The Tavern

Hi, this is my first post here. I've been playing DCSS for a while now, I haven't won the game yet although I got pretty close with a kobold berserker but lost the save file unfortunately... let me at first say I really love what you've done with the game, I remember playing the original Crawl back in the 90:s a few times (although back then I think I liked ADOM better) and it has definitely improved hugely.

However, I have to say I think the quality of the tiles is somewhat inconsistent - some have problems like lack of alpha channel usage or pixelation, some just don't look "right"... so I figured I could maybe contribute some tiles? I'd love to do something to help the development of this game, and drawing & graphics is something I love doing... so I made a small test run, revamping the 3 weapon tiles that have bothered me the most lately:

- the regular trident - the trident head just didn't look "right", it kind of looked like a claw instead of a trident head
- both lajatangs: the lajatang blades aren't actually positioned like that! they're actually perpendicular to the pole

So here's my (imo) improved versions. If people like my style of tiles, I'm willing to make many more in the future. Also included is a mock-up with my tiles placed on a screenshot to show how they'd look in-game.

Welcome to the forums! And good on you, trying to improve the game right out of the gate.

Those actually look... kinda blurry to me. A close zoom in reveals you've got no border around the items, and something like 70% of the foreground pixels are transparent.

I'd take a closer look at main.png. Transparencies are used pretty sparingly (there are a few weapons with glow effects), and generally a black border is used so they'll stand out against a variety of backgrounds (the few exceptions tend to be brightly colored and stand out against the drab floors anyways). Shadows are opaque for the same reason- your transparent ones blend into the background to where I can hardly see them.

You might be interested in the tiles design guide. It gives some basic rules and pointers, and also tells you how to test new tiles in game.

That is a much more viscous looking trident head though.

minmay wrote:Tiles' style at the moment is mostly "pixel art" - few colours (per tile - there isn't an actual palette, so probably there are tens of thousands of colours across the game, but seldom more than 3 or 4 shades of one hue in the same tile, for example), not much alpha channel usage, and almost never antialiasing.

I've noticed, and IMO that hurts the look of the tiles at some cases, especially with items that have curved edges... if you look at the axes for example (broadaxe in particular) the blade of the axe looks choppy and jagged, because of lack of antialiasing.

I actually initially thought the game was using GIFs or something that only supports 1-bit transparency, but when took a closer look and saw the tiles are PNG:s... I'm sorry, I just don't get it - PNG supports full 8-bit transparency, why not use it to make the shape of items look more natural?

I don't want to come off like I'm walking in and crapping all over the contributions of other people, so please don't take offense to my comments (if the original tile creators are reading)... it's just that to me, personally, pixelated edges and lack of alpha-channel usage don't seem very useful as general design goals.

I support correcting the lajatang tile. dd is right about the position of the blades. The trident looks good too.

Here's 2nd versions, I increased the sharpness and gave them a bit of an outline, also made the shadows opaque. Mock-up included again.

If the developers/other people still absolutely hate these, it's no big deal - I had fun making them anyway.

IMO, they look good. I would loose the shadow thought, the trident somehow looks like it's stuck in the water under really unusuall angle. They would make great contribution for randarts tiles.

Give them black outlines and they'll be good

I also created a character doll tile for the lajatang.

: lajatang-cd.png (602 Bytes) Viewed 26867 times

Here shown held by our favorite deep dwarf underwear model

: lajatang-cd-x.png (1.16 KiB) Viewed 26867 times

So, I redid the lajatang item tiles, and also made an improved broadaxe tile. This time, I went really, really light with the anti-aliasing, I basically only used it on the shadows and the blades, because those look really bad without any antialiasing, having lots of curved or non-straight/diagonal edges.

I hope these are more "in style" with the game.

: broad_axe1.png (919 Bytes) Viewed 26860 times

: lajatang2-p.png (1.1 KiB) Viewed 26860 times

: lajatang1-p.png (1.05 KiB) Viewed 26860 times

Oh, almost forgot the mock-up...

: mockup3.png (85.21 KiB) Viewed 26859 times

dd wrote:So, I redid the lajatang item tiles, and also made an improved broadaxe tile. This time, I went really, really light with the anti-aliasing, I basically only used it on the shadows and the blades, because those look really bad without any antialiasing, having lots of curved or non-straight/diagonal edges.

Thanks, they look pretty good. I agree that pixelated edges and lack of alpha-channel shouldn't be a design rule. It seems a good compromise between improvement and art consistency. I also think they still need a black outline, but rltiles can add it with the %rim command. Don't forget to post them on mantis too.

galehar wrote:I also think they still need a black outline, but rltiles can add it with the %rim command.

I doubt that'd interact well with the antialiased shadows, so it might be better to add the outline by hand.

galehar wrote:I also think they still need a black outline

The originals didn't have an outline though... seems to me like most weapon item tiles don't have one?

galehar wrote:Don't forget to post them on mantis too.

Yeah, I will.

Also, I looked at the tile requests and saw that Spider's nest needs wall tiles? So I made these. Maybe they suck but maybe not? I cheated a bit with these, I used one of the hive tiles as base and tweaked them from there...

: spider_wall_str.png (22.77 KiB) Viewed 26854 times

edit. also, new trident

: trident1_p.png (1.16 KiB) Viewed 26849 times

I'm not sure about the broadaxe. It looks very powerful, but in the game the broadaxe has lower base damage than a battleaxe, so it should look a little weaker.

Grimm wrote:I'm not sure about the broadaxe. It looks very powerful, but in the game the broadaxe has lower base damage than a battleaxe, so it should look a little weaker.

You mean the addition of spike on the backside? A lot of single-edged battleaxes had these, in order to balance the weapon... so I thought it'd bring some "flavour"...

What if I make the battleaxe more badass as well?

dd wrote:What if I make the battleaxe more badass as well?

That would be excellent.

Here's all my weapons so far.

edlothiol wrote:
galehar wrote:I also think they still need a black outline, but rltiles can add it with the %rim command.
I doubt that'd interact well with the antialiased shadows, so it might be better to add the outline by hand.

Personally I think the sans-outline versions are better, but meh... here's all my weapons with outlines.

I like them. I like the spider walls too.

Thanks.

One more thing that bothers me - and this might be just me - is that the Quickblade is just a blue version of the regular short sword. When I think of a blade that's really quick, I tend to think of something like a curved, dagger-like blade, something where the weight-center is near the hilt to make it easy to stab quickly... so I made this alternate quickblade - it's still blue, it's a "magical" weapon after all:

: quickblade.png (1.17 KiB) Viewed 26792 times

I like your tiles too.

The broad axe should look badass. The battleaxe is just the heavy, two-headed and exclusively two-handed version of it. (at least that I had in mind when I made the new item descriptions for it, which are in trunk now.)

The quick blade is the fastest weapon in the game and seldom to be found. It is between daggers and short-swords from the stats, but not a 'magical' weapon!
It's something 'special in itself', 'preternaturally well balanced' in the new description. ('Not many smiths have the skill to make one - therefore seldom to be found').

Your tile looks very much like a dagger. There are a lot of daggers with different tiles in the game already. The problem I see is, it could be 'over-seen' by the players, who think it is 'just another special dagger'.

Better would be something like a Tanto/Wakizashi...

...or this (just as an idea)?:

Lovely tiles, but i've been wondering, why do weapons have to have a shadow? It looks kinda weird, as if the weapons are lodged to the ground by their hilt or something and as mentioned above, it looks much more stupid in water.

That's an "issue" with tiles already in the game, not yours only. Just saying.

The shadow implements a little '3d-space' to the '2d-look'.
I'm not so sure, if it would look better without.

Hrmm. Could you give the quickblade more of a sharp edge? Or make it pointer or something? Right now, I look at that and I see a curved Arabian style dagger in a colorful sheath. The things people had tucked in belts in cartoons, but would never actually draw. :p

What if I make it look something like a Kris? With a sort of wavy blade...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris

--
On another note, I made some bucklers. I figured it'd be neat to have more different shield graphics, like different graphics for normal/dwarven/elven/orcish normal/runed/artifact etc. Are there orcish shields? I think I've seen at least dwarven & elven. If there aren't, there should be, just because I could draw badass shields with skulls...

Mychaelh wrote:I like your tiles too.

The broad axe should look badass. The battleaxe is just the heavy, two-headed and exclusively two-handed version of it. (at least that I had in mind when I made the new item descriptions for it, which are in trunk now.)

The battleaxe has higher base damage than the broadaxe (17 as against 14), so it needs to look badasser than it.

I dig those shield tiles but make sure they don't look better than artefact shield tiles. That's already becoming confusing with the new weapons tiles.

There were some racial buckler tiles recently added:
https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=5575

I don't know whether plain shields or large shields were ever updated, though. Maybe take a crack at those?

BlackSheep wrote:There were some racial buckler tiles recently added:

...Oh.

Well, since I already made them, maybe they can be used for artifacts or something... ?

BlackSheep wrote:I don't know whether plain shields or large shields were ever updated, though. Maybe take a crack at those?

Good idea. Right after I finish the quickblade design.

How's this quickblade?

Grimm wrote:The battleaxe has higher base damage than the broadaxe (17 as against 14), so it needs to look badasser than it.

Two-bladed head (battle axe) vs one-bladed head+spike (broadaxe) looks 'badasser' to me.
One-bladed head+spike (broadaxe) looks 'badasser' than one-bladed head (war axe).
I really can't see a problem with this.

@dd:
New 'kris-quick blade' looks good... but still like some 'artifact'-dagger. (tile should be used for this)

There are 4 different types of Short Blade weapons in the game: Daggers - Quick Blade - Short Swords - Sabres.
My point of suggestion is to make easy to recognize differences between them.
Maybe one more 'wave' to make the blade a little bit longer or better go 'Wakizashi' as suggested.
(Would best fit with the description we have now - (aka 'seldom/exotic because high forging skill is needed')
-> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakizashi

I worry that if I make it longer it'll look like a long blade... Also I don't really think anyone would confuse it with an art dagger - I haven't seen any daggers with wavy blades around...

Anyway, I made some shields - from left to right: regular, elven, dwarven, orcish (in pairs of regular/runed)

dd wrote:What if I make it look something like a Kris? With a sort of wavy blade...

I think Kris were used to make sacrifices. It's more about art and spirituality, it's not a real weapon. I don't think it would fit for a quickblade.

galehar wrote:I think Kris were used to make sacrifices. It's more about art and spirituality, it's not a real weapon.

Not true, it was also used as a weapon.

Matching player doll tiles for all my shields!

: shields.png (13.22 KiB) Viewed 26682 times

: shieldscd.png (3.15 KiB) Viewed 26682 times

: shieldscdx.png (3.86 KiB) Viewed 26682 times

How does this quickblade look?

Like a (nice)... dagger.

dd wrote:How does this quickblade look?

Much improved, I think.

It looks like it has a nice sharp egde, and a point. And kind of like it's made of out some kind of crystal. The first one just came across looking dull and kind of plastic for whatever reason.

Mychaelh wrote:Like a (nice)... dagger.

If I make it longer it'll look like a long blade. Some of the short blades already look almost as long as the long blades and I don't think that's a good thing. There should be a clear difference in size between short blades and long blades, as long as we have two separate categories for them.

Furthermore, there are no blue daggers in the game, artifact or otherwise. So I really don't see how it could be confused with a dagger.

And even further more, a quickblade should be short - it's a blade that's really quick. A short blade with the center of balance in the back (ie. the blade is thicker near the hilt and tapers sharply towards the point) is much faster to use, and much better suited for stabbing and such, than a blade that is heavier at the tip, or longer.

dd wrote:
Furthermore, there are no blue daggers in the game, artifact or otherwise. So I really don't see how it could be confused with a dagger.

Chilly death is blue, however I think you would have a hard time confusing chilly death and this quick blade.

@dd: Yeah, I think you've got it. The daggers are short, symmetrical and better at stabbing with the tip than slashing with the edge. Your curved quick blade has more of a focus on the edge, but is still capable of fighting with the tip.

(...all this tip vs edge talk. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm flashing back to Paul's lessons in Dune, now).

Ok, I'll upload this to Mantis for now. If more people think it doesn't work I can always do another design, but for now I think this is it...

Just chiming in to say the tiles look really good (maybe not the qblade)

Especially like the shield ones - wouldn't mind to find an artefact using one of those sometime. And I think weapons look better with the outline too. Something about that makes them more crawl-y. And yes, weapony

paplaukes wrote:wouldn't mind to find an artefact using one of those sometime.

Those are for non-artefact shields, there's one for each race. I made one artifact shield design, I haven't posted it here though...

I just made new tiles for longswords. There's regulars, elven, orcish, and artifact.

Improved whips

Greatswords for each race + artifact

You're a tiling machine, you draw everything.
Like a moving sword, T-port control and everything!
We love 'em! We need 'em!
We read 'em! Eight classes of weapons
All right all bright
You're a crawling star!

I'm going to revamp all the weapons. All of them.

YESSS please do more, they all look awesome

Do elven greatswords exist?

The Tavern

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