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Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - 04:22

@bluecarrot16 Nice idea! :) But I plan to translate the game in French (my mother tongue) soon, I will have to find an equivalent pun. :p

I just realize that in the trailer we mostly see biomes where the vegetation is sparse on purpose. I attached few screenshots of biomes where the vegetation is denser. It is not very tightly packed like in The Legend of Zelda as it is not what I am looking for gameplay-wise. But I may revisit the biomes to pack more the vegetation. I am also thinking of not mixing all the different types of trees in the same forest to have oakwoods, pinewoods, etc.

@castelonia Thanks! Yes, there is slowly more and more content. But it still lacks a lot of content to fill the world and for the game to be a good sandbox game.

Thanks for the feedback, it is noted! :)

Yes it is, the music in the trailer was made by Hitctrl and is called RPG For Wenches, Ale, and Loot!!, I also use RPG Never Go Full Bard in the main menu. There is no music in the game yet, only environment sounds. I have to work on this.

Monday, March 8, 2021 - 07:49

Hey samuncle! Welcome to the LPC community! :)

If you do not plan to support a lot of clothes, you may be interested in some extensions of the LPC characters proposed in this topic. In particular, I am thinking to Evert's "Grab" animation.

You cut the skill tree in purpose? We want to see more! :p

I am curious, what information do you use to create the shadows for trees? I am thinking in adding this feature in my own lighting system.

I think you should make the repo public as soon as possible and put a README to explain how to set up the project and launch the game.

Good luck in your project! I will follow its progress!

Monday, March 8, 2021 - 06:16

Thanks for the feedback bluecarrot16!

I have already planned to rework a bit the arrows for the next version: they currently do not appear at the right place. I totally agree with you that the trajectory of arrows would benefit from a pseudo-3D effect. I think items would also benefit from this when they are thrown. I will have to think about this. Thanks for the idea and the link!

Yeah, it is a well-known technique. I will surely work on that when I will add magic as I plan to use particles for spells (version alpha 4 or 5). I also plan to make the chimneys emit some smoke particles.

Haha, I have heard several times that snake tastes like chicken so I found it funny to drop chicken meat. Maybe I should rename the item "Drumstick", or maybe not. :P

Saturday, March 6, 2021 - 09:26

Hey, the version alpha 2 of Vagabond is released on itch.io! :)

Chopping, mining and crafting are the main features added in this version. In addition, with this release, a free demo is now available.

The next version is expected around May and will add farming and housing features. I have already commissioned some new LPC assets to bluecarrot16 to achieve this. I can't wait to be in May. ;)

If you find the time to try the game, I am interested in your opinion and any feedback.

Here is the new trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_WrCYR2YIQ

Have a nice day!

Saturday, January 30, 2021 - 11:49

pvigier, could you share your get_palette , get_indices , and apply_palette scripts? I don't see them in your repo, but they would be helpful.

Here they are: https://github.com/pvigier/lpc-scripts.

The only thing I don't like about pvigier's approach is that the shapes/indices (https://gitlab.com/vagabondgame/lpc-characters/-/tree/master/indices) cannot be edited directly in a practical way (one would have to convert them to RGBA, then convert the edited RGBA back to indexed; not impossible, but kind of a pain).

I don't like that either! :p I think the main reason I staid with this approach is that my game is consuming grayscale images and palettes directly.

By contrast, the hair shapes in https://github.com/jrconway3/Universal-LPC-spritesheet/tree/master/_buil... are RGBA images, but they use a standardized palette so they are directly viewable/editable.

I think this is what makes the most sense from an artist point of view: to have an RGBA image that defines the indices and the canonical palette, and that can be edited directly. To compute the canonical palette, we could just get the colors in the image and sort them by lexicographic order.

However, I see some issues:
* if we want to change a color in the canonical palette, we may change their orders and all the associated palettes are invalidated and need to be updated.
* we can't share the palettes between images if they don't use the exact same set of colors.

But I am afraid there is no silver bullet.

I haven't figured out how we should handle objects with multiple "materials" (e.g. several independent color palettes). For instance, the base bodies and their eyes, or the helmets that ElizaWy just posted and their red plumes. I suppose an advantage of the JSON palettes here is that different materials could have different standard palettes, which could be concatenated unambiguously.

I tried this too on the leather cap (to recolor the cap and the feather). My approach was to have a main palette that defines all the colors in the image, and several subpalettes to replace a subset of colors of the main palette. I had a JSON file to store metadata (e.g. the colors in "blue_feather.png" will replace the colors 2, 3, 5 in "leather_cap.png").

Saturday, January 30, 2021 - 08:02

I just have grayscale images and palettes. RGBA images are only generated to preview or make edits with true colors (and then I get back a grayscale image).

This way I am sure that I don't have wrong/obsolete recolored images that live somewhere. There is only one truth for the indices.

I don't claim this is ideal but I wanted to share the workflow I am using. And I think separating the shapes (the indices) from the colors (the palettes) make sense, philosophically at least.

Saturday, January 30, 2021 - 05:29

Personally, I chose to not use ImageMagick but Python with Pillow and numpy for my scripts. It is maybe a bit slower (can take 1 or 2 seconds to process the full spritesheet for certain operations) but I can do whatever I want.

- coerce: takes an RGBA image and a palette (in .gpl, JSON, or PNG format), and produces an indexed PNG image which only uses colors from the palette (optionally, could force "nearby" but non-matching colors to use those from the palette)

As Baŝto noted, indexed PNG has some drawbacks and I find it simpler to just use a one channel grayscale image to store the indices and a separate RGBA PNG file with one row to store the palette. The main drawback is that you have no "standard" palette that goes with the image and you need to apply a palette to modify the image with sensible colors, and then to get back the new indices. It is a bit cumbersome.

You can have a look of what it looks like in this repo: the "indices" folder contains the grayscale images, the "palettes" folder the RGBA PNG with one row, "body_parts.json" makes the link between the grayscale image and the palettes, and allows to apply several palettes to one grayscale image. "generate_colored_images.py" is the Python script that generates all the images in "images" folder.

I have three scripts to manage indices and palettes:
- get_palette: it takes a RGBA image as input and outputs the palette (with an option to merge similar colors), and the indices.
- get_indices: it takes a RGBA image and a palette as inputs and outputs the indices (and an error if there is a color not present in the given palette).
- apply_palette: it takes a grayscale image and a palette as inputs and outputs a RGBA image.

It's a bit tricky to decide on what to use, since git won't work well and svn being very centralized, which can be very impractical if the repo gets deserted and dies. Images are binary data, which works badly with diff-based tools like git. But when git or such is used, it would be a lot more handy for version control to have an image per frame. It's easier to sew which frames were changed in commits, it's easier to merge commits and image diffs are harder to see in bigger images. This is a lot harder to work with drawing-wise, though.

I am using the Git LFS extension to manage the PNG (and the other binary files) of my repo and it works well so far. It is supported on GitLab and GitHub (never tried on this platform).

I also have scripts to transform a male head to a female head (basically just a list of offsets). And a script to detect and fix inconsistencies between the west and east facing animations.

Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - 09:13

Hey, sorry for the late response, I was working on other things.

The south facing animation is definitively weird but I made several experiments and that is the best I could do with existing frames. But when players will use the south facing animation when chopping/mining, they will be partially hidden by a tree/ore vein so that mitigates a little the issue.

Yeah, the goal of this animation was to not add new frames to the base character to not have to work on clothing. But as there is discussion to add new frames to the base animation on the other topic, maybe it will be useful for these weapons. By the way, BenCreating, I am not sure to see how the weapon should be placed on your proposed animation.

In general, I am not fond of of motion blur, but I agree with you that in this case, it could make the animation smoother. I have no experience with motion blur so it is maybe beyond my skills and I think it should be different for each weapon so I am a bit reluctant to start working on this.

I reworked a bit the west/east animation (just changed the hand position). I made the walk cycles (added 3 new rotations for that). And I made the female versions. For now, only the axe and the pickaxe are ready but I will finish the other weapons too.

I think the animations are not perfect but already usable and it is a large improvement comparing to the old ones. I think I will use these versions in my game. I will look how things go on the other topic: if a new animation for the base character is done for smash/chop, I will surely revisit this. If not, I think I will commission improvements.

Do you think I should make a submission for these animations at this state or I wait the definitive version?

EDIT: Is anyone interested in the script I used to generate the animation?

EDIT2: Oops, I just realize I put the weapon in the wrong hand for the west/east walk cycle. I will fix that. Fixed!

Friday, January 22, 2021 - 17:15

Hey! I keep slowly fixing issues with items. I just finished reworking the spear and the shovel for male and female characters (fixed the thrust animation and rework the walking animation, see the joined gifs).

Where do you want me to upload the reworked spritesheets? In a new submission on OGA? Here? In a particular git repo? In all cases, I will upload them on my repo.

Wednesday, January 13, 2021 - 07:36

The frame 2 of the shoot animation has the same issue as the frame 2 of the thrust animation. I adapted a part of the clothing to my changes.

I plan to write a script to detect inconsistencies between the west and east directions in clothing. I already fixed some and I suspect there may be more.

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