It's nice, but I have a few points for consideration.
First, I know women rotate their hips when they walk, but I've never seen anyone do it quite so provocatively when they were just walking normally. Perhaps something to tone down. The difference with the running animation is a bit jarring.
Second, the death animation in the preview ends up at a rather unfortunate camera-angle. You might want to equip her with some underpants.
Just to keep things complicated: I personally loath having to download a zip file. Sometimes I want to have a quick look at some assets and if I can click an image link, I can view the image in-line. The zip file needs to be downloaded and navigated, and if I decide that I don't want it afterall I need to delete it manually. In short, I need to do more work. If I'm browsing stuff on my tablet it's even worse.
Of course it could be argued that this is what the preview is supposed to be for, but sometimes these don't show all the assets very clearly.
All of that beeing said: the ability to download an image with associated meta-data would be useful. I usually place these (along with a link to oga) in a separate text file of the same name.
At the end of the day there is no way to please everyone, so do whatever makes the most sense.
Thanks! I always get excited by new LPC sets, just thinking of what I could do with them (these are inevitably long-term plans though). I need to do some more castle mock-ups to get a feel for what might be useful further additions to this set.
I redid the merlons to make them bigger; they look a bit more like functional battlements now, although they are still small compared to the base sprites. I guess most houses suffer from a "bigger on the inside" syndrome though, which this is a symptom of. Unfortunately I also completely changed much of the layout in the set while doing this.
I opted to not make all possible transition tiles where the merlons need to overlap the tile behind them, but they can be made quite easily if desired. I added the four inner corners for the straight walls so it should now be possible to tile arbitrary wall layouts.
I added five different colour variations for the banners (these are simple RGB swaps) and I finished the chains for the drawbridge.
I'm sure things can still be added to the set, but at the moment I can't really think what's missing (apart from things like roofs and torches, which can be found in other sets quite easily). Please let me know if anyone thinks of something.
Look out for case sensitive differences: I think "LPC" and "lpc" are separate tags at the moment.
Personally I don't think the tag system is very useful and I could live without it; I find it far more useful if the search picks up keywords from the descriptive text. The reason I find it less than useful is that it is entirely dependent on what the author thinks to put in there, so searching for "32x32" may or may not be useful. The ability for other users to suggest or add tags to a submission might be able to fix that, but it's extra optional work, so it may not get done (and you still need to find the art before you can think to add a tag to it); it also needs to be moderated.
I think it's a good idea to rethink what the tags are for. Why have them in the first place? I think there are two distinct use-cases: to categorise art ("2D", "3D", "tileset", "sprite", "animated", "isometric", "32x32", etc.) and to add key-words that don't necessarily show up in the descriptive text ("house", "futuristic", "fantasy", "LPC-style", etc).
The first feature is partly served already by the check-boxes, and I would suggest merging it with that/expanding that one so you can add more fine-grained categories. If you allow users to specify their own categories you eventually get the same problem you have now (too many/random categories to be useful) but you know someone will have a legitimate use for something that's not in there, so the extra information needs to be both generic and useful. I think that's doable, but not easy. For thinks like tilesets and pixel-art characters it would be good to have the base size ("32x32", "16x16") as a standard input box so it is easy to unify across entries. Perhaps have things like poly-counts for 3D models so it's easy to search for models up to a particular count (I don't know if this is too useful though).
The second idea, I think, is basically how tags work now. It's probably best to keep that as-is and simply accept that the usefulness might be limited, although if these are simply extra terms that the search looks for (as opposed to something that you can filter on) it's probably ok.
Personally I find the tags sortof useless, since their usefulness is entirely limited to what the author thought to put in there. Looking for words in the title/description is more useful, I find. Sadly the old search is rather stupid in this regard... the solr search should fix this when it's back up.
Things take time to do properly, don't worry and take the time you need.
Although I tried using the search again yesterday and I was banging my head against the desk at the... interesting results it returned. I'll be very happy when solr search is back. :)
It's nice, but I have a few points for consideration.
First, I know women rotate their hips when they walk, but I've never seen anyone do it quite so provocatively when they were just walking normally. Perhaps something to tone down. The difference with the running animation is a bit jarring.
Second, the death animation in the preview ends up at a rather unfortunate camera-angle. You might want to equip her with some underpants.
Just to keep things complicated: I personally loath having to download a zip file. Sometimes I want to have a quick look at some assets and if I can click an image link, I can view the image in-line. The zip file needs to be downloaded and navigated, and if I decide that I don't want it afterall I need to delete it manually. In short, I need to do more work. If I'm browsing stuff on my tablet it's even worse.
Of course it could be argued that this is what the preview is supposed to be for, but sometimes these don't show all the assets very clearly.
All of that beeing said: the ability to download an image with associated meta-data would be useful. I usually place these (along with a link to oga) in a separate text file of the same name.
At the end of the day there is no way to please everyone, so do whatever makes the most sense.
Is there any estimate on when the solr search might be back up?
Thanks! I always get excited by new LPC sets, just thinking of what I could do with them (these are inevitably long-term plans though). I need to do some more castle mock-ups to get a feel for what might be useful further additions to this set.
Updated the set again.
I redid the merlons to make them bigger; they look a bit more like functional battlements now, although they are still small compared to the base sprites. I guess most houses suffer from a "bigger on the inside" syndrome though, which this is a symptom of. Unfortunately I also completely changed much of the layout in the set while doing this.
I opted to not make all possible transition tiles where the merlons need to overlap the tile behind them, but they can be made quite easily if desired. I added the four inner corners for the straight walls so it should now be possible to tile arbitrary wall layouts.
I added five different colour variations for the banners (these are simple RGB swaps) and I finished the chains for the drawbridge.
I'm sure things can still be added to the set, but at the moment I can't really think what's missing (apart from things like roofs and torches, which can be found in other sets quite easily). Please let me know if anyone thinks of something.
Look out for case sensitive differences: I think "LPC" and "lpc" are separate tags at the moment.
Personally I don't think the tag system is very useful and I could live without it; I find it far more useful if the search picks up keywords from the descriptive text. The reason I find it less than useful is that it is entirely dependent on what the author thinks to put in there, so searching for "32x32" may or may not be useful. The ability for other users to suggest or add tags to a submission might be able to fix that, but it's extra optional work, so it may not get done (and you still need to find the art before you can think to add a tag to it); it also needs to be moderated.
I think it's a good idea to rethink what the tags are for. Why have them in the first place? I think there are two distinct use-cases: to categorise art ("2D", "3D", "tileset", "sprite", "animated", "isometric", "32x32", etc.) and to add key-words that don't necessarily show up in the descriptive text ("house", "futuristic", "fantasy", "LPC-style", etc).
The first feature is partly served already by the check-boxes, and I would suggest merging it with that/expanding that one so you can add more fine-grained categories. If you allow users to specify their own categories you eventually get the same problem you have now (too many/random categories to be useful) but you know someone will have a legitimate use for something that's not in there, so the extra information needs to be both generic and useful. I think that's doable, but not easy. For thinks like tilesets and pixel-art characters it would be good to have the base size ("32x32", "16x16") as a standard input box so it is easy to unify across entries. Perhaps have things like poly-counts for 3D models so it's easy to search for models up to a particular count (I don't know if this is too useful though).
The second idea, I think, is basically how tags work now. It's probably best to keep that as-is and simply accept that the usefulness might be limited, although if these are simply extra terms that the search looks for (as opposed to something that you can filter on) it's probably ok.
Odd. It should collect them there (it does for me).
I use it as a quick bookmark for stuff I find generally useful and want to be able to find again quickly later.
Probably just leave a comment (or send a PM).
Personally I find the tags sortof useless, since their usefulness is entirely limited to what the author thought to put in there. Looking for words in the title/description is more useful, I find. Sadly the old search is rather stupid in this regard... the solr search should fix this when it's back up.
I updated the set (and demo image), it should now be a bit more complete. The straight crenelation tiles correctly with the round towers.
Apparently I don't know how to update a submission, because I had to delete the old files for the new files to show up...
Things take time to do properly, don't worry and take the time you need.
Although I tried using the search again yesterday and I was banging my head against the desk at the... interesting results it returned. I'll be very happy when solr search is back. :)
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