Anyway, I improved my axe designs somewhat. Some of the dwarven ones looked a bit dull, and some needed some extra contrast. I also modified my regular exec axe designs a bit.
- all_axes-x.png (30.81 KiB) Viewed 10182 times
Warning: following is a boring rant which represents my personal opinions only and should be considered as such.
To the argument that my tile designs don't fit crawl because they're "not pixelated enough", I have to say I appreciate that people have different opinions, but personally I find that argument laughable. For one, my latest designs use anti-aliasing very sparingly, I've actually only used it in shadows and edges that are non-straight/diagonal or curved, because those edges tend to look really bad without anti-aliasing. Even in those cases I've limited the alpha-channel variance by certain tricks that I've basically made up as I went along (which incidentally is my modus operandi 99% of the time).
Either way, I find the whole anti-aliasing argument a bit silly - it's of course noticeable when the tiles are posted here or in mantis with a transparent background, against the off-white background of the website, but when the tiles are put against the actual floor tiles or other backgrounds you can't really see the anti-aliasing unless you're really looking for it. On the other hand if there is
no anti-aliasing
at all on curved edges, like axe blades for example, you
will notice it as it will look choppy and ugly.
I am making an effort to conform my designs with the general style of Crawl - if I were in charge of all the tile designs, there wouldn't be any pixelation ANYWHERE, period... but since I'm a team player and willing to make compromises, I've amended my style and put aside my personal preferences... hence I've limited the use of anti-aliasing to the very specific cases already mentioned.
Lastly, I don't mean to come off as arrogant, or to imply that I know anything better than anyone else. I'm also always willing to listen to feedback or criticism to my work, when it's given in a constructive way. But I've had the impression (although I could be wrong, it happens) that most people have been fairly satisfied with my latest work, including most of the devs, and that most people don't see a problem with the style of my tiles. If I'm mistaken about this, fair enough... otherwise, I don't really think my work is unusable as such.