Mod Blast from the Past, Return of the Underkings

Saulot · #6 April 14th, 2008, 01:34 AM

@BandarLover:

That's good to hear about Zepath.

I'm glad to hear about the write-up, otherwise all that typing would have been for no reason, heh.

Yeah, the cavalry would be nice just for the coolness factor. Unfortunately, if I just threw in everything that was cool, it would be kind of like... throwing in 20 of your favorite types of food into one pot. Not exactly edible.

1-2 weeks is not too bad. I could have started this thread much earlier.

Patience is after all, a dwarven virtue.

@Aezeal:

Yeah... like Endo said I agree. But spritework is quite time-consuming. Smallscale spritework is even more difficult. My typical method of starting with a bigger picture, and then scaling down (such as scaling x3, so 9 pixels turn into one, and a palette of 5 colors, plus black and white, turn into a palette of a broad spectrum of colors and shades), doesn't work well when the downscale end result is tiny (15-30 pixels tall). What is a relatively easy method to get great results turns into something which turns into blurry blobs. I found this out the hard way when working on kobolds. As a result the kobolds were made quite tall.

(Though his wide color pallete would seem to indicate otherwise, I believe it's some mask or blur feature to blend the colors a tiny bit.) Based on the edges, shapes, and outlines, Zepath seems to do it at-scale one pixel at a time, probably zooming out and in to see how changing the color of one pixel looks different overall. This is most likely incredibly time-consuming.

So, while I'm not opposed to doing sprites from scratch... especially considering Zepath's organized method is one I could learn from (as in how he has several dwarf bases, plus armor overlays, shield overlays, weapon overlays), it would take up a lot of time, and that's time I wouldn't be spending working on several other mods I want to get to.

Anyway, just to give you a comparison, the Zepath Dwarves are around 20 pixels tall and 16 pixels wide (with weapon and shield). Typical humans are 32 pixels high and Hoburgs are I believe 16.

If I was going to do it from scratch, I'd probably make them 26 pixels tall and 24 pixels wide.