Hound Redux

[Pfhorrest]

Looks great to me!

[ravenshining]

Nice work!

I think the size - 146x156 - is perfectly fine, after all it's going to get scaled back up again in game.

[PerseusSpartacus]

Minor status update. Just thought I'd share a small animation showing roughly what the attack animation will look like from the front:

Spoiler:

Hound attack animation (front view)

output_XA5lZi.gif (14.35 KiB) Viewed 6539 times

[Pfhorrest]

Looking good

[President People]

I may also make the sprites slightly smaller - as of right now, they're noticeably bigger than the sprites for the original Marathon, and the added detail may be more of a hindrance than a help.

Agreed. I feel like the darkest brown shades could use some smoother blending (I'm using the Hunter as a reference, mainly), and shrinking the sprite will probably make that a bit easier.

Very promising, overall!

[ravenshining]

Great to see it coming along!

When you get to shading, it might be a good idea to focus on maybe, shading each view of the stationary sprite, or every frame of one animation from one view, so we can test and see how it looks in-game and make adjustments if necessary without having to go back over a whole bunch of sprites.

[PerseusSpartacus]

When you get to shading, it might be a good idea to focus on maybe, shading each view of the stationary sprite, or every frame of one animation from one view, so we can test and see how it looks in-game and make adjustments if necessary without having to go back over a whole bunch of sprites.

Oh definitely. I expect that in the near future, in addition to working on more outlines, I'll probably work on shading the sprites in the frontal attack animation as a more thorough experiment to see how things look.

I feel like the darkest brown shades could use some smoother blending (I'm using the Hunter as a reference, mainly), and shrinking the sprite will probably make that a bit easier.

Yeah, the darker shades are a challenge because the jump from one swatch to the next in the palette gets more severe in the darker areas. Just take a look at this:

A selection of swatches from the main brown palette in the color table I'm using.

palette.png (2.87 KiB) Viewed 6497 times

If you look closely at the four right-most swatches, and then compare them to the four left-most swatches, it's clear that the lighter ones are much more similar to each-other than the darker ones. I'm not sure why this is the case, but those are the colors used in the original game, such as in the color table for the Hunters. Still, I'll be the first to admit that the blending in the dark areas on that sprite could be better - something I'll definitely keep in mind for the future. Still, looking at it again, I feel even more confident than I did before that things are going well and this is definitely worth working on.

[ravenshining]

If that gradient isn't working out for you, make another one and I'll add it to the CLUT. I don't think we need to worry too much about "safe" colours for people playing in 8-bit.

[The Man]

You might want to ask RADIX about Photoshop's "Save for Web" option. I've got an old version that can't use custom colour tables, but newer versions seem to be able to do wonders with it.

[General-RADIX]

You might want to ask RADIX about Photoshop's "Save for Web" option. I've got an old version that can't use custom colour tables, but newer versions seem to be able to do wonders with it.

@Perseus, there should be an arrow near the colour table/image size areas that, when clicked, brings up the colour palette menu. From there, you can apply a pre-existing CLUT to the image. I'm using Photoshop CS3, for version reference.

(Note: trying to apply the Major Projectile Fighter CLU to the minor version in PS to see if it'd work the same way as in ShapeFusion...didn't.)

[PerseusSpartacus]

Okay, quick status update. Haven't been getting as much work done on this as I'd like, but I think I'm making some small amount of progress, at least. Here you can see the rough basis for the side-view movement animation:

A Hound in motion.

output_vvudau.gif (12.21 KiB) Viewed 6289 times

As I said, it's a rough basis - as in, very rough. Needs a lot of work around the edges, but I figured since it's been almost exactly a month since I last wrote, I should give you all some idea of what I've been up to.

[General Tacticus]

This is looking great so far!
If you are having trouble with limited color gradients, try using a "dithering" process when converting them to the color palette, Photoshop should have some good options for that.

[ravenshining]

Nice! I like how you took the time to make the two claws go in opposite strides.

[PerseusSpartacus]

If you are having trouble with limited color gradients, try using a "dithering" process when converting them to the color palette, Photoshop should have some good options for that.

Yeah, I've been working with that. It certainly helps, but I do need to make sure the gradients look decent to begin with - if I use too much of a solid color, dithering won't do much to fix it.

Now, unfortunately, this week is going to be very busy for me, so I don't expect to make much progress, if any, over the next few days. Sorry about that - I'll try and get things going again by the middle of next week.

[ChristTrekker]

Maybe hound poison would swap in the original textures for 5-10 seconds. "Leela, help, my eyes! Everything's gone blurry!"