Mirroring Creatures

[EJlol]

My personal opinion about this that allowing mirroring is bad because the lighting becomes wrong. Shading creatures to have the correct lighting should not be that much more work, but it will look a lot nicer. So when I first created the guidelines, I added that to the guidelines. ("You may mirror the creature sprites, as long as the lighting is correct")

Then Crush changed it to "You may mirror the creature sprites"

And now Fate denied the guidelines because of the following reason "Disapproves of allowing mirrored sprites except as a temporary stop-gap measure"

So I want to hear more opinions about this topic. Should mirroring creatures be allowed? Do you think that it is worth the effort to shade it correct?

[octalot]

For accuracy of lighting, I think different sprites would be needed for outdoor creatures vs cave creatures.
The cave sprites would be mirrored, but the outdoor ones would need separate sprites for each direction.

[Jaxad0127]

The cave sprites would be mirrored, but the outdoor ones would need separate sprites for each direction.

Only if no shading is done on them. And if we do that, we can't use them outdoor, so we'd need to duplicate a lot of sprites.

[Crush]

Almost all sprites which are currently ingame use mirroring and I never heard any complaints about this.

Noone notices mirroring and it saves about 25% work.

[kr0n05931]

I always get yelled at if I mirror something

[Len]

mirror and go back and fix the light direction ><
god! People think

[fate]

Crush,

Almost all sprites which are currently ingame use mirroring and I never heard any complaints about this.

I have heard two complaints about mirrored sprites and one complaint about the casino indoor tileset. While I don't mean to say that these numbers are in any way statistically significant, my anecdotal evidence counters yours.

Noone notices mirroring and it saves about 25% work.

It saves much less than that in practice: Most of the time you can mirror outlines and fill colours (even alpha-shaded outlines, unless you lighten them up), so it's only the shading that you have to re-do. Granted, shading is tricky, but once you've done it for one side, doing it for the other tends to be much easier. (I've found that shading is mostly about allocating pixel space for gradients-- and the allocation work is re-usable.)

That being said, we are using mirrored sprites in a few places and it doesn't look too bad (in particular not when compared to other things that are in-game right now), which is why I think that it might be acceptable as a stop-gap measure for monster sprites (and for monster sprites only), since we are short on those.

-- fate

[EJlol]

From what I understanded, the only one who wants to mirror creatures (and has a strong enough opinion about this to say it) is Crush.

If someone else wants to mirror creatures, please say it now, otherwise I'll update the guidelines again to disallow it. Thank you.

[Rotonen]

Are we in a hurry? In that case saving work would make sense.

In other cases slowly and relaxedly fixing stuff towards perfection as always should do.

[EJlol]

Because more people wanted to disallow mirroring creatures, I updated the wiki. If this change your opinion about the guidelines, please update your approval/disapproval, with your new opinion.

http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/ ... Guidelines

[AxlTrozz]

I rather recommend to put something like "Try to avoid mirroring if the result is not good" but don't try to limit the pixelart process in that way.

I've use mirroring several times in my own process and nobody seems to complain if the result has been good.

for instance : all the mushrooms

http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... a&start=75

what you have to do is mirror before fine touch the light reflections on your pixelart, then you can finish that part, or just create a layer only for light effects