The Mana World Forums

Particularly recently, TMW has had to use a lot of artwork which is quite poor due to its severe lack of artists. This ranges from decently drawn but in a completely different style from what TMW has traditionally aimed for (such as the snowglobes and rubber bat) to just shockingly bad (for example, the bandit hood or wrapping paper).



While these serve their purpose, there's no reason to use such graphics if an improvement is possible. I decided to go through some generic-type icons and see what I could do with them. For some all that was needed was the addition of a dark outline, while others needed major adjustments or complete redraws. This is what I did for the icons above:



So far I've edited all 126 generic-type icons. All of them could still be improved further, of course, but I decided it was better to go over everything once quickly and then return to whatever needed more attention.

The following icons were drawn from scratch (apart from the palette, if marked with *): bandit hood, bent needle, blanket, small clay lump*, dark petal*, frozen yeti tear*, grass liner, the four coloured herbs, ice cube*, ingot, jelly beans, lockpicks, pumpkin seeds*, raw log*, saddle rug, santa and snowman globes*, scissors, silver mirror, strange coin, terranite ore*, wolvern tooth*, striped and dotted wrapping papers*, yeti claw*. I'm not sure if using the palette of another icon makes it a derivative work, but those if possible and all others are dual-licensed as GPLv2+ and CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Here's a huge image showing all the icons, and I've attached a .zip containing the folder that's shown in that image as well.

If these are at all wanted, I'd be happy to edit any of them further if required, and at some point I'd also love to go through the rest of the icons as well as tiles and perhaps spritesheets.

Good job, some of them are very huge improvements. I'm curious what you will do with the equipment sprite icons. In the past I tried to pixel a 3/4 icon of some armor, not sure what happened to it actually, I don't think they actually made it to the game, but if you start redrawing the icons to 3/4 they might be a little bit of help. And if you go for the front view, or keep them mixed as they are now, then they will be useless

see:
http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... on#p114852
http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... con#p35815

Anyway hope to see more of your icons

Hello and welcome back, Enchilado. It's been a while since the last time I read from you. You certainly were one of the more talented pixel artists in the history of TMW, and I hope that you will again contribute to TMW in the future.

Regarding the icon touchups you posted: I really like them, and I hope the TMW developers will use them.

Wow.. just wow!

Damn nice work, I hope you stay around since the project really needs talented pixel artists!

My only concern is whether they dyeable ones will still dye correctly, since you did change some of their colors.

It's also obvious that we are not taking some opportunities to use dye, e.g. with the different present boxes. We should take care of this before we ship new client zips.

IMO, I love the new bandit hood but I prefer the old snow globe and wrapping paper, the older ones are bigger and show more detail of the item.

Also looking at the photo, a lot of the new icons are well done, but a lot of them have a more bold and dark outline which makes it look more unnatural compared to the older ones, the rose is a good example.

I also noticed you made some of the Icons a lot smaller, They might be better to identify in the inventory if they were bigger like the older icons.

regards,

Chicka-Maria wrote:IMO, I love the new bandit hood but I prefer the old snow globe and wrapping paper, the older ones are bigger and show more detail of the item.

Also looking at the photo, a lot of the new icons are well done, but a lot of them have a more bold and dark outline which makes it look more unnatural compared to the older ones, the rose is a good example.

I also noticed you made some of the Icons a lot smaller, They might be better to identify in the inventory if they were bigger like the older icons.

regards,

Enchilado wrote: This ranges from decently drawn but in a completely different style from what TMW has traditionally aimed for (such as the snowglobes and rubber bat) to just shockingly bad (for example, the bandit hood or wrapping paper).

I have to agree with enchilado. Just because the current snow globes look nice doesn't mean they fit the style. Outlines are required. Some people chose to ignore this because it "looks better" but it doesn't follow our guidelines. He has provided us graphics with a consistency using a style that fits our projects. His IMO are way more appropriate than the current ones in game. This also helps with an ongoing consistency problem. Thanks enchilado great work!

Nice work enchi!

I don't know if this belongs in this topic, but icon size has always been one of my grumbling points. Couldn't they all be the same size? Or maybe come up with a standard sizing guide for them on the wiki?

As far as scaling current artwork I've done some preliminary research of scaling algorithms:
https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um ... rison.html

It looks like the best results could be obtained if the images were magnified to double size using a hq2x filter, then scaled back down to the desired size using nearest neighbor and the anti-alias fuzz removed by hand.

EJlol wrote:In the past I tried to pixel a 3/4 icon of some armor, not sure what happened to it actually, I don't think they actually made it to the game, but if you start redrawing the icons to 3/4 they might be a little bit of help.

Most of the chest armours at least are already like that, so I suppose I might try redrawing the others to match if that's wanted. Thanks for the suggestion.

o11c wrote:My only concern is whether they dyeable ones will still dye correctly, since you did change some of their colors.

It's also obvious that we are not taking some opportunities to use dye, e.g. with the different present boxes. We should take care of this before we ship new client zips.

Yeah, I didn't realise some of the items were dyeable. I've fixed that and can do the same for the present boxes and easter eggs too when I find time.

Chicka-Maria wrote:IMO, I love the new bandit hood but I prefer the old snow globe and wrapping paper, the older ones are bigger and show more detail of the item.

Also looking at the photo, a lot of the new icons are well done, but a lot of them have a more bold and dark outline which makes it look more unnatural compared to the older ones, the rose is a good example.

I also noticed you made some of the Icons a lot smaller, They might be better to identify in the inventory if they were bigger like the older icons.

MadCamel wrote:I don't know if this belongs in this topic, but icon size has always been one of my grumbling points. Couldn't they all be the same size? Or maybe come up with a standard sizing guide for them on the wiki?

The snow globe does need more work and I suppose both it and the wrapping paper might be a little small. However, IMO it looks really quite bad to have all icons drawn at the same size; I don't think everything should be to scale, since that would look bad even if it was possible, but I do think, for example, that an acorn should be shown smaller than a shield. If this isn't wanted I could possibly redraw them larger, but most of the existing icons are already scaled vaguely relative to their size so it would probably be much more work to increase their size than to decrease those that are too large, and IMO the result would look far worse.

If you'll excuse the not-so-great artwork:

I like the old snow globe and wraping paper better.

I'm not really happy with my snow globe either, but the old one is too large and isn't pixel art. The old wrapping paper is very messy and I much prefer mine, but I'll work on improving both of those when I have time and hopefully I'll come up with something everyone likes.

enchilado wrote:I don't think everything should be to scale, since that would look bad even if it was possible, but I do think, for example, that an acorn should be shown smaller than a shield. If this isn't wanted I could possibly redraw them larger, but most of the existing icons are already scaled vaguely relative to their size so it would probably be much more work to increase their size than to decrease those that are too large, and IMO the result would look far worse.

I agree with you that it's better to have the icons relatively scaled as currently, the acorn being as large as the shields just looks odd.

enchilado wrote:

I like your acorn shield!

I tried some things with food: http://i.imgur.com/16ujECl.png

Again concerned about dyes, particularly on Big Cake ...

But wow! I might have to fly to Australia, kidnap you, and tie you to the Internet if you ever try to leave again.