About a new, well-defined LPC specification

About a new, well-defined LPC specification

bzt's picture

As a discussion with @bluecarrot16 went on here, I've realized I'm not the only one frustrated about the many incompatible LPC forks and unnecessary duplications, so I think this topic deserves more attention.

There I wrote

And maybe it's time to join efforts and create a standardized, LPC-NG specification and collection, and make the other forks read-only? (Or at least give a big red warning something like "For LPC assets submitted after 2022-XX-XX, please use these guides (link) as well as these collections (link) and the LPC-NG tag", something like that). I understand that converting everything to this new LPC-NG standard is a HUGE task, but I'm 100% certain it needs to be done, and sooner the better. Any delay will just make this harder and would allow even more new incompatible forks to be born.

I'm volunteering to collect the best aspects and practices from all existing forks and write a detailed, well-defined updated style guide for the benefit of designers as well as for game developers. (I've many years of IT management experience, so I'm perfectly capable to organize this, plus I think this is going to be fun and very beneficial for everyone). I personally think up to this date @ElisaWy's "LPC revisied" is the best, most well-thought revision of LPC, so I would like to use her guides and palettes as a base for the new style guide, but I would like to hear your opinions too what else should be considered.

To make it clear, I'm not talking about creating yet another LPC collection, I'm talking about creating a new, detailed LPC style guide (a HTML page), which hopefully could one day serve as the rules for the new, advanced and compatible LPC-NG collections.

I'm thinking about include things such as: expected perspective; angle of light and drop shadows; what animations are supported; if those are merged into a spritesheet then what layout should be used; standardize the pixel coordinates for the head, hands etc. so that the compatibility of assets is guaranteed etc. There's nothing new in these really, you can find this information spread wide in form posts (sometimes multiple times, in an incompatible way sadly), what is going to different that I want to collect all of these into a single, coherent, convenient and easy to use LPC specification.

What do you think?

Cheers,
bzt

PS: after voting, we've settled with the LPC-Refined tag.