The Mana World Forums

Hm... I don't like so big weapons, this way is more a way of advanced digital
art, not pixelation for me. And imagin you have many items, and they are soo
big, too! It's clearlier than so big icons, i think. Else we could place the icons centered: He? But ok, you are the boss... I will enhance the icon size, but nit the icons self.

You can still draw the same size as you did till now, just make the bounding box 32x32

Are these the sprites to go on the map (say, when you find an item), or in your inventory? If it's only for inventory, this doesn't matter, but if it's for in-game as well, I have a slight issue.

That being: I've started working on character sprites, using the style rules I know of. Knowing the relative size of the character images on the wiki, tile size, and the size of item/weapon sprites (I am assuming in this that the item/weapon sprites are both for inv. and in-game use), I used a calculator and figured that, for the purposes of this game and in the interests of keeping things proportional, a foot is roughly eight pixels. This means, while the small graphics are fine for items (food, potions, what have you), weapons and equipment on the whole really are going to have to be drawn larger in order to not look silly. Real longswords are often around 5 feet in length, for example. Of course, dimensions don't have to be adhered to strictly; the characters are drawin in SD, after all (in particular, very small items can and should be disproportionally large). But some degree of proportionality must be maintained, if things are to mesh well. Which brings me to my next question, which will have a huge bearing on how I work on some of these images. In item/equipment sprites for in-game use, can the sprites be larger than a single tile? I am thinking here of suits of armor, of longswords, of polearms, of staves...things that are generally longer than the three to four feet or so allowed by a single tile. If this isn't possible, and I know saying this won't make me any friends, then you should really think about restructuring whatever makes it impossible, or risk it looking silly.

Well haveing dropped items be larger than a tile should be pretty easy, as someone else suggested if we have an item of 60x60 we can just center it around the centre of the tile. Probably there will be some problems with overlapping layers, but it's something we can manage I think, the only problem is if we want to act this way. If we have a different icon for dropped items and items in the inventory will mean we have to draw both icons for every item in game. That's not impossible but think that will mean a lot of work for artists and a lot of memory used.

Right, thats not optimal. We need a better solution for problem. Any suggestions?

Oh, I'm not suggesting two different icons for every item and piece of equipment. Only those that don't fit in 32x32 would need two, and I'd totally be willing to do the extra spriting.

Talaroc wrote:I'd totally be willing to do the extra spriting.

Glad to hear that but it will be a lot harder to implement compsite items I think.

I'll also share my opinion on the matter. I'm under the impression we're going for an icon-based inventory, which will mean a size restriction as for example is the case in Morrowind:



I have no problem with such a system (even though a coin is almost the same size as a pants), and we could limit the amount of items you can take with you on their weight. I think though, that the icons will not always be suitable to be used when the item is lying on the floor, and I don't think it's a huge effort to draw a single extra image for an item lying on the floor. Especially if you compare it to the amount of effort that is planned to go into animating every piece of clothes for all player animation frames.

Items on the floor indeed don't have to adhere to any specific limit, but they can't take much more than one tile for the reason Elven mentioned. If the tile next to the tile the item is lying on is a wall for example, any overlap would look weird.

I like the 32x32 size because it aligns nicely to texture sizes, and because I think 20x20 is too small. I mean it's ok for candy canes, but with weapons and clothes you just can't put enough detail in it. I agree with Talaroc that even 32x32 is small, but 64x64 is getting too large in my opinion, even though it looks to me that Morrowind is using higher resolution icons than 32x32.

Indeed. 64x64 would be nice; the graphics could be extremely high-quality, but that would be a monumental undertaking, particularly for such a small-scale project. Plus, I know I wouldn't be able to help out all that much, as I'm not good enough at sprite art for that kind of stuff yet.

When I'm done with what I'm working on right now, I'll look at some more item/weapon sprites (and redoing the ones I already did; I'm not satisfied with those). I'll do what I can to keep them close to 32x32.

Oh, one last question: for inventory sprites of those items too big for 32x32, how would people feel about soomed-in images that only show part (like the most interesting part) of the item (Warcraft style)? I'm thinking polearms in particular here, as it would only really be necessary to have the head and a small portion of the shaft to show the player what it is, and the picture could be more detailed that way. It would, of course, only work for those items with two images, since a zoomed-in, square, partial weapon image lying on the ground would look pretty goofy.