Firstly, I understand the chances of this becoming an actual thing in the game are very low but at least worth a mention. Your character should be changed from what you're wearing such as the traffic cone & etc. Example: I think it would be a excellent idea because it'd give more of a "customization" to your character, it'd make it feel like what you are wearing really is changing you. I'm not too sure how it would work for both genders but I still think something could be arranged. What do you guys think?
I would like to see basic clothing variations though.. maybe all the armor sets could have the same viking warrior look, or magic clothes might have a wizardly look. That way only a few pieces of clothing would have to actually be drawn, but different character types could still look different. Maybe a few special items could have their own sprites, but I would still be happy with just basic clothing variation. Edit: Just to be clear, I mean one clothing sprite for a warrior/ rogue/ wizard type character would be enough. Three doesn't seem that unreasonable..
I wish you good luck with drawing, then. Even if we just assume that you see one of 3 styles (warrior-armour, rogue-armour, wizard-armour) on each character, that's about 2.000 sprites to draw. And I seriously doubt the developers see any point in tiring themselves with that, as it will not give us much and would be beyond tedious. In games where models are rendered by projecting more models on the base one, it's not that difficult, but if the game is sprite-based (like this one), anything that doesn't have any real functionality and is only there to look pretty is a stupid idea.
Basically what Kazeto wrote ^ It isn't just "a few pieces of clothing", as we are talking about at least 500 new sprites (per piece of equipment), and probably double or triple that if we're going to be realistic. Keep in mind that every combination of gear would have to be taken into account and drawn separately for every single animation in the game. Also important to keep in mind is that most -- if not all -- of those animations would have to be drawn twice, once for each gender. Is this doable? Sure, but... it would take months of work, finally resulting in our characters being able to... prance about in a fancy hat? I don't think that purely cosmetic changes warrant that much work. Also, this has been discussed in several threads, and I believe the developers also explained this when they were on roguelike radio. Probably on their twitter too. Lastly - sorry if I sound a bit hostile -- conveying a tone, in text, over the internet is pretty difficult, especially when English isn't your native language. Peace~~
There are so many pictures already in the game though.. I am not an expert, but wouldn't it only take some minor editing to change a few pictures into proper sprites to fit the character, and work with some basic animations? And besides, have you seen just how many items have high quality pictures.. I somehow don't think they'd have any problems drawing a few more in their free time, if they decided that this was worth their time. I'm not saying that these would be easy to add, or that they are even needed, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable to draw a few; And they can potentially make the game a bit more visually interesting, and more appealing to non-rogue-like fans. I really don't think that this would be all that tedious, but maybe I am wrong, I don't know that much about spriting, and it could end up being alot harder than I think it would be.. Edit : I thought I clearly said that even three sets of clothing sprites would be easily enough to make me happy.. one for each class type would be more than enough. Edit2 : To be even more clear, I really don't think it would be necessary to sprite every item in the game, and I don't even expect them to sprite three clothing sets really.. unless they happen to agree with me. I just want the points to be made, so that they might consider them when updating the game, and/ or its graphics. Three sets of sprites doesn't seem like too much work to me, but I may be very wrong, and wouldn't want them to focus on spriting, if it meant diverting valuable time from more useful and substantial updates.
Yeah but when you're drawing an item icon it's just one single image. When you're fixing a sprite it has to work for several animations. Since it's a sprite you'll have to redraw it for every direction the action is taken and such, meaning that you don't just draw one attack-animation; you draw 1 attack animation per weapon and direction and gender. I'm no expert either of course, my experience with sprites is really limited -- but I do remember helping a friend out once, he was basically scanning in a hand drawn, crude, placeholder-sprite for a game he was working on. I think it was 2 different things, 1 which was a tree that would look the same and have no animations what so ever, and 1 for a really basic and crude character that he wanted to be able to jump. After about 8 hours we had managed to get the trees in, and the jumping character got in there, with 1 (!) additional frame for when it was up in the air. It couldn't jump in all directions though, and there were several bugs. It took him the better part of the month before it worked from every angle, and had the sound synched up with the jumping sound from Super Mario Bros. Granted that this was the first time either of us had worked with sprites at all, it probably wouldn't have taken more than a day for someone experienced in the field. To get the animations to actually work, have more than 1 frame of animation and have all the on-hit effects and different weapons (plus 3 different set of armors for 2 different characters) synched to all the different sound effects and without glitching with any of the rather many environments which exist in DoD would however take at least a month to get to a point where it looks and works at an alpha-stage no matter how experienced you are. It is a ton of work. My conclusion: To get it to the point where it actually conforms with the quite high visual standards in DoD, and without any critical bugs would probably take a year of poor dgbaumgart's life. It's just not realistic to ask one person to do all that work. If Gaslamp Games suddenly had 10 experienced artists who knew exactly what to do and were very well coordinated, then it might be realistic, but I still think their time would be better spent on other things. I should probably put a small disclaimer down here, I'm not an expert, I could be wrong, and most of my estimates are just estimates. I'm also not sure exactly how the process of drawing and implementing sprites work in a professional setting, or what tools they use. With that said, and even though my numbers are probably off by a bit, I still think that my conclusion is fairly accurate. edited for spelling~~
I didn't think that it would be that hard to implement them, if it actually is half as hard as you say it is, then I can hardly expect them to add these.. It would still be nice to see in-game, but without alot of free time, or an extra artist or two, it does seem a bit unreasonable. I do hope that it is alot easier, since most of the ground work should already be laid out with the existing sprites, animations and pictures to work with. Keep in mind though, that this game isn't fully 3-d, and only four directions have to be drawn, and the left/ right animations should be mirrors anyways. I would love to get a reply from someone who knows how to properly sprite though, since it doesn't seem like either of us know nearly enough about spriting to really discuss it.
Yeah, that would help. I'll see if I can find the actual clip when they discussed this on roguelike radio. Interestingly enough though I think that it would be easier to add clothes to your character if this game was in full 3D. Take a mainstream RPG like Skyrim or Fallout 3 for instance, if you want to add a new item to games like those all you really need to do is draw up a 3D-model and then paste the mesh (which you can design in photoshop for instance) onto it. Then you add it as a separate object to the game, fiddle with the in-game settings so that it's recognized as a helmet, if that's what you made. As soon as the game knows to apply the model you provided it just pastes it over your characters head. Obviously it's gonna be a tad more work if you want it to work with all hairstyles and minimize clipping etc, but it's not that much work since you're just adding a separate object of sorts. With sprites on the other hand, you can't just add an object like that, you have to manually go back and edit all your models -- as opposed to the 3D engine of the previous games, as those only have 1 basic model, so you only have to add one object. With TES would be a bit more work since there are beast-races and such, and you probably want it to work with all races and reduce clipping as much as possible across the board... but now I'm getting off-topic so I'm just gonna stop =) anyway I'll edit in the link and time where they discuss it on Roguelike Radio when I find it, though if you haven't heard it before you should probably listen to the entire interview: it's hilarious edit: http://roguelikeradio.blogspot.com/2011/10/interview-with-gaslamp-games-developers.html there's the link, I couldn't find the exact time where they talk about sprites -- I might even be wrong in thinking they discussed it, but I recommend you listen to the interview anyways, not only is it funny but you also learn a lot about why they designed certain things the way they did.
There are 618 frames of animation just for the male hero, another 449 for the female. For three outfits each, that's a total of another 3201 frames of animation. It's a lot of work for a cosmetic feature.
Well to be fair, some of those male animations are unused and were made a long time ago (eg the trapdoor animation, which actually I believe was modified into drowning, or the poison I believe).
They may be deprecated now, but they certainly can make a comeback. I'm personally rooting for the head explosion via poison, myself.
What FaxCelestis said. If you've got 450 frames of animation for a character, it really isn't worth it to make new ones for every item. Or any item, really. Might as well make a whole new character -- wouldn't that be cooler? To play as a dwarf or a robot or a dude with a beard? But assuming a few naive numbers: let's say there are 100 unique items we want to display. That's 45000 frames of animation. Assume we want to naively animate every combination ... well, we're looking at millions of frames of animation. So the obvious solutions are 1. to paperdoll overlay the animation frames in-game so we don't have to do combinations, and 2. cut down the number of frames by doing some Diablo-style handwaving with item types. And, looking at the attacks, we can realize that those only require a unique weapon for the attack sequence themselves. This problem could perhaps be cut down to a reasonable size and we could keep poor Chris Triolo employed for a year or two doing these animations, but his efforts would be better applied to things that make the game significantly more fun (new monsters, new weapon types, etc) and ... we'd rather just make another game with all this effort. Basically: The original design decision to make Dredmor with unique, whimsical Lucasarts-style animations for every frame (vs. the stiff side-view paperdolling of something like Terraria- which makes paperdolling ridiculously easy) makes displaying equipped items more painful than it could ever possibly be worth compared to what that effort could add to other parts of the game.
I didn't realize that it took that much work to sprite it, or that so many different animations were needed.. thanks for the response; I would much rather see more substantial patches.. considering how hard it is to add new character sprites, and they are just for aesthetics anyways. Actually, I am pretty impressed that all of those animations were sprited for the female character, I had no idea that so much effort was put into that!
hmm wow that dose sound like alot of work, and on top of that that would only mean for the games core items not for any "mods items" added on which would be suckish :l as kwl as it would be i see why no one would want to do it
The nice thing about indie game developers, and gaslamp games in particular -- is that they actually bother to post and explain things like this. 90% of game developers would have left me and Wisp hanging without explaining much of anything. Hat's off to you, kind sirs.
Well, they're not a mere group of paid workers doing "something" for a big studio that has the ability to sell their work at 100$ price, release a few bug-fixing patches (if they even bother), and going away to work on another project. Instead they are a group of people that started working on something whilst not even being sure if the result will be a success. Let's face it, every indie game making group is in it, at least partially, for the act of creating the games. Obviously they want to make profit on that (who wouldn't want to make profit on something he did), but they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't have the desire to create. Because of that, they are much closer to players, as they actually want to know what players like/dislike/think about the game in general. And that is the reason why I love indie games (in fact, every game I bought for the last 7 years was an indie game). Thus, as it had been said by tehrei before, hats off to you.
Heh! I gotta say, those are the nicest responses to me saying "no, it's not possible" that I've ever heard.
Some devs don't want to get involved in the community too much.. I am personally very grateful that you responded so soon! Besides, I realize that most of our ideas will never be used, or even seriously considered. I can just hope to light some inspiration.. By pointing out why this idea was bad or unreasonable, I can use my time thinking up better ones !
