I just noticed Eliza did a sneaky thing with the girl in the pink top in the preview image: the body is facing right, but the head is facing front and the eyes are angled to the left. It works really well, and shows off one of the real benefits of having the head modular. When I tried this, I found that the same trick doesn't work so well for the north-facing frame and using the left/right facing head; it looked better with the diagonal head (from the diagonal walk/run cycle), but that of course lacks other assets to go with it.
I do have a question about the run cycle. I mentioned above that I like it better than the old/original one, but I do wonder how well it works if the character is running with something like a shield or a weapon in hand? Arguably that's not a very realistic situation to be in, but it'll happen in games more than it does in real life. I don't think the arm pumping will work as well in that situation?
Finally, a different off-the wall idea inspired by the modular head: blending animations for the legs, torse+arms and head. If these all exist as separate layers, it should be possible to play the "walk" animation for the legs at the same time as the "swing" animation for the arms, so your character can swing his sword around while walking. It won't be as good as a purposefully drawn animation, and it requires a bit of tinkering in code (to get the head bob in the swing), but it could be pretty neat. May work better with the stiffer original animation though. Any thoughts on this?
@bluecarrot16: "Adapt the "animation guides" to the adult male, muscular, and pregnant body types and other animations. (Evert, it would be great if you were interested in doing some of this!) FWIW, I think the animation guides can basically be derived from existing clothing; the main work will be painstakingly checking them for consistency and eliminating bugs, as Eliza has done here."
Yup, I'm on it. I'm going to clean up my "push" and "carry overhead" animations and post those up (they'll probably be male only and a single skin tone, but the latter can be easily fixed), then I'm moving on to the guides doing exactly what you suggested. I'll post an update on the forum, it seems off-topic here.
@bzt: "Sorry to say, you are confused and mistaken."
Except, not really. There are differences in the male body, the colour palette and the animation. Note I don't say better or worse, just different - which makes it a matter of opinion which one is preferred.
"Good luck adding "jump" or "run" into your game."
Oh, that's fairly straightforward: you add in the existing animations, then adapt the clothing items you want for them and share those back to the community (when you're satisfied with them) so others can benefit, or you pay bluecarrot16 a commission to do it for you. Hell, for the jump you could just use Eliza's as is, since it's the same animation except cleaned up and with some assets to get you started.
"that's the only one submission that actually has compatible heads and facial expressions,"
Except, not really.
"not to mention guides for future assets."
Yeah, that's missing at the moment. Working on it.
"All the former submissions are useless and incompatible in a real game, just try to use them if you don't believe me."
That is uncalled for. You know, people have actually made games using LPC assets and characters. You might want to do some research there before proclaiming something that ends up just looking stupid.
Seriously, get someone to proof-read your posts before submitting them, because you're coming across as rude and condescending as all hell.
"That's a TERRIBLE idea. It's not going to work, because left and right isn't mirrored sprites, and what's more it's not compatible with any of the existing assets either, not with the original LPC base, and not with Eliza's."
Of course it's going to work, as long as you have left facing sprites, you have right facing sprites by flipping them. It's been done that way since the '80s. Sure, it doesn't work as well if the sprite isn't left/right symmetric, but many sprites are and even when they're not games have not worried about this for ages. Sure, having 4 directions (or heck, having 8 directions) is better, but in terms of priorities, there are definitely more important things to worry about.
You say the existing assets aren't mirrored sprites, so then explain why the character goes from right-handed in left-facing frames to left-handed in right-facing frames (also when going from up to downward facing sprites for... some reason). The only thing I can think of that supposedly differentiates the left and right facing frames is the glare spot on the head (it's supposed to be on the left side of the sprite) and even that flips position on some frames (it's wrong on the left-facing thrust animation for the male base).
"Here's a perfect example for you about the LPC asset compatibility problem I'm constantly talking about. Look how the helmet doesn't fit to the male base on the left. This, and the missing animations for certain assets makes the original LPC asset unusable in a real game."
You complain that things are "broken", "missing" or "incompatible", but appear to be unaware of effort that has gone into fixing the things you're complaining about and you're dismissive and rude towards the people who have put in that work.
Now, finding the correct place to look is tricky because newer and older submissions are lumped together in the site search. The same thing is going to happen to Eliza's recent submission once it falls off the front page. That should be improved, somehow. If there are issues or misisng things, do point them out - mistakes can't be fixed if no-one points them out, and someone may just be willing to help out if you ask nicely.
@ElizaWy: Fair comment about the run cycle; I had noticed that it was very different from the original (and, I think, better). I mainly wanted to point out the existence of the original.
Regarding a "stuff over head carrying animation, basically a walk with the arms raised, Zelda-style", funny story: I have that one too, based on the original LPC walkcycle (guess what sort of game I'm going for with that one). I'll clean that up and post it, in case it'll be useful (my guess is not really, I'm sure you can do a better job than I can if it needs to be adapted for your bases). What I don't have is a "lift" animation to transition to the carry animation.
@bzt: "Most definitely not." Ok, might I suggest checking your attitude when someone points things out to you? Of course they exist, I've been using them on-and-off for a couple of years now. I said the animations exist. I didn't say they're in the base assets (most LPC stuff isn't since it post-dates the competition), I didn't say it's in the generator and I didn't say they have additional assets available for them. They don't, it's just the bases (and that's a problem - no one uses them because there's no other assets for them, no one is making assets for them because no one is using them).
@bzt: Just to point out: running and jumping exist for the original bases, they just lack assets making them less useful. The real win here is not that Eliza included these, but that she made some actual assets to use with them. Regarding a push animation, I have that one, but for the original bases and only for a clothed male sprite (because I stupidly didn't derive it from the character base, but from the completed sprite); I'm recreating that so it's more modular and re-usable. When it's done (including the clothes to go with it) I'll post it. Do note though that "walking with your hands in front of you" looks like your character has super strength because they're not leaning into the push, unless they're pushing a trolley or something that's meant to be pushed around without effort.
Anyway, not to derail this thread, which is supposed to be about the submission. This is great, and I'm happy to see this finally posted up here. It's been a lot of effort over a long time, and highly anticipated.
That said, I probably won't be using most of it directly, because it's missing some important (for me) animations and assets, and because I actually prefer the original head and chunkier male body. Different body types are a good thing to have in general, since people come in all shapes and sizes, so it's nice to be able to mix them. It's a nightmare for asset creation though. I'll probably end up back-porting the guides and references to the original assets, since that's useful to me.
Sorry if the following seems pedantic, but my impression is that you're unaware of some of the history and origin of the LPC collection assets, so I thought I'd clarify a few things.
The original LPC was an art and game development contest, for which some base assets were provided by OGA. The LPC style guide and descriptions refer to those original assets. As part of the composition, some additional animations were provided, the "thrust" and "shoot" animations were added later.
After the competition, the diverse set of character bases and assorted assets were combined in a "unified LPC spritesheet", which is a GIMP .xcf file with all/many available (at the time) assets in different layers. This inspired the online "universal spritesheet generator", of which various forks exist, with Castelonia's being the most complete, up-to-date and well-maintained one. Most assets created after the universal spritesheet was created are made to be compatible with it.
Some existing animations are not part of the universal spritesheet and as a result they lack assets. This includes a grab animation, the jump animation and the running animation that were contributed later. Eliza did include the latter two in her revision, but they exist based on the original bases.
I'm also experiencing a sense of deja-vu. You bring up some good points: yes, the LPC assets need to be more clearly specified, it's all scattered around at the moment and things like intended frame timings, windup/cooldown/repeat frames are burried deep. It's somewhat hard to find that the 9-frame walkcycle is actually a 1-frame idle and 8-frame walk cycle. Guides and references aren't easy to find in a single location and style. The thing is, this was all discussed on the forum here a while back, with bluecarrot16, Castelonia, ElizaWy and several others contributing their input. It feels like many of the points discussed there are going to come up again, and so it's probably a good idea to dig out that thread and use it as a starting point.
I've reworked the female deer by analogy with the horse.
Not that the horse should be some gold standard that all animals should follow, but as an arbitrary starting point, it's not a bad one I think. Plus, I was hoping that it would be possible to adapt the riding animations for the horse to the deer (riding deer is cool, if unrealistic; as far as I know their back wouldn't hold the weight of a human), but I suspect that's overly optimistic.
What I did:
Automatic recolour to the LPC palette. This probably still need some tweaks to be optimal, since colours do jump around a bit.
Reworked the horse body into a body for the deer for the south facing frames. It's not as extreme as my previous example, where I think I aligned the bottom of the head with the horse for a quick comparison. Here I based things more on the top of the head.
Added a simple idle frame with all four legs at rest (but it was a quick and dirty edit).
Added an eating animation as for the other animals. For this, I used Aseprite to rotate the head and did some manual cleanup.
Still left to do:
Antlers, as a separate layer that can be overlaid to produce the male deer. Perhaps different stages of growth for these?
Spots, because we really need to have Bambi in LPC style
Recolours
It's true that the goat (and llama) have a more extreme south facing frame than the horse and cow, which I'm more familiar with myself. So I guess there is no definite answer as to which is more correct.
Let me know if you want to include my edits into this submission, or whether I should make my own.
I've been tinkering with the deer a bit. I'd like to use it, but the way it is now, it feels a bit out of place with some of the other sprites.
I think the "issue" is that the colour palette and the perspective are a bit off. I did a quick hack: I recoloured the deer into the LPC base palette (which messes up the colour ramps; I should really have used Eliza's palette) and modified the south facing frame by modifying the horse. This mainly has the effect of making the view more top-down rather than from the front. I don't know that it's better per se, but it's more consistent.
I'm probably going to do the other frames and see how that works out.
Isn't it nice how there are as many preferences as there are people (or more even)? :D
Clearly there's no single way to do it that will be ideal to everyone, so picking one and being as consistent as possible (and documenting it) is probably the way to go.
I will say though that yes, I do indeed think having (the option for) independent images from the generator is the way to go. It seems to me that the generator mostly stacks images in a well-defined order, and doesn't need to know if it's stacking a walkcycle, cast, slash, run, jump or universal spritesheet. On the other hand, I haven't looked at the code in any detail but I'm clearly not volunteering at this stage to implement that. Obviously stacking them one below the other will work fine, and it's better than a more compact sheet for general distribution (I mean, I have trouble remembering where the buildup, repeat and recover frames go in the shoot animation and half the time I forget that the first frame in the "walk" animation is actually an idle frame rather than part of the walkcycle).
I actually used recolours of Eliza's test image when building up the palette set to see how they work (or kept hers); I'll post those up here in addition to the palette above (I have it as a set of layers in Gimp, so it's not immediately convenient to post).
Good point about the wolfman; I'll add the fur colours from those.
Personally, I don't think it makes sense to waste space on other directions for the death animation if we don't intend to fill them in; it actually makes using the spritesheets a tick more cumbersome in that you have to special-case the death animation explicitly (which I personally don't do - I just detect that if I try to extract all directions, I go off the edge of the spritesheet and end up re-using the last valid set).
Anyway, I've gone through the various colour options that are in the generator and list the different palettes. If there are a couple that seem like they are intended to be the same, I merged them. I ended up with the following set:
From top to bottom these are: light=white=ivory, tanned=peach, olive, dark, dark 2, brown, black, dark elf, dark elf 2, zombie, reptile light, reptile dark and orc. I based the names on the male/child bases, the pregnant bases seem to follow a completely different naming scheme.
The options "tanned" and "peach" seem to be exactly the same. White/peach/olive/brown/black originate from Eliza's skin tone pack; I think they're slightly different but very similar to her Liberated Palette. I left out "tanned 2" because... well, I didn't like it and it seemed pointless?
If a set seemed close to what is in the Liberated Palette, I went with that, but notably the tanned/peach, dark elf and various greens are different. They're mostly between two colour ramps and I couldn't decide which one to pick. I have to say I'm not a fan of the greens, I think they're too flat, but then again, I'm not entirely sold on the greens in the Liberated Palette either.
I guess my question is whether you all think it's useful to keep all these, and whether there are any colours that seem to be missing?
My next step will be to make sure I have consistent sets in one colour (probably "white") and then automate the recolouring of them.
I just noticed Eliza did a sneaky thing with the girl in the pink top in the preview image: the body is facing right, but the head is facing front and the eyes are angled to the left. It works really well, and shows off one of the real benefits of having the head modular. When I tried this, I found that the same trick doesn't work so well for the north-facing frame and using the left/right facing head; it looked better with the diagonal head (from the diagonal walk/run cycle), but that of course lacks other assets to go with it.
I do have a question about the run cycle. I mentioned above that I like it better than the old/original one, but I do wonder how well it works if the character is running with something like a shield or a weapon in hand? Arguably that's not a very realistic situation to be in, but it'll happen in games more than it does in real life. I don't think the arm pumping will work as well in that situation?
Finally, a different off-the wall idea inspired by the modular head: blending animations for the legs, torse+arms and head. If these all exist as separate layers, it should be possible to play the "walk" animation for the legs at the same time as the "swing" animation for the arms, so your character can swing his sword around while walking. It won't be as good as a purposefully drawn animation, and it requires a bit of tinkering in code (to get the head bob in the swing), but it could be pretty neat. May work better with the stiffer original animation though. Any thoughts on this?
@bluecarrot16: "Adapt the "animation guides" to the adult male, muscular, and pregnant body types and other animations. (Evert, it would be great if you were interested in doing some of this!) FWIW, I think the animation guides can basically be derived from existing clothing; the main work will be painstakingly checking them for consistency and eliminating bugs, as Eliza has done here."
Yup, I'm on it. I'm going to clean up my "push" and "carry overhead" animations and post those up (they'll probably be male only and a single skin tone, but the latter can be easily fixed), then I'm moving on to the guides doing exactly what you suggested. I'll post an update on the forum, it seems off-topic here.
@bzt: "Sorry to say, you are confused and mistaken."
Except, not really. There are differences in the male body, the colour palette and the animation. Note I don't say better or worse, just different - which makes it a matter of opinion which one is preferred.
"Good luck adding "jump" or "run" into your game."
Oh, that's fairly straightforward: you add in the existing animations, then adapt the clothing items you want for them and share those back to the community (when you're satisfied with them) so others can benefit, or you pay bluecarrot16 a commission to do it for you. Hell, for the jump you could just use Eliza's as is, since it's the same animation except cleaned up and with some assets to get you started.
"that's the only one submission that actually has compatible heads and facial expressions,"
Except, not really.
"not to mention guides for future assets."
Yeah, that's missing at the moment. Working on it.
"All the former submissions are useless and incompatible in a real game, just try to use them if you don't believe me."
That is uncalled for. You know, people have actually made games using LPC assets and characters. You might want to do some research there before proclaiming something that ends up just looking stupid.
Seriously, get someone to proof-read your posts before submitting them, because you're coming across as rude and condescending as all hell.
"That's a TERRIBLE idea. It's not going to work, because left and right isn't mirrored sprites, and what's more it's not compatible with any of the existing assets either, not with the original LPC base, and not with Eliza's."
Of course it's going to work, as long as you have left facing sprites, you have right facing sprites by flipping them. It's been done that way since the '80s. Sure, it doesn't work as well if the sprite isn't left/right symmetric, but many sprites are and even when they're not games have not worried about this for ages. Sure, having 4 directions (or heck, having 8 directions) is better, but in terms of priorities, there are definitely more important things to worry about.
You say the existing assets aren't mirrored sprites, so then explain why the character goes from right-handed in left-facing frames to left-handed in right-facing frames (also when going from up to downward facing sprites for... some reason). The only thing I can think of that supposedly differentiates the left and right facing frames is the glare spot on the head (it's supposed to be on the left side of the sprite) and even that flips position on some frames (it's wrong on the left-facing thrust animation for the male base).
"Here's a perfect example for you about the LPC asset compatibility problem I'm constantly talking about. Look how the helmet doesn't fit to the male base on the left. This, and the missing animations for certain assets makes the original LPC asset unusable in a real game."
Care to elaborate? What "missing animations" are you referring to? Older submissions have things like "no cast/slash" or "walk only", but the vast majority of those have been filled in ages ago, but you have to know where to get the most recent version (which is typically from the Universal LPC spritesheet character generator). Where did you pick the helmet and base from? I'm asking, because the version I have (see it at https://sanderfrenken.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Generator/#?body=Humanlike_white&hat=Barbarian_silver&sex=male&weapon=Slash_dagger) appears to be fine?
You complain that things are "broken", "missing" or "incompatible", but appear to be unaware of effort that has gone into fixing the things you're complaining about and you're dismissive and rude towards the people who have put in that work.
Now, finding the correct place to look is tricky because newer and older submissions are lumped together in the site search. The same thing is going to happen to Eliza's recent submission once it falls off the front page. That should be improved, somehow. If there are issues or misisng things, do point them out - mistakes can't be fixed if no-one points them out, and someone may just be willing to help out if you ask nicely.
@ElizaWy: Fair comment about the run cycle; I had noticed that it was very different from the original (and, I think, better). I mainly wanted to point out the existence of the original.
Regarding a "stuff over head carrying animation, basically a walk with the arms raised, Zelda-style", funny story: I have that one too, based on the original LPC walkcycle (guess what sort of game I'm going for with that one). I'll clean that up and post it, in case it'll be useful (my guess is not really, I'm sure you can do a better job than I can if it needs to be adapted for your bases). What I don't have is a "lift" animation to transition to the carry animation.
@bzt: "Most definitely not." Ok, might I suggest checking your attitude when someone points things out to you? Of course they exist, I've been using them on-and-off for a couple of years now. I said the animations exist. I didn't say they're in the base assets (most LPC stuff isn't since it post-dates the competition), I didn't say it's in the generator and I didn't say they have additional assets available for them. They don't, it's just the bases (and that's a problem - no one uses them because there's no other assets for them, no one is making assets for them because no one is using them).
For your reference: https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-male-jumping-animation-by-durrani (ok, so it's actually male only; Eliza fixed that a while back, https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-jump-expanded), https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-runcycle-and-diagonal-walkcycle.
@bzt: Just to point out: running and jumping exist for the original bases, they just lack assets making them less useful. The real win here is not that Eliza included these, but that she made some actual assets to use with them. Regarding a push animation, I have that one, but for the original bases and only for a clothed male sprite (because I stupidly didn't derive it from the character base, but from the completed sprite); I'm recreating that so it's more modular and re-usable. When it's done (including the clothes to go with it) I'll post it. Do note though that "walking with your hands in front of you" looks like your character has super strength because they're not leaning into the push, unless they're pushing a trolley or something that's meant to be pushed around without effort.
Anyway, not to derail this thread, which is supposed to be about the submission. This is great, and I'm happy to see this finally posted up here. It's been a lot of effort over a long time, and highly anticipated.
That said, I probably won't be using most of it directly, because it's missing some important (for me) animations and assets, and because I actually prefer the original head and chunkier male body. Different body types are a good thing to have in general, since people come in all shapes and sizes, so it's nice to be able to mix them. It's a nightmare for asset creation though. I'll probably end up back-porting the guides and references to the original assets, since that's useful to me.
Sorry if the following seems pedantic, but my impression is that you're unaware of some of the history and origin of the LPC collection assets, so I thought I'd clarify a few things.
The original LPC was an art and game development contest, for which some base assets were provided by OGA. The LPC style guide and descriptions refer to those original assets. As part of the composition, some additional animations were provided, the "thrust" and "shoot" animations were added later.
After the competition, the diverse set of character bases and assorted assets were combined in a "unified LPC spritesheet", which is a GIMP .xcf file with all/many available (at the time) assets in different layers. This inspired the online "universal spritesheet generator", of which various forks exist, with Castelonia's being the most complete, up-to-date and well-maintained one. Most assets created after the universal spritesheet was created are made to be compatible with it.
Some existing animations are not part of the universal spritesheet and as a result they lack assets. This includes a grab animation, the jump animation and the running animation that were contributed later. Eliza did include the latter two in her revision, but they exist based on the original bases.
I'm also experiencing a sense of deja-vu. You bring up some good points: yes, the LPC assets need to be more clearly specified, it's all scattered around at the moment and things like intended frame timings, windup/cooldown/repeat frames are burried deep. It's somewhat hard to find that the 9-frame walkcycle is actually a 1-frame idle and 8-frame walk cycle. Guides and references aren't easy to find in a single location and style. The thing is, this was all discussed on the forum here a while back, with bluecarrot16, Castelonia, ElizaWy and several others contributing their input. It feels like many of the points discussed there are going to come up again, and so it's probably a good idea to dig out that thread and use it as a starting point.
I've reworked the female deer by analogy with the horse.
Not that the horse should be some gold standard that all animals should follow, but as an arbitrary starting point, it's not a bad one I think. Plus, I was hoping that it would be possible to adapt the riding animations for the horse to the deer (riding deer is cool, if unrealistic; as far as I know their back wouldn't hold the weight of a human), but I suspect that's overly optimistic.
What I did:
Still left to do:
It's true that the goat (and llama) have a more extreme south facing frame than the horse and cow, which I'm more familiar with myself. So I guess there is no definite answer as to which is more correct.
Let me know if you want to include my edits into this submission, or whether I should make my own.
I've been tinkering with the deer a bit. I'd like to use it, but the way it is now, it feels a bit out of place with some of the other sprites.
I think the "issue" is that the colour palette and the perspective are a bit off. I did a quick hack: I recoloured the deer into the LPC base palette (which messes up the colour ramps; I should really have used Eliza's palette) and modified the south facing frame by modifying the horse. This mainly has the effect of making the view more top-down rather than from the front. I don't know that it's better per se, but it's more consistent.
I'm probably going to do the other frames and see how that works out.
Isn't it nice how there are as many preferences as there are people (or more even)? :D
Clearly there's no single way to do it that will be ideal to everyone, so picking one and being as consistent as possible (and documenting it) is probably the way to go.
I will say though that yes, I do indeed think having (the option for) independent images from the generator is the way to go. It seems to me that the generator mostly stacks images in a well-defined order, and doesn't need to know if it's stacking a walkcycle, cast, slash, run, jump or universal spritesheet. On the other hand, I haven't looked at the code in any detail but I'm clearly not volunteering at this stage to implement that. Obviously stacking them one below the other will work fine, and it's better than a more compact sheet for general distribution (I mean, I have trouble remembering where the buildup, repeat and recover frames go in the shoot animation and half the time I forget that the first frame in the "walk" animation is actually an idle frame rather than part of the walkcycle).
I actually used recolours of Eliza's test image when building up the palette set to see how they work (or kept hers); I'll post those up here in addition to the palette above (I have it as a set of layers in Gimp, so it's not immediately convenient to post).
Good point about the wolfman; I'll add the fur colours from those.
Personally, I don't think it makes sense to waste space on other directions for the death animation if we don't intend to fill them in; it actually makes using the spritesheets a tick more cumbersome in that you have to special-case the death animation explicitly (which I personally don't do - I just detect that if I try to extract all directions, I go off the edge of the spritesheet and end up re-using the last valid set).
Anyway, I've gone through the various colour options that are in the generator and list the different palettes. If there are a couple that seem like they are intended to be the same, I merged them. I ended up with the following set:
From top to bottom these are: light=white=ivory, tanned=peach, olive, dark, dark 2, brown, black, dark elf, dark elf 2, zombie, reptile light, reptile dark and orc. I based the names on the male/child bases, the pregnant bases seem to follow a completely different naming scheme.
The options "tanned" and "peach" seem to be exactly the same. White/peach/olive/brown/black originate from Eliza's skin tone pack; I think they're slightly different but very similar to her Liberated Palette. I left out "tanned 2" because... well, I didn't like it and it seemed pointless?
If a set seemed close to what is in the Liberated Palette, I went with that, but notably the tanned/peach, dark elf and various greens are different. They're mostly between two colour ramps and I couldn't decide which one to pick. I have to say I'm not a fan of the greens, I think they're too flat, but then again, I'm not entirely sold on the greens in the Liberated Palette either.
I guess my question is whether you all think it's useful to keep all these, and whether there are any colours that seem to be missing?
My next step will be to make sure I have consistent sets in one colour (probably "white") and then automate the recolouring of them.
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