Graphic Guidelines

Post by **ElvenProgrammer** » 05 Jul 2004, 08:24

Playerset

I hope our graphic dev team will be back soon and I think we already have a new member, so I think it's time to post some development guidelines for graphic.

Here's my idea, please post every comment that comes to your mind!

First I think we should get a complete playerset with all possible actions:
STAND, WALK, SIT, ATTACK for each weapon, SUMMON and maybe some others such as idle movements... (the attack sequence should be without the weapon so we can have also different kind of swords, bows, ...)
To do this I think a good starting point is to rip a player from a game: maybe only Ragnarok online, Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3 and others like that have a complete playerset that do all of these actions.
To help you rip the graphic theres a useful tool "tiled", you can download it from http://digilander.libero.it/eugeniofavalli or just use zsnes (http://www.zsnes.com) as I've done till now. The next step is to remove all hair and clothes from this player and start making your own or modify them (To start I think that having 2 hair styles in 2 different color it's enough). And the same for clothes.
At this point we can start coding the real graphic engine and you just have to add more clothes and hairs and others such as hats, maybe boots or gloves and so on!
Having only one playerset and many accessoriesets will give us the possibility to save a lot of memory!

It would be nice if you post your progress here

Thx and good work!

Post by **ElvenProgrammer** » 05 Jul 2004, 09:41

NPCset

About the NPCs you should take a look at the existing one: Graphic/charset.bmp. This one was developed for another project so there's a lot of uselles frames because in The Mana World the npcs can't walk.
So what it should be done? You have to set a character in a column with:
1st row: facing south
2nd row: facing west
3rd row: facing north
4th row: facing east
Then you can add as many npcs as you want on new columns. At the moment the dimension is 25x40 for each frame but you can chenge it if you need just tell me so I change the code

You're encouraged also to make your own npc?s graphic but also npc from games are welcome since we're in dev stage.

Post by **ElvenProgrammer** » 05 Jul 2004, 09:47

Tileset

As for the NPC you should look at /Graphic/Tileset.bmp. We're in early dev stage so also tilesets coming from rpg maker or resources like that are fully welcome, but if you manage to make your good looking tileset don't be shy and post it here immeditely!

Genis · Post by **Genis** » 05 Jul 2004, 18:08

great post, I was about to do something like this. And I agree for right now, one playerset and some accessories is what are needed, for then we can make the engine compatible with this kind of stuff, and future playersets will be really easy to add.

Post by **ElvenProgrammer** » 09 Jul 2004, 06:19

Here are some example frames from RO to help you on developing headsets and bodysets

http://themanaworld.homeip.net/Graphic

Ardaen · Post by **Ardaen** » 09 Jul 2004, 14:24

1st row: facing south
2nd row: facing west
3rd row: facing north
4th row: facing east
5th row: facing south west?
6th row: facing north west?
7th row: facing north east?
8th row: facing south east?

Post by **ElvenProgrammer** » 09 Jul 2004, 15:20

Starting from knight000 you have facing south-east -> south -> west -> north-west -> north. Other directions are mirrored from these ones.
Then it start again with the next frame:first step of walking animation...and so on

Guest · Post by **Guest** » 09 Feb 2005, 00:04

Sorry to post this, as it can stir some flames, but i think it's necessary for the project.

Has a license for the graphics been decided?

If not, be aware that projects like Worldforge had quite some problems because of artwork not properly licensed from the authors.

The ideal license should stat that the original credits and copyright will be always kept, and that everyone with access to the graphics should be able to modify and redistribute them as long as they still credit the original authors.

Just think what can happen if an artist gets fed up with this project (I hope it never happens) and decides his artwork should be removed from the game.

Of course that would mean artists should be aware of the license before cooperating with the project.

If in doubt about the wording of a possible new license, check this page:

http://creativecommons.org/

Good luck with the project, although latest advancements indicate you won't need much of that

P.S.: remember relicensing requires all the owners of copyright from a work to agree on the license change.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » 09 Feb 2005, 00:06

Sorry, the complete webpage should be:

http://creativecommons.org/license/

maci · Post by **maci** » 09 Feb 2005, 09:54

aren't the pictures gpl'ed too ?