Drages Weapon Sprite Collection

[drages]

Newwww poooosst!!!...

I did not see any UFO mod used TFTD tanks.. don't know why.. but i wanted to add them. I don't have any idea how to mod the turrets..i will see what i can do.

[Solarius Scorch]

Can you make a white variant?

[drages]

Can you make a white variant?

This white?

[Solarius Scorch]

Something like that, yes, but not so monochromatic. Maybe combined with blue, or orange?

[drages]

Something like that, yes, but not so monochromatic. Maybe combined with blue, or orange?

White is really tricky, like black at this game.

I put you another example. I am putting the files too so maybe you can recolor it with the needs of you. You can get the spritesheets at falkos tool as sectoid template.

[Wolfstarr]

Nice work Drages

A quick question, what is your workflow for colour swaps? Do you use photoshop or some kind of plugin?

[drages]

Nice work Drages

A quick question, what is your workflow for colour swaps? Do you use photoshop or some kind of plugin?

Thx. I am working on photoshop. I take image, make it rbg color then indexed mod with ufo palette. Then I go to rbg again and work on it. After final indexing with ufo palette, if I am happy with result, I go for pixel by pixel editing.

There is much better tricks pixel artists know. But they hate limited palettes.

OpenXcom should have change this palette system. I see no reason to use this.

[yrizoud]

There is much better tricks pixel artists know. But they hate limited palettes.

It's a misunderstanding. People who learn and master 24bit painting (typically in Photoshop) feel they are completely crippled because it's a completely different way of drawing a picture. And it's a way which can't be replicated in Photoshop, which is why a lot of professional game artists do most of their work in a different program (ex: Cosmigo Promotion for all the pixel-level graphics in Shantae DS games)

Now, it would still be nice to have OpenXCOM allow expanding the palette beyond the 256 original battle colors. Currently, this idea is completely stalled by the way the lighting work : The original game's lighting is so special, that nobody has been able to produce a mathematical formula which would extrapolate the same behavior for the entire RGB color space.

IMO, the issue could be nicely resolved by allowing multiple battlescape palettes. You'd only need a handful of knowledgeable people to produce some well-working palettes, and then many more people can draw modded graphics with these palettes, or convert to them.

[The Reaver of Darkness]

The original game's lighting is so special, that nobody has been able to produce a mathematical formula which would extrapolate the same behavior for the entire RGB color space.

It's not really very complex. The battlescape's palette (as well as all of the other palettes) are arranged into a set of 16 combinations of hue and saturation, with each color then having 16 shades. Each unit a square is darker, it takes all of its colors and moves them one position darker on the palette. When the pixels must go darker than the darkest position, they turn to black. Interestingly enough, since some of the darkest colors look brighter than others, some color schemes will appear to glow in the dark. This is probably just a natural aspect of things such as yellow being a brighter hue, for instance.

The same effect can easily be replicated on a 24 bit color system. Instead of using a RGB palette, you would want a HSL (Hue/Saturation/Luminosity) palette. This palette will have 256 hues, each with 256 saturation levels, and any given hue/sat combination will have 256 luminosity levels. Then on the battlescape when something gets one unit darker, you move its colors down 16 places on the luminosity scale.

[yrizoud]

Here's one of the unsolvable cases :
Color 248,248,248 is a pure grey, but with vanilla behavior, it shades to a slighty pink tone as it gets darker.
Colors 252,252,252 and 232,232,232 are pure greys, and part of the colorless range.

Now, when somebody paints in photoshop with soft brushes and and pure greyscale, it WILL produce 248,248,248 sometime, and I'll wager the artist does not want these specific pixels to become pinkish when shaded, while the rest of the picture follows the greyscale range and stays grey.
 

[The Reaver of Darkness]

Here's one of the unsolvable cases :
Color 248,248,248 is a pure grey, but with vanilla behavior, it shades to a slighty pink tone as it gets darker.

That's because they're using a RGB palette.

248,248,248 in RGB is 248 luminosity, moving down 16 points in luminosity should produce 232,232,232 which is a perfect grey. But if the algorithm is using a simpler function to generate the base colors, it might misalign the numbers. I don't know what programming people were trying to use, so I can't tell you what's wrong with it. Now the colors should work fine with grey if you use a proper RGB scale, but they won't work right with many other colors. For example, if you have 218,126,33 (a slightly desaturated orange), its luminosity is roughly 118 using Paint's luminosity scale (0-240). Its true luminosity is 125.667. If you try to go down 16 points in Paint luminosity, you get 188,108,29 on RGB which has reduced the red by 13.8%, the green by 14.3%, and the blue by 12.1%. This unevenness results in the darker color looking like a slightly different color.

If this were done in the HSL palette, it would be 20,177,118 moving to 20,177,102 and it would make a perfect transition into a darker color with exactly the same hue and saturation.


Something I've seen in Microsoft's Paint:
Standard graphics use a 32-bit RGBA palette which is fully compatible with the 24-bit RGB palette (the extra 8 bits add only an alpha channel for transparency), and while Paint uses this palette, the program functions as if it were on a 241-length HSL palette. If you select a color by choosing its exact RGB coordinates, Paint will save that color based on the closest HSL coordinates, which themselves may be a better match for a slightly different set of RGB coordinates. So Paint will have the screen display a different color from what you had selected. The only colors Paint gets correct are anything along the greyscale.

I don't know what people are doing to make grey turn pink as it gets darker, but it reminded me of what Paint does. Ultimately, while I don't know what's going on in the code, I can assure you that the code is written wrong at some point and that there is no mathematical difficulty in making a true HSL palette work perfectly for this. The trick, then, might be to get modern graphics cards to use HSL. I don't know if they're compatible.

[yrizoud]

I disagree with most everything you just posted I'm reluctant to derail this thread further, so I'll just advise you to read this entire thread to see what has been proposed, tested, and abandoned (and why!).
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,896.60.html
If you test your idea and still think that you found the holy grail, please show it and we'll be very happy.

[drages]

Hey fellas..

I finished 3 different Sectopod types by default and black colors. Because, one is never enough..

- Default Sectopod with balck/blue colors.
- Rocketer Sectopod, default and black
- Heavy Cannon Sectopod, default and black
- Missile-Heavy Cannon WTF Sectopod default and black.

Rar file got all versions ready with photoshop file who wants to edit further.

Enjoy!

[Wolfstarr]

Loving these Drages!

I think after the next commission il look at getting the sprite artist to do an ED209

[drages]

Loving these Drages!

I think after the next commission il look at getting the sprite artist to do an ED209

OMG ED209!!! the most cool robot human created at that size! I made it for Xenonauts but never added.

Btw i worked on default tanks and their coloring... i don't know why but i want to make everything black.. maybe i can make MIB game as the X-Com one of the enemies.. hmm a different concept but i can't shoot to xcom.. so nop ..

I want to make more little turrets but bigger guns as they are heavy weapon platforms but then we will lose the "turning turret" thing because the turret won't be at the middle anymore..