The Mana World Forums

Nothing is more rooted into our art style than our current emotes. Although, most of the new emotes since 2010 are made directly out of this rasterized version which was hacked from existing emotes:

It wasn't originally done this way and it prevents us from creating some more complex and better looking emotes from the original set's style.
Originally, emotes were done by svg file and then rasterized into a png file.
We long lost this svg but I was able to create a new one that exports the same as our old emotes (this file is accessible through the art and design repository here: https://gitlab.com/sourceofmana/artdesi ... Emotes.svg ).

Here is an example of the generic smile (alt+3):

And its downscaled version usable in-game:

Having these emotes redone as svg will let us play with the zoom level for mobile or high-resolution screens and it will let us work on some fancier UI to display these emotes like such games/projects:
https://support.badlion.net/hc/en-us/ar ... 699-Emotes
https://support.playeternalreturn.com/h ... 905-Emotes
It will also scale correctly in the game chat and could be pretty useful for our press kit.

But the main benefit will be to replace/redo these evol emotes into some high quality emotes and to add new ones as well!
Here is an example of the current emote set that has been redone within this vector process:

I like the idea as M+ awfully scales up to larger resolutions. By the way I'm worried for client performances on less modern computers so I wonder if it's possible to keep having both raster and vector formats on graphics.

Even if this isn't limited to the emotes, I believe vector graphics can punch a boost into graphics quality and maybe lower data usage on updates. I'm not really expert on this field, what are your opinions?

TMW is a pixel game. I know it is kinda modern to incorporate vector graphics (and text) into pixel art "retro" games. I personally find them to be quite harsh breaks in style. In a pixel game to not break style there is imho one important rule (well, several, but this is to me the most important one) : every pixel needs to be the same size. (That does not mean that it is impossible to get this by pixelating vector graphics, but it needs o be done with this in mind* - also, often even when pixelated at runtime, they can look too clean and out of place... we know (not only) from Tengu how easy it is to achieve breaks in style that are noticed by players).

(*that also means it needs to be done in original size and then using the same filtering method when upscaling as the rest of the game i guess)

SoM will remain a pixel art game but there are 4k (and soon 8k) monitors and mobile devices that somehow urge us to upscale some assets.
I've been working on implementing some post-process shaders (i.e.: HQ4x) in Godot for mobile builds to upscale our viewport while removing the large/bad pixel effect.

For these emotes we will still use the rastered version to display on your character, we will just use the vectorial version for some fancy animations that could be enabled/disabled in your options.

As for any other data: we won't use any vectorial assets as they will just break with our art direction.

cough fonts cough

EJlol wrote: ↑14 Jan 2023, 14:33

*cough* fonts *cough*

Indeed thank you to propose yourself to draw a pixel art font, we would need it in 12px, 16px, 24px and 48px to fit most of our needs!
PS: Undeed thingy