Thanks bzt, glad we agree on most points. Again, I'll comment more on the substance a bit later. I take it this is the repo you are committing to? It's helpful to be able to track changes as they happen. https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/lpc-cert
(This was written before you posted your draft; I will read it and comment on the substance of the discussion above later, but wanted to get these comments out before we get too much further along...)
I welcome the offer to build and document consensus and help guide our efforts. I'd like to make some suggestions about the purpose of this effort. Quoting from the original style guide https://lpc.opengameart.org/static/LPC-Style-Guide/build/styleguide.html: "The purpose of this style guide is to allow pixel artists to collaborate on a top-down set of artwork and produce content that is stylistically coherent ... we've intentionally built a style guide for artwork that should be easy to collaborate on for both intermediate and advanced pixel artists."
With that in mind, I would suggest a few overarching principles to guide this effort:
Coherence: the style guide should help create body of artwork that can be used together. This should be the primary and overriding goal.
Accessibility: the style guide should support ease and breadth of contribution to the body of artwork. For example, in the context of tiles, the style guide says---"we want some detail, but not so much that things are so ornate that it might make collaboration difficult;" I think this should apply to things like animations too---they should have some motion, but not so much as to make animating them overly difficult. Likewise requirements for how many conditions/variations/animations are included, etc. should be as permissive and not-onerous as possible
Consensus: the style guide should reflect consensus among the community and not be dictatorial. As much as possible, it should reflect what people have already been doing, and if it makes prescriptive changes, it should do so for very clear and well-justified reasons that are broadly agreed upon.
Flexibility: the style guide should only specify that which is necessary for coherence or interoperability. Affordances should be made for future additions; for example, if new character animations are added, how should that be handled?
Should you embark on this, please be prepared for your draft to be modified or possibly abandoned, depending on how everyone responds. Plan for this to take a while and give occasional but substantial contributors some time to read and respond. Assume everyone is acting in good faith. Please approach this with some humility, understanding that there will be differences of opinion, mistakes, and genuine misunderstandings; also recognize that some of us have been working on this project for years, while others are just coming on the scene. As Evert says, many of the relevant issues have been discussed at length, so I would expect those participating in this discussion to at least try to familiarize yourself with that conversation. If someone says in response to your point, "that has been discussed before here: ____", please read the link before responding.
A few of these threads have been mentioned, but here is a more comprehensive "reading list" of threads where these issues have been discussed; these should absolutely be reviewed to understand how we got here:
Did you fork your guide on Git from the original? https://github.com/OpenGameArt/LPC-Style-Guide ; It would be helpful if we could see what has changed compared to the original. Is there a repository where we can eventually submit pull requests directly?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The original template here https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-child-standing-template is already available under that license (as well as CC-BY), and this would allay the concerns some folks have about using CC-BY-* works in software that contains DRM.
Good grief... this is predominantly original, and the derivative parts are a substantial contribution beyond Sevarihk's original. Plus this is a FOSS website---we're happy to have derivative works here... it's kind of the point. Finally, gatekeeping entries to a "contest" with no prize and like 4 entries... my mind boggles.
tapatilorenzo, I really hope you stick around; I'd love for you to keep contributing, whether in the LPC style or otherwise. As I said above, this is an excellent submission and I'm grateful for it!
Don't feel too pressured to revisit right away---personally, I often find it more productive to come back to something after a while with fresh eyes; I feel better about both the original and the improvements that way :p
These are awesome! I know these will be very useful to many people.
If you're interested in some constructive feedback:
- Bears: their legs look too long compared to the height of their bodies. Their proportions are almost sloth-like :p I would shorten the legs and thicken the bellies. Probably increase the size of the east/west-facing heads too, which look much smaller than the south-facing head. South-facing head the perspective doesn't look quite right---it looks like you're looking the bear directly in the face and don't see any of the top of the head. The fur texture looks really nice on the leftmost bear color! The brown suffers from not enough contrast to appreciate the shading, and the white really needs at least one more color; it ends up looking flat with only the 3 shades. I would probably use the darkest color for an outline throughout.
- Deer: I'd make the eyes rounder---they look kind of malevolent as-is :p Same comment about the outline. IMO it looks strange not to have an outline around the belly (in the east-west directions). In general, you could probably use 1--2 more halftones in the color ramp---3 shades (excluding the black for the hooves/eyes) is not very many, especially for big-ish sprits like this! For instance, the top deer color, it doesn't look quite right to me for the front, belly, and the background horn to all have the same (pretty dark) color. Try adding another halftone and use this darkest color for an outline. North- and south-facing walk animations like this are hard... I'm not certain what to suggest, but you could try animating the back legs more deliberately (see some of the things BenCreating and I did in this submission for example---the movement is probably pretty similar https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-horse-extended ). I don't think the shadow sort of swinging back-and-forth is really working.
- Lion: These benefit from some additional shades, but this results in a different problem---banding (if anyone is not familiar with this term, see here and Ctrl-F for "banding" to see some examples https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299 ). Look at the east/west-facing lions, on the top of their backs. It seems you want to avoid transitioning from your lightest color directly to the outline, so you draw all the half-tones in between. This makes the outline look really thick and blurry, emphasizes the fact that the back itself is mostly a straight line, and generally obscures the three-dimensional form of the creature. Try instead to draw the back as if it were an ellipsoid. You can also add some shading to separate the back from the rump. I can do some example edits if you think this would be helpful. Compare to Sevarihk's rat and shiba, for example. Also there is something up with the lioness' face in the east-/west-facing directions.
Thanks again for your contribution! I hope you take the feedback not as criticism but really as an appreciation of your work and effort and an invitation to continue honing your craft.
Looks pretty good, but perspective is not quite right for the side view. You are drawing the character side-on, but you should see the top of the creature too, at about a 1:2 ratio (so if the creature is as wide as he is tall, and you draw the side of the creature 20 px tall, you should draw the top ~10px tall).
Thanks bzt, glad we agree on most points. Again, I'll comment more on the substance a bit later. I take it this is the repo you are committing to? It's helpful to be able to track changes as they happen. https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/lpc-cert
(This was written before you posted your draft; I will read it and comment on the substance of the discussion above later, but wanted to get these comments out before we get too much further along...)
I welcome the offer to build and document consensus and help guide our efforts. I'd like to make some suggestions about the purpose of this effort. Quoting from the original style guide https://lpc.opengameart.org/static/LPC-Style-Guide/build/styleguide.html: "The purpose of this style guide is to allow pixel artists to collaborate on a top-down set of artwork and produce content that is stylistically coherent ... we've intentionally built a style guide for artwork that should be easy to collaborate on for both intermediate and advanced pixel artists."
With that in mind, I would suggest a few overarching principles to guide this effort:
Should you embark on this, please be prepared for your draft to be modified or possibly abandoned, depending on how everyone responds. Plan for this to take a while and give occasional but substantial contributors some time to read and respond. Assume everyone is acting in good faith. Please approach this with some humility, understanding that there will be differences of opinion, mistakes, and genuine misunderstandings; also recognize that some of us have been working on this project for years, while others are just coming on the scene. As Evert says, many of the relevant issues have been discussed at length, so I would expect those participating in this discussion to at least try to familiarize yourself with that conversation. If someone says in response to your point, "that has been discussed before here: ____", please read the link before responding.
A few of these threads have been mentioned, but here is a more comprehensive "reading list" of threads where these issues have been discussed; these should absolutely be reviewed to understand how we got here:
Discussion of licensing that ultimately lead to the creation of the OGA-BY license:
Did you fork your guide on Git from the original? https://github.com/OpenGameArt/LPC-Style-Guide ; It would be helpful if we could see what has changed compared to the original. Is there a repository where we can eventually submit pull requests directly?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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:
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... :
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.
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.
Hello! Would you be willing to license this asset under the OGA-BY 3.0 License https://opengameart.org/content/oga-by-30-faq ?
The original template here https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-child-standing-template is already available under that license (as well as CC-BY), and this would allay the concerns some folks have about using CC-BY-* works in software that contains DRM.
Good grief... this is predominantly original, and the derivative parts are a substantial contribution beyond Sevarihk's original. Plus this is a FOSS website---we're happy to have derivative works here... it's kind of the point. Finally, gatekeeping entries to a "contest" with no prize and like 4 entries... my mind boggles.
tapatilorenzo, I really hope you stick around; I'd love for you to keep contributing, whether in the LPC style or otherwise. As I said above, this is an excellent submission and I'm grateful for it!
Great!
Don't feel too pressured to revisit right away---personally, I often find it more productive to come back to something after a while with fresh eyes; I feel better about both the original and the improvements that way :p
A great thing about OGA is that someone else might pick these up in the meantime and improve them. For instance, I posted this horse in 2014, https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-horse , expanded and updated it in 2016 https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-horses , then it was further expanded and improved by BenCreating in 2018 https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-horse-extended .
These are awesome! I know these will be very useful to many people.
If you're interested in some constructive feedback:
- Bears: their legs look too long compared to the height of their bodies. Their proportions are almost sloth-like :p I would shorten the legs and thicken the bellies. Probably increase the size of the east/west-facing heads too, which look much smaller than the south-facing head. South-facing head the perspective doesn't look quite right---it looks like you're looking the bear directly in the face and don't see any of the top of the head. The fur texture looks really nice on the leftmost bear color! The brown suffers from not enough contrast to appreciate the shading, and the white really needs at least one more color; it ends up looking flat with only the 3 shades. I would probably use the darkest color for an outline throughout.
- Deer: I'd make the eyes rounder---they look kind of malevolent as-is :p Same comment about the outline. IMO it looks strange not to have an outline around the belly (in the east-west directions). In general, you could probably use 1--2 more halftones in the color ramp---3 shades (excluding the black for the hooves/eyes) is not very many, especially for big-ish sprits like this! For instance, the top deer color, it doesn't look quite right to me for the front, belly, and the background horn to all have the same (pretty dark) color. Try adding another halftone and use this darkest color for an outline. North- and south-facing walk animations like this are hard... I'm not certain what to suggest, but you could try animating the back legs more deliberately (see some of the things BenCreating and I did in this submission for example---the movement is probably pretty similar https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-horse-extended ). I don't think the shadow sort of swinging back-and-forth is really working.
- Lion: These benefit from some additional shades, but this results in a different problem---banding (if anyone is not familiar with this term, see here and Ctrl-F for "banding" to see some examples https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299 ). Look at the east/west-facing lions, on the top of their backs. It seems you want to avoid transitioning from your lightest color directly to the outline, so you draw all the half-tones in between. This makes the outline look really thick and blurry, emphasizes the fact that the back itself is mostly a straight line, and generally obscures the three-dimensional form of the creature. Try instead to draw the back as if it were an ellipsoid. You can also add some shading to separate the back from the rump. I can do some example edits if you think this would be helpful. Compare to Sevarihk's rat and shiba, for example. Also there is something up with the lioness' face in the east-/west-facing directions.
Thanks again for your contribution! I hope you take the feedback not as criticism but really as an appreciation of your work and effort and an invitation to continue honing your craft.
Looks pretty good, but perspective is not quite right for the side view. You are drawing the character side-on, but you should see the top of the creature too, at about a 1:2 ratio (so if the creature is as wide as he is tall, and you draw the side of the creature 20 px tall, you should draw the top ~10px tall).
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