bzt. Please be mindful of your tone going forward. The use of capitals and exclamation marks to "shout" at someone via text is argumentative and borderline abusive behaviour, which is not tolerated here. There are more constructive ways to express your dissatisfaction. Instead of "wrong!" consider the phrases "I do not agree" or "you may be mistaken" as an alternative before giving your reasoning. The thread may get shut down otherwise and that would be detrimental to your cause...

"You see, "I do not agree" suggests that this is an opinion. However the need of duplicated sprites is a fact, and it is also a fact that with the guidelines such duplication isn't needed." - What's not a fact is that this is the problem you make it out to be. So let's be clear. Is it annoying that male and female sprites have different offsets in different frames for no obvious benefit? Very much so. Is it a major issue? Well, not really, for most applications.

Consider headgear, which is where the issue is at its most blatent. The actual number of unique frames for headgear is small, considerably smaller than the number of animation frames available for LPC sprites (I think it's just N,E,S,W and five frames for the death animation; you might get away with flipping E and W sprites) so in practice the spritesheets are assembled by a script rather than a human from the source images. The assembled spritesheet is what is shared for ease of use, in addition to the source images. Arguably, when using the spritesheets, the correct way to handle this is to assemble the spritesheet on the fly from the few source images as needed. That is the most memory efficient.

Say you don't want to do that in code, and just want to layer spritesheets without doing offsets. You can do that, the spritesheets are available! The male and female versions might be distinct. Annoying, but only a problem if you're actually trying to load everything in memory at the same time, which is probably not a good idea either way since that is not scalable when you have more assets to pick from. I would suggest that the best way to handle it is to assemble the spritesheet of the character from base assets once when the character is generated, coupled with a cache for assets so not every access involves a disk read. That is really an implementation detail for the game engine though, and not appropriate for an artist to make decisions on up front.

A common use-case is to pre-generate the entire spritesheet, in which case it is also a non-issue.

"Please understand the difference. I don't wanted to be rude or anything." - Ok...

"Believe me, I wouldn't sacrifice my precious free time on this and offer my help for free if the community were able to produce compatible assets in the first place." - Oh.

See, that's the problem: you say it's "incompatible". It's not. It's just not as convenient for you as you like, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to point out. However, you don't have to be a dick about it.

"I beg to differ. I've already written a software that converts old spritesheets into the new one, and it works for all asset types except clothes."

Which is... pretty much all of them?

Point to consider: Eliza's head is different, which you can possibly ignore when bringing in hair and things like helmets. Then again, possibly you cannot ignore it. It's something you at least need to think about.

"I'm just waiting for Eliza to finish the guides so that I can fill up the transformation matrices for all frames."

It's not as simple as that. Some of the outlines are different; proportions of the body and the animation of the body are sometimes different. Position of hands and arms are different. Not all of it is hard, but it's not a simple offset in most cases. And if it is a matter of simply shifting things by a couple of pixels to convert all assets, what's stopping you from doing that yourself? It's actually not hard to do, and you'd be contributing something constructive!

"Plus your updated lpc-character-base is also incompatible with the existing assets, and there's simply no way to search OGA for assets that works with your bases," - LPC Spritesheet Character Generator. That's the current and curated version of spritesheets published here.

"and there's no guide for the artist on how to make their assets compatible with your bases." - Not publicly, no. And yes, it's an issue - that's being worked on. In people's spare time. Between jobs and family. Note that this didn't prevent people from making assets!

"It's a nice initiative, but lacks foresight and a way to cooperate with unfortunately"

That's the thing you keep missing: there is a way to cooperate. It starts with talking to the people involved. No, it's not easily visible, but given that it's been pointed out to you several times alreay, you ought to be aware of it by now. And yes, that's probably someting that can be improved. Feel free to make a suggestion.

Also consider this: there are several people involved, with their own time commitments, ideas and priorities. The tricky part is finding something that works for everyone. That takes time.

"Let's be clear: if you make lpc-character-bases consistent, with swapable heads, standard hand coordinates, and "shrink" it into guidelines," - That's actually fairly close to being done. I have elbows to do for the male sprite, and then guides for the male sprite are done, except for run for which we're still sorting things out. The female version can be done quickly once some organisational details are taken care of - but I'm going to finish the push/carry animations first.

"then I would use that instead of Eliza's guidelines in the spec." - Why not include both and tell people what the benefits and drawbacks of either set are?

EDIT: I don't think anyone actually uses these, so listing them is probably not actually useful, but there is also a couple completely different chibi characters: https://opengameart.org/content/alternate-lpc-character-sprites-george, https://opengameart.org/content/one-more-lpc-alternate-character. 

"In half of your post you're arguing that those assets are compatible, and in the other half you're counting reasons why they aren't..." - I'm not. You just seem to be unwilling to try to understand that one does not exclude the other. Yes, male and female bases are different. However, available assets (say, a hat) are "compatible" with both, because the positional adjustments have been made for you. No, you can't put the male sheet on the female base. However, you can put the female sheet on the female base.

"Yes, it is that simple with Eliza's guidelines."

Re-read what I said. In most cases it's not that simple, because the shape and animation of the body are not the same as the original. And so it takes more than a shift to properly adapt existing artwork.

"In Eliza guidelines all hand positions are standardized,"

That's good. Unfortunately, hand positions isn't all that's different between Eliza's bases and the originals.

"so your argument that it cannot be done, let's just say, funny."

You know, I'm not sure what you think I say can't be done. To be clear: I'm saying adapting existing assets takes more than a shift by a few pixels. Obviously modifying character bases so hand positions are the same is easy to do. That's not the hard part, and no one claims that it is.

"What's stopping me is people like you,"

How am I stopping you?

"unable to understand that I'm working for everyone here, not just for myself."

If that's the case, you may want to actually take an effort to listen to feedback, instead of throwing a hissy fit and insulting people when they disagree with you. You ask for feedback, but seem unable or unwlling to accept critcism. You do not ask if something is reasonable, you demand that things be done your way.

"May I ask, what do you think, what this topic is about?"

I think it should be about documenting best practices for making artwork compatible with LPC assets, based on what's available, what's desirable and what's achievable, with common pit falls and documented usage instructions. What it seems to be about is you determining a set of instructions and demanding they be followed to the letter, and that they be done now, if not yesterday.

"You haven't created guidelines for the lpc-characters-base (or anything else resembling a clear set of rules for compatibility)."

I haven't? Ok, it's a good thing you're here to tell me what I have and haven't done. Yes, that was sarcasm.

"And you haven't said "yes, let's do that I'll create guidelines because that's what the community needs."."

Eh... I'm pretty sure I've both said (first message dated April 10th) and done exactly that.* You need to pay more attention to what's being said, because you keep selectively missing (or ignoring?) parts of the discussion, and it's tiresome.

*Now, you're correct that they're not released yet, because we're still reviewing it and I want the run and female (at least) guides in there too before I do.

This thread will be closed for 48 hours in an effort to mitigate increasing toxicity levels.

Anyone is welcome to discuss this with me via PM without risk of repercussions, but arguing elsewhere about the thread-lock or starting a new thread about this same topic will result in an account suspension.