In the past I used the generator mostly for finding assets again, I already know. For me it was much quicker than going through the collections. Also sheets got merged with all extenionsions.
It's likely that there are quite some additions, that were never uploaded to oga.
Giving more detailed attributions and relationships of derivative work is very important to me:
It must be giving credit to every work a sprite sheet is based on
Currently there is often no way to propagate changes to derivatives
Right now with generators and spritesheets it's often so, that you have to go carefully through the authors list or even list all possible authors. You can't find the originals, can't comment on the uploads, it's hard to get in contact with the authors.
It's hard to confirm the attributions or reconstruct changes. Some attributions are pretty vague. Since your fork is based on the generator, you've cut off the history of Universal-LPC-spritesheet which likely makes it even harder to find out who did what.
It would also be nice to include unfinished, very limited and not properly fitting sheets. Which should be disabled by default and only enabled with expert settings. Same goes for showing sheets that don't match the body shape.
I'm not sure if I want to make the 'none' body also an expert setting, but I think it's neat when you just want to combine some clothings without creating a full character sheet.
Maybe even adding a tab with a list of complete characters (sara, laurelia etc.) could be neat. They would indeed be only character links. But that could also be done via readme.md or so.
I did implement masks without testing or using it yet, but it should work. It just sets the alpha channel of the image to the red channel of the mask right now.
Next thing would be to do animation and previews, without repeating the errors of the original. Children look pretty broken right now.
After that relations should follow. I started using it in the tsx of roman amor, but it is not displayed yet.
Here is my commit, I'm now mostly satisfied. Spiked helm needs reflectiones improved. Gold is so bright that it loses detail there, I also mapped all light colors to one for gold palette. I included two examples for gold palette (from original gold mask)
I just mapped colors and used the 12 color palette of wulax. This means there is no color loss for the knight amor. I think it's too many colors, but this palette is so carefully crafted.
You could also include legion armor, tiara, buckles and belt (at some point later). Those even include gold and bronze already.
But in fact, a player playing an LPC based game will not notice 95% of the issues we are spotting.
I look at the color count ... it's not really something you can see at all. I just like the limitations this stuff comes with.
From the begining there were assets which appeared to not fit. It was a jam, they only had limited amount of time. I can't do it any better, but the more I look at it with 1200x zoom, the worse it gets.
Skorpio's pack has some cool stuff, but other stuff that just looks bad. And yes, better than nothing. Otherwise I don't think I would've ever uploaded anything. I've other stuff lying on my disk which could theoretically be used for static NPCs in games. But it's not finished enough or looks too bad from one direction.
Also I often had trouble to get the attributions together, which hopefully gets easier some time in the future.
I'm starting started to bring all iron and metal stuff I can find onto one palette (7 colors + background), but I think I'm using too much detail on the reflection. I just let it do mtPaint automatically, which might not be the best idea.
@castelonia: as I sai before, somebody fucked up the base sheets. I already noticed this when I with my full body suit, and mentioned it here before.
I just looked into it. It's because of the new animations.
With shooting added it goes from 11 to 20.
With piercing added it goes from 11 to 75.
It is still basically just 11 colors, since there are many colors are just looking slightly different.
You can use those from my repo, normal and muscelar male as well as normal and pregnant female use a palette of ten 11 to 12 colors. It's only indexed 8-bit in my repo, with canvas it gets converted back to full color. (only light skin in repo)
The eleventh color is not used yet, but is intended for the teeth of orcs. Grayish orc has 159 colors, light green orc has 244 different colors.
With < 20 colors it's doable, but I would still recolor automatically then just fix what looks weird. Or pick colors from the base palettes or so. Having more than 20 colors is rather a sign for having too many colors, I think.
It would make sense to bring all characters light palette and all clothes maybe yellow. At least colors which aren't too dark or to bright to see the details.
With that base you can "just" switch the color palette. Before doing it with javascript I just did it with mtPaint, which can load gimp color palettes. You will only see a change with indexed images, but when you convert to indexed it allows to "use current palette"
@bigbeargames:
No, I think the images you started working with aren't good. It's likely the same for each color, it has so many colors mtPaint didn't even give me the option for an exact conversion. That's why I focused on iron.
I think a problem is that the sprites you use have different colors to begin with. (horned helmet sticks out)
Other tools should be possible to limit the used color palette as well, mtPaint is just what I'm working with, but it's a dead project.
The original plate armor is good, but I don't know where the horned helmet is comming from.
Steel alone uses 34 different colors (with background). That shouldn't be. Original plate armour "only" uses 13 colors, which already pretty much. For comparison: base characters use 11 colors and this includes eye color.
So you use basically a multitude of palettes, the horned helmet uses completely different colors from the rest.
The outline border within metal isn't consistent (horned vs. rest). I would maybe use black for iron and bronze and back to #281820 for the rest.
And I don't understand why there are two versions of the horned helmet, one shiny and one dull.
---
A few assets do not look anything like LPC despite tagging themselves so.
My own stuff doesn't look better. For triumph I just colorized it with gimp and picked the colors from the original captain triumph imag. I tried to use the colors from the base asset for my police car, but it looks weird.
I mostly implement features on a very basic level, but I would need to do some polishing later.
I've implemented color palette switching.
So I just override the name and switch to new color palette. This means, colors are limited to available palettes. Palettes should be chosen or at least fixed manually, which I have no experience with. It looks better if there aren't so many different colors used, also automatically recoloring with gimp changes colors of eyes and the outline.
Since I do simple color replacement, I have to specify the used palette in tsx files.
I modified some images, since I'm not satisfied with the current quality. Light male used 82 different colors, which I reduced to 12. I also shrink it all down to 8-bit png.
I think about splitting base into skin color and body type selection, since all clothes depend on the body type.
Best default color is light skin tone and white, I guess. Darker palettes merge some colors, which would be bad for replacement.
Flipping down fucks up the reflections. Handedness is inconsistent, because left and right are nearly just flipped (reflection was the only difference I saw).
I removed nearly all graphics from my fork.
I plan on seperating graphics and code again.
If done right, the spritesheet generator could also be used with other assets. Only question is whether that will work with github pages then.
The only thing hardcoded is the position of the first list.json and the sexes.
I also nearly got it running with nodjs now, thanks to node-canvas, xmldom and pango. (Palette switching is missing)
./cli.js test.png --sex=1 --body="body.light"
In the past I used the generator mostly for finding assets again, I already know. For me it was much quicker than going through the collections. Also sheets got merged with all extenionsions.
It's likely that there are quite some additions, that were never uploaded to oga.
Giving more detailed attributions and relationships of derivative work is very important to me:
Right now with generators and spritesheets it's often so, that you have to go carefully through the authors list or even list all possible authors. You can't find the originals, can't comment on the uploads, it's hard to get in contact with the authors.
It's hard to confirm the attributions or reconstruct changes. Some attributions are pretty vague. Since your fork is based on the generator, you've cut off the history of Universal-LPC-spritesheet which likely makes it even harder to find out who did what.
It would also be nice to include unfinished, very limited and not properly fitting sheets. Which should be disabled by default and only enabled with expert settings. Same goes for showing sheets that don't match the body shape.
I'm not sure if I want to make the 'none' body also an expert setting, but I think it's neat when you just want to combine some clothings without creating a full character sheet.
Maybe even adding a tab with a list of complete characters (sara, laurelia etc.) could be neat. They would indeed be only character links. But that could also be done via readme.md or so.
I did implement masks without testing or using it yet, but it should work. It just sets the alpha channel of the image to the red channel of the mask right now.
Next thing would be to do animation and previews, without repeating the errors of the original. Children look pretty broken right now.
After that relations should follow. I started using it in the tsx of roman amor, but it is not displayed yet.
[LPC] Items and game effects also contains a shovel, but I haven't seen a proper animation for neither of those items. Second column, second last row.
It does not work with all headwear.
My mask, which is basically a recolored head, won't work.
Ears, nose (side view), eyes and chin differ, everything that does not cling tightly to those areas should work.
I just noticed, that elven ears sometimes contain an eye color pixel. That shouldn't be.
Back to topic:
Why lack Dark and Dark 2 a belly button?
And why has dark green reptilian light green wing in some directions and vice versa?
Here is my commit, I'm now mostly satisfied. Spiked helm needs reflectiones improved. Gold is so bright that it loses detail there, I also mapped all light colors to one for gold palette. I included two examples for gold palette (from original gold mask)
I just mapped colors and used the 12 color palette of wulax. This means there is no color loss for the knight amor. I think it's too many colors, but this palette is so carefully crafted.
You could also include legion armor, tiara, buckles and belt (at some point later). Those even include gold and bronze already.
I look at the color count ... it's not really something you can see at all. I just like the limitations this stuff comes with.
From the begining there were assets which appeared to not fit. It was a jam, they only had limited amount of time. I can't do it any better, but the more I look at it with 1200x zoom, the worse it gets.
Skorpio's pack has some cool stuff, but other stuff that just looks bad. And yes, better than nothing. Otherwise I don't think I would've ever uploaded anything. I've other stuff lying on my disk which could theoretically be used for static NPCs in games. But it's not finished enough or looks too bad from one direction.
Also I often had trouble to get the attributions together, which hopefully gets easier some time in the future.
I'm starting started to bring all iron and metal stuff I can find onto one palette (7 colors + background), but I think I'm using too much detail on the reflection. I just let it do mtPaint automatically, which might not be the best idea.
I'm using the iron palette of roman plate.
@castelonia: as I sai before, somebody fucked up the base sheets. I already noticed this when I with my full body suit, and mentioned it here before.
I just looked into it. It's because of the new animations.
With shooting added it goes from 11 to 20.
With piercing added it goes from 11 to 75.
It is still basically just 11 colors, since there are many colors are just looking slightly different.
You can use those from my repo, normal and muscelar male as well as normal and pregnant female use a palette of ten 11 to 12 colors. It's only indexed 8-bit in my repo, with canvas it gets converted back to full color. (only light skin in repo)
The eleventh color is not used yet, but is intended for the teeth of orcs. Grayish orc has 159 colors, light green orc has 244 different colors.
With < 20 colors it's doable, but I would still recolor automatically then just fix what looks weird. Or pick colors from the base palettes or so. Having more than 20 colors is rather a sign for having too many colors, I think.
It would make sense to bring all characters light palette and all clothes maybe yellow. At least colors which aren't too dark or to bright to see the details.
With that base you can "just" switch the color palette. Before doing it with javascript I just did it with mtPaint, which can load gimp color palettes. You will only see a change with indexed images, but when you convert to indexed it allows to "use current palette"
@bigbeargames:
No, I think the images you started working with aren't good. It's likely the same for each color, it has so many colors mtPaint didn't even give me the option for an exact conversion. That's why I focused on iron.
I think a problem is that the sprites you use have different colors to begin with. (horned helmet sticks out)
Other tools should be possible to limit the used color palette as well, mtPaint is just what I'm working with, but it's a dead project.
The original plate armor is good, but I don't know where the horned helmet is comming from.
Copper should look more brownish, I think.
Brass looks flat.
Those are likely issues who where there before:
Steel alone uses 34 different colors (with background). That shouldn't be. Original plate armour "only" uses 13 colors, which already pretty much. For comparison: base characters use 11 colors and this includes eye color.
So you use basically a multitude of palettes, the horned helmet uses completely different colors from the rest.
The outline border within metal isn't consistent (horned vs. rest). I would maybe use black for iron and bronze and back to #281820 for the rest.
And I don't understand why there are two versions of the horned helmet, one shiny and one dull.
---
A few assets do not look anything like LPC despite tagging themselves so.
My own stuff doesn't look better. For triumph I just colorized it with gimp and picked the colors from the original captain triumph imag. I tried to use the colors from the base asset for my police car, but it looks weird.
My code isn't stable, it breaks often.
I mostly implement features on a very basic level, but I would need to do some polishing later.
I've implemented color palette switching.
So I just override the name and switch to new color palette. This means, colors are limited to available palettes. Palettes should be chosen or at least fixed manually, which I have no experience with. It looks better if there aren't so many different colors used, also automatically recoloring with gimp changes colors of eyes and the outline.
Since I do simple color replacement, I have to specify the used palette in tsx files.
I modified some images, since I'm not satisfied with the current quality. Light male used 82 different colors, which I reduced to 12. I also shrink it all down to 8-bit png.
I think about splitting base into skin color and body type selection, since all clothes depend on the body type.
Best default color is light skin tone and white, I guess. Darker palettes merge some colors, which would be bad for replacement.
Flipping down fucks up the reflections. Handedness is inconsistent, because left and right are nearly just flipped (reflection was the only difference I saw).
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