The Leflair Sprite Sweatshop, Voxels need not apply

[moriarty]

love the new snakeman (the rightmost one from two posts up). could you go ahead and make a side view?

as for the dark one directly above... that's scary. imagine a nighttime misison with those dark snakemen.... aaaaarrrghhh!

a lot of the aliens could actually come in several colors. snakemen most of all... they should actually be able to adapt their colors to the surrounding terrain, if you ask me. like a chameleon. plus the corresponding to-hit-modifier

[luke83]

a lot of the aliens could actually come in several colors. snakemen most of all... they should actually be able to adapt their colors to the surrounding terrain, if you ask me. like a chameleon. plus the corresponding to-hit-modifier

Yanks has some code for the visual effect, i dont think he ever finished it though , would love to be able to make it a special ability for the aliens.

[moriarty]

oh, that "fake transparency" effect? right, but I think that deserves a whole new alien race. some kind of Predator-tribute-alien.

I was thinking more like four or five different colorings for the snakemen, chosen by terrain type. perhaps, though, chosen by the intended terrain type of the UFO's mission, so if there's a UFO headed for the jungle, and you shot it down over the desert, you will find green snakemen stumbling over the yellow sands... LOL

[Volutar]

Fake transparency in tactic turn based strategy? You gotta be kidding... You have highlighted buttons of each alien you see. If it were absolutely invisible - you still be able to shoot it with that.

[luke83]

The invisibility would decrease chance of Hhuman unit seeing it And reduce chance to hit. I see this as a Alien Item that could be researched " Cloaking shield" - Short term use - High energy requirements.


StarTrek away team had Cloak Bands and its Turn Based stratergy

[moriarty]

If it were absolutely invisible - you still be able to shoot it with that.

you'd be able to shoot at it, but just like luke83 said, the chance to-hit would be greatly decreased. granted, you could still use explosives. it's what I would do still sounds like a feasible tactical element to me.

[Volutar]

So this not for fooling player with something like green mutons on green grass, but rather gameplay penalty element, working with firing mechanics. I'm fine with that

[Leflair]

Yeah, something like that could be cool. A Chamelon type terror unit could be pretty... well, terrifying 

I still want some teleportation and "jump" movement mechanics. Could make some pretty cool units with that.

Floater remake, draft 1:





Took some inspiration from the new XCOM with this, having both a "standard" Floater and a "Heavy" Floater.

The Floaters are pretty much the weakest units in the game, short of a few scenarios where the AI can use the aliens greater night vision + flying mechanics to its advantage (usually on Superhuman difficulty).

What makes the Floater so weak is really its lackluster terror unit (the Reaper) - the AI has trouble enough using the Chryssalid, let alone a four tile large close combat unit like the Reaper.

So why not throw in a "Heavy Floater" packed with built in weapons and greater stats than the standard Floater in general? ... A Flying Muton if you will 

Did some different takes as you can see, the Standard Floater I wanted to look a little goofy and grunty like the original, but more cybernetic (with perhaps the hint that the Aliens make Floaters out of any suitable material they can find - including abducted humans) - A smaller profile to make up for their general weakness, and perhaps improved armour as well (still a low Health count though).

I kept the Floaters flying disco-ball, but remade it a little. It's even more a torso stuck on top of a flying ball now.

At first I experimented with a "Mono-eye", a single red eye - but with the limitations of the Sprite size I couldn't make it look right (more like a "mono-square") so instead I took a page from my first Heavy Floater draft and gave them three eyes. Eventually I would take the main body from the Heavy Floater too, with some modifications, the bright armour of the first one did look a little "off" to me.

The Heavy Floater was hard to pin down - I knew what I wanted with it, bigger and tougher - but how to translate that into practice? Bigger Shoulders and head was a given, and I slapped some heavier armour on the cest as well - buffed up the arms and got a pretty decent look. Eventually I settled for slimming down the lower body a little too, for a less "pudgy" appearance.

Some experiments with visually mounted arm weapons as well, I mean - why not stick a tank weapon on it if you can? No need to bother animating the proper weapon handling then either.

The last draft for the Heavy Floater I tried sticking some "chest tubing" on the front, to break up the down-ward pointing "arrow" that the slimmer lower body created (kinda drawing the viewers vision to its... giant ball  ) which made a it look a little buffer too.

The biggest problem was really breaking up how symmetrical the design became, I think the arm weapons did the most for that and for the final design that might work out for the best.

Edit:


Another attempt at the mono-eye idea and a somewhat more eye-catching version (pun not intended).

With the third sprite I'm just taking an axe to the humanoid-ness by removing the head all together to make the standard Floater more unique.

I'm not sure on the arms, perhaps the standard Floater should have fleshy arms while only the Heavy Floater got the cybernetic arms - to distinguish the two further.


What do you guys think?

[Leflair]

Working on converting the Velarian to something usable ingame but I am running into some issues:
Is there a max roof on amount of frames for one "movement"? For example: When walking the game seem to use about 8 frames (+1 idle frame)

My own draft got like 18 frames + 1 idle for the same - Do I need to cut out some frames for the game to parse it correctly?

Example:

8 Frames, 4 for each movement - The other 4 are just mirrored versions of the first set
The frames also move up and down about 2 pixels (I guess to create a faux sense of movement)
It's a bit interesting because there's just 1 single front torso part, which makes me think that it somehow automatically moves up and down with the leg parts between frames? Or do they in practice clip through it? That shouldn't look right, but it's hard to know without directly comparing it ingame.

My old animation looks like this


And a new one that "matches" the Muton one, sans the pixel jump



Thoughts?

The other issues are "unarmed" arm movement and weapon positions.

The Muton got a pile of arm movements for each angle and a set too for holding weapons for the various angles - within the current game modding limitations I can't just throw in a gun on my own sprite sets and create a file for weapon positions from that - I need to match it with an existing set (and replace it) and that's proving to be the most difficult part, siffling through the unassembled standard aliens to find a decent match.

The Veronian is slightly taller than the X-Com soldier (and I can't exactly replace that either) and the other closest match is probably the Muton, which got some funky beef-cake arms where I'm uncertain on how the final gun position rests. I've yet to find the default "standing still holding a rifle" arms. Maybe I'm overthinking it and it won't even be noticable if most of the hands are covered by the guns? Still, don't want the guns to hover clearly above the hands either.

[moriarty]

I think that there are only two gun positions for the sprites: standard and "sectoid". because the sectoid is visibly shorter, the weapon positions had to be adjusted. I think it's simply a vertical offset. also, when a weapon is fired, there is an offset list (X and Y) that adjusts the gun position to the "firing" arm positions. the offset list is hardcoded, I've seen it somewhere in the code.

maybe one of the coders could help us out here?

for the basic weapon positions on xcom soldiers, head on over to https://openxcommods.weebly.com/downloads1.html and grab one of my "layered composite sprites" (perhaps this one) - they also contain the basic pistol and rifle, so you can see where the weapons will appear on the sprite in-game.

[luke83]

 Sorry i could not be more help here , i have only really played with the HUMAN sprites. Once you figure it out , please share the knowledge with the rest of the community.

[Volutar]

moriarty is almost right. Hand held weapon is just one of unit layers, which rendered "as is". It also has Y offset when walking (1,0,-1,0,1,0,-1,0), for sectoid it 5 pixels lower (static value), for sitting xcom - 4 pixels lower, and for muton it has different Y offset sequence for walking (1,1,0,-1,1,1,0,-1). Positive values are lower, negative are higher. So when it drawn - it should be checked against other unit sprites. It should fit hands properly.
Actually same animated Y offset work for hands and for torso sprites.
So there aren't unit class with Y offset of -1. Though you can draw them as tall as you want, only considering standart weapon Y position.

[Leflair]

Tell you what, I'll assemble a first version with the focus on just getting all the frames in the proper order and then if things looks funky with the weapon handling I'll adjust things accordingly.

I still wonder how the (single) torso frame "knows" how to move up and down with the different leg frames, perhaps that too is tied to the Y-offset?

Edit:
Here's an idea I knocked around in my head today at work:

The "Sectoman" (Yeah yeah I know :p)


Inspired by that comment about one of the remade snakemen heads making for a potential new species and the "Outsider" from the new XCOM game, I thought the idea of a universal "guardian" to be pretty cool.

Regardless of species it has a chance of appearing onboard medium and larger ships + bases, up to 4 units [in addition to the normal crew].

The chance of appearing is modified by difficulty.

So a Medium ship might get 1 [say 25% chance on beginner]
While a large ship may get up to 2 and a battleship up to 4 (same for bases). It might be none though, or anything inbetween.

It's tough as nails and comes with built in weaponry that doesn't run out of ammo (like the Sectopod gun), shielded against psionics with its only weakness perhaps being "slowness" and low aggression to keep it around the ship.

I also knocked around having a even beefier version with lower % chance of appearing, just for that extra "That doesn't look good-" factor.

Ideally OpenXcom could have a seperate category for a "guardian" class of unit, just like terror units that simply slaps on a randomly (or tied to species) unit for when the aliens are on the defensive to spice things up.

[Volutar]

I still wonder how the (single) torso frame "knows" how to move up and down with the different leg frames, perhaps that too is tied to the Y-offset?

Hmm? I've already said "how".

It also has Y offset when walking (1,0,-1,0,1,0,-1,0), and for muton it has different Y offset sequence for walking (1,1,0,-1,1,1,0,-1)...Actually same animated Y offset work for hands and for torso sprites.

[Leflair]

Ah, missed that part when I read your post! (I guessed the same after though so  )

I believe Mutons might be the closest fit as far as Y-position goes (for the legs at least), but we'll see.