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Author Topic: Additional soldier sprites  (Read 54680 times)

Volutar

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #15 on: October 13, 2012, 09:23:58 am »
Last sprite weirdly looks when turned left/right, like it being looking downwards (both eyes are visible, when they shouldn't).
« Last Edit: October 13, 2012, 09:25:32 am by Volutar »

Offline Warboy1982

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #16 on: October 29, 2012, 05:43:31 pm »
i would like to include these, (and much of your work) in my mod.
from what i have seen and done so far, getting these in game will be simplistic.
i already have 4 types of cops (2 male and 2 female, blondes and brunettes) as a proof of concept
if you could make me head sprites for all 8 soldier variants i can get them working, and it's a feature i'd REALLY like
i've already included your knife and alternate flying/power armour, i hope that's ok.
as a side note, the knife was my jumping off point for the whole dual wielding thing, i REALLY wanted to see my knife/pistol combination on troops running round the field. if i think about it hard enough, i'd probably say your knife was the jumping off point for my entire mod!

here's a little something for you:

Offline 54x

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #17 on: January 03, 2013, 12:21:02 pm »
If there's still interest in additional sprites (haircuts, ethnicities, armour customisation, etc... and eventually when people are modding the game once it's feature-complete) I'd be happy to help too, although likely there's some coding involved as well for this I'm sure. (especially given the weird format UFO uses that seems to rely on the engine to recolour things- would be cool to have it simply accept a normal png or something instead, might even save on resources)

I also don't mind doing any missing battlescape items, or possibly re-doing ones that don't actually look like the item itself.
« Last Edit: January 03, 2013, 12:23:21 pm by 54x »

Offline luke83

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #18 on: January 03, 2013, 12:31:31 pm »
Hey 54X , there always room for more mods, i am unsure if more solider images are supported yet within Openxcom buts its definitely something we all want, if you have the talent and the time to create some, someone will add the code to handle them.

 As for the UFO file formats , Head on over to the MOD site and have a quick read through the How to guides , everything you need to know is there, if you have any questions feel free to PM me directly, Also when your ready to share your work , i will set you up a Page also.

 My time has been taken up with Family and study currently so i havnt done any mods recently , but i have enough time to help you out answer any questions you may have.


Offline moriarty

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #19 on: January 03, 2013, 01:40:42 pm »
you are absolutely welcome to go ahead and create additional sprites and stuff! I'd like to do more myself, but I've got next to no time at the moment... RL is keeping me busy :)

as for "weird format", it's actually not that bad, all you have to do is use only colors that are in the palette. most graphics programs support this in one way or the other ("indexed palette" is what it's called in The Gimp).

so if you want to just quickly edit a sprite, all you have to do is use a "dropper" tool to pick colors from the image itself (or other original images used in the same context, i.e. battlescape sprites) to use. don't try to use other colors from the graphics program, just pick from the image(s) and use, that way it's always safe :)

Offline luke83

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #20 on: January 03, 2013, 02:08:54 pm »
I like Gimps "colour Exchange" option , it makes colour changes really easier , what i normally do is just open up in Gimp the UFO colour pallet beside the sprite set i want to mod, that way i can pick the colour each time i want from the pallet and replace all of the Pixels with the same colour in about 3 steps.
« Last Edit: January 03, 2013, 02:12:52 pm by luke83 »

Offline 54x

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #21 on: January 03, 2013, 02:21:45 pm »
Oh I don't mean I think it's weird using an indexed palette to recolour an image, that's pretty standard! The weird format dig was about keeping files in proprietary formats, which to be fair was just how things were always done back in the day. What I do think is weird however is recolouring via the engine when the image is only coloured the one time in the actual game- perhaps there was some intention to use recoloured sprites in the original game but it just had to ship before those features made it in- hence the whole red muton thing! It always weirds me out working on images where I can't "see" what I'm doing though, so that's gonna be interesting. ;)

When modding support for images is being developed, it would definitely make sense to simply move to using full colours (and ideally, partial transparency) and masks for any recolouring. (For instance, you could have customisable hair colours, either by supporting images with alpha channels and simply saving the area of the hair to the alpha channel, or you could use a maskfile in shades of grey with white areas to be recoloured by the engine, and grey areas to be partially recoloured) You could also use this to customise armour colours, especially for sprites that don't show soldier skin or hair.

I've done a fair bit of pixel pushing over the years so I'd be quite willing to put in some spare hours to the project for this or any other areas that are lacking graphics and I should hopefully be able to fit the aesthetic. I'm better at re-arranging details once I already have a base shape, but I should be able to get back into practice doing pixel art from scratch that can fit in with the aesthetic, so filling in all the battlescape images so that you can see the different ethnicities and hair styles etc... that already exist in game, and eventually new ones, would definitely be a great place to start.

This is all, of course, so that we can make it even more traumatic when all of your renamed and customised soldiers die, LOL.

And yeah, I hear you about being busy with RL- my free time is all on my weekends nowadays. Thus is the downside of responsibility at work.

edit: Yeah, the issue I'm having is that I've actually got the relevant files extracted now to work on, but BB's tool didn't attach the original palette to them, so I need to either find another way to convert the PCK files, or grab image(s) off someone with the relevant colour pallete(s) attached. ><
« Last Edit: January 03, 2013, 02:26:54 pm by 54x »

Offline moriarty

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Offline 54x

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #23 on: January 03, 2013, 02:53:39 pm »
That's really awesome. I had stumbled upon a file containing the relevant palette browsing Luke's site, so that helped, but your link will be excellent if I need to play around with other images. Of course now it's clear that the images aren't recoloured, just the tool I'm extracting with doesn't play nice with palettes like it ought to. ;)

Ideally I'd like to add some interface images too, like an icon that indicates that you can click to rename things. (eg. for soldier names, base names, craft names, etc... as appropriate)

So yeah, at the very least I can do some more battlescape hairstyle images that can be swapped out so that it doesn't look like all the men are from streetfighter. :) (although the short hair image posted earlier is really good, and I think the decision to go with 4 pixels is correct in the context of this sort of low-res environment)
« Last Edit: January 03, 2013, 02:55:41 pm by 54x »

Offline 54x

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #24 on: January 03, 2013, 03:30:00 pm »
So, step one:

Basic female death animation consistent with the default blonde ponytail head. Each new head graphic will require a new death animation too, so might as well practice and eliminate plasma-induced transgenderism at the same time. :) This way I will also have a template that I can simply paste new female heads onto to fit with the existing death animation, and then adjust similarly for each skin tone from there.

edit: OK, done with that, and also got the correct head on the power armour death animation. I'm moving on to additional stuff now, but I need to know where to find:

  • the corpse graphic for the battlescape (is this in floorob.pck? Seems a likely candidate so I'll unpack that when I go digging tomorrow)
  • the corpse "item" graphic for inventory, if it makes sense to customise those?
  • the soldier mugshot for equipment screen

Ideally we should have sprites for all three of those for customisation purposes, although I'm open to the argument that just adding an armoured and unarmoured female corpse item would be enough.
« Last Edit: January 03, 2013, 06:49:08 pm by 54x »

Offline Nickolaidas

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #25 on: January 03, 2013, 06:49:04 pm »
That's awesome! I hope guys can make these multiple sprites idea work. I hated how *everybody* looked the same in the game.

Now, if we could also change that stupid helmet of the power suit and make it look like ... I don't know, a Cylon's helmet from battlestar galactica ... then I'm SOLD!

Offline 54x

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #26 on: January 03, 2013, 07:36:51 pm »
That's awesome! I hope guys can make these multiple sprites idea work. I hated how *everybody* looked the same in the game.

Now, if we could also change that stupid helmet of the power suit and make it look like ... I don't know, a Cylon's helmet from battlestar galactica ... then I'm SOLD!

That's step five or six in terms of what I'm going to draw. I'm going to operate on the theory that if you build resources for it, someone will eventually get interested and code it. No point waiting!

Step two: Hair colours. I have already started this for the default haircuts, which multiplies the amount of work by up to four for the later steps, as I'm assuming hair is either blonde, brown, red, or black. I'm operating under the assumption that hair will be painted blonde and european first and can then be palette-shifted to get the other colours. This involves loading a palette three times onto the image and then resaving it, but that's not a huge problem as I only need to do eleven images for a hair-colour-hair-cut combination. Really the hardest part of this is choosing the right part of the palette for each colour, but it looks like there will be appropriate battlescape colours available.

Step three: Ethnicities. Essentially I'm going to index-shift the palettes of all of the arm graphics to a new pallete with darker skin colours, then match it back. The advantage is that the extra work only has to be done once per skin colour, then after that I just need to do faces for one or two hair colours per ethnicity. I'm thinking there will probably be three or four given the palette range I have, and as ethnicity covers only "skin colour" and not detailed facial appearance.

Once I've done that, I'll have an extra three to four palettes to apply to every haircut. (I'm assuming that one of these skintones will have brown and black hair, and the other one or two will just have black hair all the time, but may have additional haircuts)

Step four: Actually spriting new haircuts as above. Original artwork, yay! But then I have to go back to steps two and three up to eighty-eight times for each one, LOL. I'll see if I can fill out the other hair colours and ethnicities for Moriarty's sprites.

Step five (or six): Power armour customisation, which involves a lot of new drawing repeating several times. The tricky thing here is that if anything touches the arms or legs it has to be done a LOT, so I may cheat and give you a lot of breastplate artwork and helmet options to cut down on repetitive spritework.

Step six (or five): If I'm still not tired of it, I start working in sprites for power armour and flying armour that leave your head visible through some sort of cool safety glass, forcefield, or tinted material that lets us see something of your haircut and skin shade of your face. In a way that may be BETTER than step five from a coding perspective, as you'd already have to do all the work for steps one-through-four. If someone's really keen to get this feature in and not just sprited before I hit step five, this may jump up a step, as step five would require some sort of per-soldier armour customisation interface to be worthwhile implementing.

Then I can move onto spriting any extra interface buttons, UFO parts, new items, or new facilities people might want. :)

Offline Nickolaidas

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #27 on: January 03, 2013, 07:40:50 pm »
Awesome!

Offline moriarty

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #28 on: January 03, 2013, 09:26:09 pm »
That's awesome! I hope guys can make these multiple sprites idea work. I hated how *everybody* looked the same in the game.

Now, if we could also change that stupid helmet of the power suit and make it look like ... I don't know, a Cylon's helmet from battlestar galactica ... then I'm SOLD!

Hmmm... it's not as sophisticated as 54x's plans, but for now you might want to take a look at openxcommods.weebly.com and navigate to my section for my version of the power armor and flying suit ;)

Offline Nickolaidas

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Re: Additional soldier sprites
« Reply #29 on: January 03, 2013, 10:27:44 pm »
Moriarty ... I finally understand what your Avatar is.  ;D

Those are awesome. When the game is finished, I'll use these mods, if it is possible. These suits are amazing, I hated that stupid  :o visor of the power suit.