to really quickly iterate/preview designs. So it might be helpful if it could also generate GIF previews.
Animations list
This is a great conversation. A few more thoughts:
Swim:
We could also use the lower body from the "run" animation for this, combined with arms as Basto and BenCreating have proposed; TheraHedwig's run animation has the torso tilted diagonally forward, and the legs slowed down could be kinda kicking for swimming. That way it would work for underwater levels, or with a semitransparent overlay for swimming at the surface.
Push/Pull:
I think these should be for heavy objects. The character really needs to lean into/away from the object to make this feel right. Like pushing a block in a Zelda game.
At least for the "push", this could also borrow from the "run" animation---maybe the torso and lower body are the same and the arms are just held out in front of the character, pushing. Not sure about pulling.
Grab:
I'm having a hard time understanding Daneeklu's/BenCreating's animation here... Can you show an example of how it would be used?
And just to add more chaos, a few more possibilities:
Nod
Look up (could potentially use same frames as "nod")
Shake head ("no")
I'm reticent about these three, because they would require a lot more animation of the hair/hats, which currently don't need to be animated much at all (although animating hair for the run animation would be nice, it's not mandatory right now).
Dig/hoe: this could probably be accomplished with the current thrust animation, though I haven't tried yet
but I feel like the work of modifying the existing animations and creating new ones comes out about the same. Either way, someone will have to modify old assets to fit, so I don't think we should rule out updating the animations altogether.
That's not quite fair---if it's X hours to create a new run cycle and also X hours to re-do the walk cycle, all things equal I'd prefer we spend the time to make a run cycle, since we already have a walk cycle, where as a run cycle creates new gameplay possibilities (even if not all clothing is adapted right away). Plus, the changes proposed above to "fix bugs" in the bases (even if propagating the changes to all the other assets) are trivial in comparison to completely re-drawing all assets, which is what ElizaWy's new animations would require. Finally, I'll mention that if we are updating the existing animations, I would like to see them go in the opposite direction---fewer frames (the walkcycle being the most egregious example), minimal extranous motion, frames re-used where possible, etc., to make it as easy to contribute as possible.
Yes, a simplified animation set for enemies would be amazing! Especially if it could share enough frames with the player set that assets would be easy to adapt between them.
I think the idea was that the simplified set would be a proper subset of the full set. For instance, an NPC might only need walk, or walk/slash/hurt.
I think it would be a shame to "lose" compatibility with all the existing art.
afaik that's already the case, because there are various variations of the base sprites around and clothing submissions might be based on different versions.
No, I don't think that's right---the majority of clothes/weapons work with at least the male and female adult human bases; most work with the various humanoids that just have different heads (lizard, wolfman, orc), or could be made to work with small modifications. If you're talking about differences between the "vanilla" base sprite and the "bug-fixed" versions that Evert, BenCreating, pvigier, et al. have been sharing, those are tiny changes in comparison to completely re-drawing.
Say ElizaWy's "LPC 2.0" bases are released. If someone makes a new shirt, drawing all the animations on that base---that new shirt can't be used on any of the existing bases or their animations. By contrast, if we tidy up the existing bases, remove trivial differences, build some good tools to reduce the amount of duplication necessary, etc., then a "new" shirt can be mixed and matched with dozens of "old" pants, hats, swords, belts, etc.---for human, orc, lizard-people, etc. Further, if we agree on a new animation that otherwise uses the existing base, then thousands of assets can be adapted to that base just by drawing the new animation. Perhaps I'm belaboring the point.
I also have a feeling that even if we make any drastic changes, at least some of the old animations would still be used quite a bit, just not for their original purposes.
This is a good point, which is why I suggested a careful study of all existing animations (and proposed new animations), to see that as much as possible could be re-used across multiple animations/applications (for example, if designing a new push/pull/grab animation, it would be great if many frames were shared). This approach might require some compromises, compared to drawing bespoke animations from scratch. But I think the underlying principle should be that contributing items is as easy as possible---meaning the animations have the minimum number of frames necessary, variation between the bases is minimized (where possible), and so on.
Here is a draft list of possible new "motions"/"actions", based on some suggestions in this thread. I would propose we think about which ones would be most useful and whether/how they could be combined into a minimum set of animations.
Chop (chopping trees/wood, mining with pickaxe, etc.)
Climb
Push
Pull (could also be used to pull vegetables out of the ground?)
Grab
Carry
Give/present/hand object to
Swim
Sleep
Sit
Alternate sword/spear attack (parry?)
Guard/block
"Craft"/"Interact"/"Work"? (I'm thinking things like crafting, cooking, etc.; something where the character moves their arms to interact with a waist-high object in front of them)
Throw (overhead, or one-handed)
One-handed shoot (pistol)
Two-handed shoot (rifle)
Handshake
Finally, I'll reiterate that my goal is not to dissuade ElizaWy from working on whatever she wants! But I'd encourage others who are on the fence to continue building on what we have instead. The amount of effort to re-create the existing art would be measured in the hundreds or thousands of hours (much of which would need to be done by more experienced animators, whereas a lot of the tweaking and bug-fixing we're talking about can be done by beginners or programmers who dabble in art). And that's just to bring us to the space of gameplay possibilities we have now. Why would we not invest that effort towards new possibilities instead?
I think the tilesets have a lot of issues of combining chairs, tables, cupboards, shelves and objects which are meant to be put on them.
I'm definitely interested in working on this. It's one of my priorities for the furniture set, and I think we can come up with a good solution.
Hi Medicine, can you bump this submission: https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-food ? Roughly doubled the number of sprites included, and significantly reorganized.
I will also say that having a set of more basic animations for enemy/NPC sprites and a more richly animated set of animations intended for player characters is not unreasonable. On the other hand, dividing resources (available artist time) over multiple sets rather than having a single good set is not good, and it's probably better to have one set with better variety.
My thoughts exactly!
What I personally look for is modularity and adaptability. I'm not a pixel artist, and modifying art for my specific purpose is easier if it's modular ... Having the arms separated also makes it easier to quickly make a mockup for a new animation, because you can just cut up the arms and move pixels around without worrying about fixing up the torso.
I see. That may or may not be feasible depending on the specific part, but we could make it a goal. I do see now how the arms could be an issue when they are raised above the head (e.g. such that they overlay a helmet or hair). Hmm, let's think about that. I definitely think Basto's modular heads are an improvement, so arms/legs is the next logical step...
Another application would be having the arms move somewhat independently of the legs; like, you could have a walking thrust animation, or a person walking with their arms raised, just combining the existing upper- and lower-body animations...
Having tools to help automate things like spritesheet creation or taking things like hats and hair and putting them in the correct position is extremely important, but personally I sometimes find these to be unreasonably restrictive. A certain piece of headgear might be labelled "female only" and then I can't put it on a male sheet in the generator just to get an idea for how it looks and make modifications afterwards, so I find that I tend to just use the Gimp anyway.
There's two separate issues here:
1) the scripts can handle differences in male/female (as feasible); for example, the current hair scripts generates both a male and female version, which differ only slightly in the offsets and cutouts that are used. Cases where this couldn't be overcome include the example you gave above, where you're trying to generate a cutout but the shape of the cutout is variable depending on the piece that's being cut out... Hmm, I'm starting to come around to your idea that the arms should be on different layers...
2) whether the specific generator software allows you to make "illegal" combinations just to test something out. I think we could easily permit that.
You know, would anybody be interested in a Discord server for the LPC set? We could share WIP and concept work directly pretty easily that way.
Personally, I'd rather discussion stay on OGA as much as possible---makes it more likely that information is preserved. But maybe I'm just a dinosaur who doesn't want to use a different platform :)
I think ElizaWy's new animations look nice, and I welcome her efforts. I'm looking forward to seeing her completed set of base animations.
But I'll reiterate my opinion that re-doing everything is probably the wrong direction for the community. I think the "easy to create for" is a very important value, for a community project. As ElizaWy mentioned, it also looks like the new animations would be more complicated to animate, raising the barrier to new contributions. It doesn't look to me like adapting the existing assets would be easy either, which means this would require mostly new art. I think it would be a shame to "lose" compatibility with all the existing art. (Of course, the old art doesn't go away, it just doesn't benefit from any improvements that ElizaWy or other "Revised LPC" contributors make).
Just my take. Again, nothing wrong with ElizaWy experimenting or going in a totally different direction---this is the point of free culture :) But if we're talking about working "as a community" on the project of the LPC characters, I think retaining existing contributions (as much as possible) and keeping things easy-to-contribute-to are important values.
Thanks Eliza, these are all really good points.
1 and 2. You're totally right about the tilted head; I think as a general rule we should avoid the number/amount of head tilts, since right now hair and hats can be added only drawing the 3 directions plus the "hurt" cycle.
3. Agreed about previewing the animations; I'd like to add gif generators to the shell tools and the "character creator."
Something that our more code-inclined colleagues could help with: a very simple HTML5 game where you can upload different versions of the spritesheets and then control the character moving around the environment, triggering the different animations. Basically a very simple sandbox to get a feel for the different animations working together
4. I think this is a really good idea. Are there any substantive differences other than the breast sheet between "male" and "female" bases? (I know there are various 1px differences in the head position and such that are probably accidental). It would be nice if everything other than shirts could just be unisex. We could apply the same logic to the pregnancy bases I think, where they are just unisex with an overlay.
5. This is a fine idea. Ideally we can make tools to do this (and also to stitch sheets back together)? I think we should agree on a standardized file naming convention and a standard single-file assembly order as well (like the current standard), but this will give some flexibility.
6. Off-site version control would be good, we need someone to take charge of this though and enforce those guidelines. File/folder naming conventions will also be important. I can take a stab at it, starting with castelonia's generator as a base.
6.5 I agree that we should switch to making automatic recolors; that will just require a bit of code and some curation.
It's a big improvement, for sure! I still think the motion blur is necessary for the chop animations---you're just trying to convey dramatic movement in very few frames, so without motion blur, the animation will always look pretty choppy---like a game running at low FPS. You're right it will need to be different for each weapon, but it's not that hard. I'd be happy to give it a try if you'd like. Castelonia was also interested in this.
Yes! Submit early, submit often! You can always update, and use the Bump Requests thread to move the submission back to the homepage if you make a major improvement. Definitely upload the script(s) too if you can.
Hi, could you bump this submission? https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-crops Added 17 new animated crops.
I'm confused :p Are you saying the layering is a bad idea? If I understood Evert's original comment, the layering would solve two problems:
1. Sometimes the arms go over the head/face, so right now you need a "cutout" on hats, hair, etc. so the arms can show through. If the front arm was on a separate layer, that cutout wouldn't be necessary. Relatedly, for the bow shoot animation (and others), in frames where only one arm is moving, the artist wouldn't have to re-draw the torso
2. You could combine the upper body and lower body from two different animations (e.g. as you pointed out, for Skorpio's two-hand gun animation, artists could just replace the torso and arms and the shell tools could fill in the lower body with frames/layers from the walk animation)
Here is BenCreating's draft of the female base: https://opengameart.org/comment/89342#comment-89342
pvigier, please upload to a new submission on OGA; that will make attribution/record-keeping much easier. We should probably set up a git repo for this little project so we can have a "working copy" of the animations and don't branch off/duplicate work accidentally.
Tools
Pretty much agree with Basto about this. I envision two sets of tools:
I think it's most important that the "build" can be used to really quickly iterate/preview designs. So it might be helpful if it could also generate GIF previews.
Animations list
This is a great conversation. A few more thoughts:
At least for the "push", this could also borrow from the "run" animation---maybe the torso and lower body are the same and the arms are just held out in front of the character, pushing. Not sure about pulling.
And just to add more chaos, a few more possibilities:
I'm reticent about these three, because they would require a lot more animation of the hair/hats, which currently don't need to be animated much at all (although animating hair for the run animation would be nice, it's not mandatory right now).
Hey, I updated my submission recently with many new items. You're welcome to add them if you'd like :) (They're marked with "V2" in the credits file)
added, thanks
That's not quite fair---if it's X hours to create a new run cycle and also X hours to re-do the walk cycle, all things equal I'd prefer we spend the time to make a run cycle, since we already have a walk cycle, where as a run cycle creates new gameplay possibilities (even if not all clothing is adapted right away). Plus, the changes proposed above to "fix bugs" in the bases (even if propagating the changes to all the other assets) are trivial in comparison to completely re-drawing all assets, which is what ElizaWy's new animations would require. Finally, I'll mention that if we are updating the existing animations, I would like to see them go in the opposite direction---fewer frames (the walkcycle being the most egregious example), minimal extranous motion, frames re-used where possible, etc., to make it as easy to contribute as possible.
I think the idea was that the simplified set would be a proper subset of the full set. For instance, an NPC might only need walk, or walk/slash/hurt.
No, I don't think that's right---the majority of clothes/weapons work with at least the male and female adult human bases; most work with the various humanoids that just have different heads (lizard, wolfman, orc), or could be made to work with small modifications. If you're talking about differences between the "vanilla" base sprite and the "bug-fixed" versions that Evert, BenCreating, pvigier, et al. have been sharing, those are tiny changes in comparison to completely re-drawing.
Say ElizaWy's "LPC 2.0" bases are released. If someone makes a new shirt, drawing all the animations on that base---that new shirt can't be used on any of the existing bases or their animations. By contrast, if we tidy up the existing bases, remove trivial differences, build some good tools to reduce the amount of duplication necessary, etc., then a "new" shirt can be mixed and matched with dozens of "old" pants, hats, swords, belts, etc.---for human, orc, lizard-people, etc. Further, if we agree on a new animation that otherwise uses the existing base, then thousands of assets can be adapted to that base just by drawing the new animation. Perhaps I'm belaboring the point.
This is a good point, which is why I suggested a careful study of all existing animations (and proposed new animations), to see that as much as possible could be re-used across multiple animations/applications (for example, if designing a new push/pull/grab animation, it would be great if many frames were shared). This approach might require some compromises, compared to drawing bespoke animations from scratch. But I think the underlying principle should be that contributing items is as easy as possible---meaning the animations have the minimum number of frames necessary, variation between the bases is minimized (where possible), and so on.
Here is a draft list of possible new "motions"/"actions", based on some suggestions in this thread. I would propose we think about which ones would be most useful and whether/how they could be combined into a minimum set of animations.
Finally, I'll reiterate that my goal is not to dissuade ElizaWy from working on whatever she wants! But I'd encourage others who are on the fence to continue building on what we have instead. The amount of effort to re-create the existing art would be measured in the hundreds or thousands of hours (much of which would need to be done by more experienced animators, whereas a lot of the tweaking and bug-fixing we're talking about can be done by beginners or programmers who dabble in art). And that's just to bring us to the space of gameplay possibilities we have now. Why would we not invest that effort towards new possibilities instead?
I'm definitely interested in working on this. It's one of my priorities for the furniture set, and I think we can come up with a good solution.
Hi Medicine, can you bump this submission: https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-food ? Roughly doubled the number of sprites included, and significantly reorganized.
My thoughts exactly!
I see. That may or may not be feasible depending on the specific part, but we could make it a goal. I do see now how the arms could be an issue when they are raised above the head (e.g. such that they overlay a helmet or hair). Hmm, let's think about that. I definitely think Basto's modular heads are an improvement, so arms/legs is the next logical step...
Another application would be having the arms move somewhat independently of the legs; like, you could have a walking thrust animation, or a person walking with their arms raised, just combining the existing upper- and lower-body animations...
There's two separate issues here:
1) the scripts can handle differences in male/female (as feasible); for example, the current hair scripts generates both a male and female version, which differ only slightly in the offsets and cutouts that are used. Cases where this couldn't be overcome include the example you gave above, where you're trying to generate a cutout but the shape of the cutout is variable depending on the piece that's being cut out... Hmm, I'm starting to come around to your idea that the arms should be on different layers...
2) whether the specific generator software allows you to make "illegal" combinations just to test something out. I think we could easily permit that.
Personally, I'd rather discussion stay on OGA as much as possible---makes it more likely that information is preserved. But maybe I'm just a dinosaur who doesn't want to use a different platform :)
I think ElizaWy's new animations look nice, and I welcome her efforts. I'm looking forward to seeing her completed set of base animations.
But I'll reiterate my opinion that re-doing everything is probably the wrong direction for the community. I think the "easy to create for" is a very important value, for a community project. As ElizaWy mentioned, it also looks like the new animations would be more complicated to animate, raising the barrier to new contributions. It doesn't look to me like adapting the existing assets would be easy either, which means this would require mostly new art. I think it would be a shame to "lose" compatibility with all the existing art. (Of course, the old art doesn't go away, it just doesn't benefit from any improvements that ElizaWy or other "Revised LPC" contributors make).
Just my take. Again, nothing wrong with ElizaWy experimenting or going in a totally different direction---this is the point of free culture :) But if we're talking about working "as a community" on the project of the LPC characters, I think retaining existing contributions (as much as possible) and keeping things easy-to-contribute-to are important values.
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