The Mana World Forums

Those are badass little sprites though - bad ass.

So when you think about it, it's worth it to switch, it would allow the game to be so much more lush and detailed. Why the hell are we scaling it 2x instead of just having good looking sprites to begin with (No offense, I understand how we think about the style of the game, but consider for a moment. TMW being a mix between oldschool sprite and newschool MMO, it would be absolutely lovely to adapt our own style to all of this.)

Why not use use 32x32 and still have the som sprites? Just revamp them to match the 32x32 specs? No reason to leave behind the SoM theme so you can have 32x32. This way both parties can be happy. Plus I would be willing to contribute some time to sprite creation/revamping to do this as well. I have photoshop, jasc, and can get a hold of almost anything else I may need to get the job done too... I have already done some minor work on kRO client for some spriting fun.

In Fact I will be willing to go higher than 32x32. The bigger the better for me!!! heh heh!

Astral: that is what I was thinking for: If you already had some spriting on RO then we will very pleased if you can join our graphic development team

There are advantages and disadvantages of using high-res gfx, one good thing is we can include many equipment items such as rings, shoes, belts ..ect

The down part is, these may give our artists a little harder time making them :l

Just my thoughts

Here is a comparison between some different styles:



I'd like you to notice especially the differences between the first one and the last one, as you can see with high-res, at quite the same height we can reach a lot more details.

Here's a comparison where I tried to retouch the low res man to a higher resolution:



My personal opinion is that the rightmost characters in the comparison Elven Programmer posted look absolutely the best, by far. We can't reach that level of quality but I think we can come close.

You'll notice just increasing the resolution of the current sprites does improve the character compared to the lower res version (at least I think so). I think it would be better to aim for a less "fat" version so something between the retouched one and the rightmost ones Elven shows above.

For the record, I don't feel much for the kiddie style of the 2nd to 4th character that Elven posted. I understand that I won't be doing most of the character drawing, so this is just my opinion passed on to the artists.

elven:
THE LAST ONE !!!
it's really SOM like .. i love this style^^

Perhaps it looks a bit too clinical and shiny..? (Sure, that can be worked on..)

As it was supposed, there are different opinions, I'd like everyone to post his opinion, so we can do something that most of us like. Personally I like the second and last one. I think we should not go so far from these styles, I mean not many modifications, because this way we already have a well developed template to work on. (This is only my opinion of course, if we find prof artists there won't be any problem)

ack i have nowhere to put my pictures to show >.< my serverness is kind of downness!

hmm 32-64 requires less interpolation eagle engine or anykind of smoothing it just takes more memoryspace and less cpu power, but hardly noticeable, beside shudnt the enemys or some bigger monsters be 64++? and game resolution be at least 800x600 ++ 1024x768 :\ todays cheepest pc is overpowered for 640x480

oh didnt notice i wasnt logged inn anyway those two posts above are mine!! MINE I TELL YOU!

I suppose we can get past 800x600 since sprites will look too small and also you could get out of visible range. The only way to get past the default resolution is to use again a stretch engine. I'm testing the sprites in a small app to see how they fit and for the moment I feel comfortable with 640x480 and 800x600. Remember also that the lower the res, the faster the game will go. If you have a lot of horsepower you can always choose to use a stretch engine and here you are, you can choose whatever resolution you can support

Anonymous wrote:ack i have nowhere to put my pictures to show >.< my serverness is kind of downness!

In such cases there is always: http://www.imageshack.us/

Of course... I think higher res graphics would be great, but who's gonna do the higher res artwork? If you want to go that far out for the graphics, I don't see why you shouldn't go even farther and make it fully 3d like Ragnarok.

About the interpolation engines, or whatever they're called (Super Sai and the like). I've never liked the way graphics look when processed through them. I prefer the graphics to just be scaled up perfectly or simple antialiasing.

Those are my views, ha.