Art for the Return of the Darks

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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

I want to draw a nice animated sky terrain but i have no clue how to animate a terrain. I hope somebody can just post a WML code snippet here.

Second im not sure if the desingn for the darks fighter line is fitting to the magic line. Please post your thoughts.

Third: are there any suggestions for a name for them?I
Pilauli
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by Pilauli »

Darks Shaman / Elder: I think they do look a little bit too small. They seem to already be about as tall as it's reasonable for them to be. More bling might help, or a glowy floaty magical aura. Also, the tops of their staves look a little bit bent backwards, which is probably not ideal. The other color is a good idea, though, and the pants look good.

Darks Fighter: I like the shield; the crystal is very nice indeed. His sword arm looks weird, sort of thin and a little bit separate from his body at the shoulder. Unfortunately, the shield's darkness makes the rest of his armor look sort of boring gray. Making the armor more colorful, or more dramatically shaded, might help, but I'm not sure. Also, his head looks a bit octagonal - which is hard to avoid when making small circles and might not matter against darker backgrounds - but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

I downloaded and looked through Return of the Darks not long ago, and realized that a lot of the enemies are either trolls (resistant to blade and pierce) or undead (resistant to blade and pierce, vulnerable to impact). That would make an impact-based fighter (give him a mace instead of a sword) quite convenient. Just a suggestion.

Terrain animation: this minor tweak of your current terrain graphic line seems to sort of work:

Code: Select all

{NEW:BASE Qx sky[1~3]}
That obviously assumes you have frames sky1.png, sky2.png, and sky3.png. Tweak numbers as needed. I unfortunately don't know how to change the delay.

There are other fancy terrain graphics macros which feature animations, but it seems like Wesnoth can't access most of them from inside an add-on or something. I mean, I'm sure there must be a way, but I copied-and-pasted and it told me it didn't recognize the macro, and I don't understand why.
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

First: thank you for this great feedback Pilauli. This is realy usefull and i will try to add the changes you suggested.

Now to the darks fighter. Im not sure wich colours i should use for his armour. I think gold would look nice but give the unit a too powerfull look. So some sort of grey and blue would be nice?

The head is looking like that because i tried to give the unit a helm.

If i give him a mace, shall i place it in front of the shield or on tge side of his body?

It is nice that you played the campaign but it is very in beta. I will post it here if i think it is finished ;) .
Pilauli
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by Pilauli »

I wish I knew, I definitely wish I knew the answers to those questions.

Blue-purple, maybe? To go with dark green and dark blue?
I almost kind of imagine him with more armor plating over most of his body that matches the shield, but unfortunately, that would not show up very well, because it would be impossible to tell the difference between his shield and his body.
If he held his shield at more of an angle, so the top was a line facing sort of like a / line (but not that much angled), and the shield section was narrower but we could see the gem sticking out, that would make more of his body visible. I'm not sure whether it would look okay, but if you're in a mood to experiment, you could try it.

Yeah, helmets and other small curved shapes are hard. Rounding out the corners sometimes works.
curves.png
curves.png (1.5 KiB) Viewed 2362 times
None of these are really great. The top left is part of an octagon, the top right and bottom left are symmetrical and a bit wobbly, while the bottom right is just trying to be some other, rounded but not circular shape. The more pixels you have to work with, the more it becomes practical to round the corners, though.

If you give him a mace: make sure it shows up clearly, that's all I can say. So if he does hold it in front of his shield, then it needs to be a bright color so it's visible against the shield, and if it is a dark color, then it needs to be held out to the side so it shows up in the silhouette.

My general impression, actually, is that he might hold his weapon so that it still covers his body, but is held a bit lower. Here's a quick scribble I made (yellow is arm, blue is sword) to provide a general idea of what I'm suggesting. (Although now that I look at it again, I think I may have made his upper arm a little too short and the lower part of his arm just a little too long and angled. So experiment a bit, if you use this, rather than just copying it.)
warrior-scribble.png
warrior-scribble.png (1.63 KiB) Viewed 2362 times
The feet are just hopelessly messed up (they used solid black, and copy-pasting from the thread fills the whole background in with solid black, so when I chopped the background back out, the feet also disappeared.) Ignore the feet.
I also tweaked the helmet, trying to make it a little bit more rounded and a little bit cone-shaped. (It was too small to fit a proper circle, but I think changing up the shape so it's not quite a circle works.)

And I didn't originally intend to write a long post, but I got carried away with my suggestions again. I hope you don't mind. :D
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

This is realy helpfull thank you. :lol:
Just an idea that came to me while i read your post:
How about an shield attack?
I think it would fit better to the darks in general but also a shield and a sword attack would make them to powerfull.

I also thought about to make this one to a darks guard.
The advancement line would be the following:

Darks Guard -> Darks Protector -> Mysterious Defender

Darks Fighter -> Darks Warrior -> Darks Destructor

Darks Magic line...

Ps: better a long post than a short post :)
Pilauli
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by Pilauli »

Shield attack is a good idea.

One way it might be sometimes useful is if, oh, let's say that he deals 5-4 damage with his sword and 13-1 damage with his shield. (Random numbers, based on the fact that the Elvish Fighter does 5-4 damage.) The shield is probably more likely to kill an enemy with 10-13 health than the sword is (he only needs to hit once, rather than 3 times, even if he would get 4 chances), and of course an impact shield will have a pretty big advantage over a blade sword (15-1 vs 3-4, I think) against skeletons.

Oh, I actually just realized that I misread your post and you are worried about it being overpowered, rather than worried about whether it would be useful at all. Obviously, one limiting factor is that even if a fighter has two attack options, he can only attack once each turn :P Also, I mostly used the mages, rather than the melee fighters (because I like ranged attacks), so I doubt the fighters are in serious danger of making the mages obsolete. And even if the Darks in general are more powerful than equivalently-leveled units in other factions, that can be fixed either by decreasing their stats or by increasing the number of enemy units.

You could make two separate lines of fighters, but it would mean you need twice as much melee unit art, and it's more unit lines to pay attention to for players also, so I doubt it's worth it.
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

darks_fighter_new.png
darks_fighter_new.png (6.64 KiB) Viewed 2289 times
Pilauli
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by Pilauli »

I see his sword changed position a little bit. It looks good - a bit like he's deliberately holding it flat in front of his shield, but that might just be my imagination. I like the brighter color, because it makes it easier to see the slightly curved end of the sword.

Speaking of color changes, whatever you did to the crystal on his shield definitely makes the shield look subtly more angled. Nice!

I see you changed his colorscheme. Deep blue matches his shield a lot better. However, it matches it a little bit TOO closely on my screen, so it's hard to tell where the edge of the shield is. Could the blue be made a little bit lighter?

His head now looks like a smudge, which is not so good. (It always sort of did, but the rest is smoother and shinier now, so it looks worse by comparison.) I'm not quite sure what to suggest. I actually didn't realize it was a face-covering helmet until I squinted at it, so that might be improvable.

It might work better to draw a round, shiny helmet, and then hack an eyeslit into it. (Of course, before you try such a destructive procedure, make a backup image so you have the old helmet if this goes wrong. :D)

I still get the feeling that his sword arm is too thin, I'm afraid.

And it's now very hard to tell where his hand is. You could try (or all) any of the following and see if they work:
- Different-colored gloves
- A fancy pommel-stone for his sword
- Add a highlight on his hand, with a dark outline underneath

---

I'm afraid that was a lot of nitpicks, but I hope they aren't too daunting. You have made amazing progress.
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

darks_fighter_new_new.png
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

Sorry for just posting the image. I had no time to write further about it.

So here is what i think about it: I tried to draw agladiator like helmet but you see the result. My headdrawing skills are not the best and i found no tutorial on the creating art page.

So i anybody thinks he is good or just better than me in such things it would be nice to post a short tutorial here. In case it is good enough i will post it to the wiki. If you dint feel good enough to do this some colour suggestions would also be nicei.

Thanks for replies
thvk


Note: this is the 40. post in this topic. I thank everybody who posted here: Thank you very much :lol:
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thvk
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Era of Universe

Post by thvk »

Here is the initiating post for the Universalia.

The Universalia are the opponents to the Darks. They live between stars and they exist out of pure magic mixed with solar plasma. Their colours are a gold like yellow and a sky blue. They are in war with the darks because the darks stoped them from invading the world as they could stop them with their flying isles in sky.

The great goal of the Universalia is to find a way to create suns. With this knowledge they could create an endless power source to invade the whole Universe. They searched for the spell or summonig formula and finally they found it. But the summoning sequence requires a great power source that can only be found in wesnoth. So they gathered their forces to invade wesnoth and were stoped by the darks. Since then there is a war between them.


I hope you like the new race i invented them to create a opponent for the darks. Im still not sure with the name. Post your ideas here.

Art will come soon as i have no ideas yet for the darks fighter line.
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

universal_proto.png
universal_proto.png (1.45 KiB) Viewed 2042 times
First very prototype for an universal fighter.
Im not sure with design yet so i didnt drw it to end. Are there any changes that would be nice? Im open for critique.
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

So long time no post but here it is the new Version of the Universal Fighter:
universal_proto.png
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Hope its nice. As usually im open for critique.
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

Here is the next level:
universal_proto_advance.png
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

I think these variants are better than the first proto type. Third Level will have a cloak or wings i dont know yet. It will be out of fire in any case.
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