General Style - Guidelines

Discussion and contribution to game graphics and user interface.
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Posted relevant content can be used under GPL or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/) for the project. Thanks!
Veneteaou
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Joined: Sat Aug 25, 2012 4:23 am

Re: General Style - Guidelines

Post by Veneteaou »

The technical achievement illustrations were awesome. For copyright reasons we must recreate them, but I will jump up and down of joy if we ever get such drawings. :)
Actually, the original patents (or patents of modified systems) for many of the innovations of Imp1 can be found on Google Patents, and they have original diagrams. Since these patents are from so long ago, we are in fact free to use the patents themselves in our game. I'm not great with Photoshop/GIMP, but I'd be willing to bet a quick filter or two would make them look hand drawn.

Also, I may be willing to crack them out if we ever run out of other things to do.
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Trilarion
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Re: General Style - Guidelines

Post by Trilarion »

Just learning from the past: Last year we use proprietary software for creation of graphics assets but due to not everyone having the same versions (especially of me not having the latest Adobe CS) we could not open the proprietary formats and not change the graphics later on or not work together which was not what we wanted.

On the other hand we need the ability to store in a native format (not PNG, TIFF, JPEG) to be able to store applied actions (filters, layers) to easily modify the art if needed. We will need to adapt the art many times during the making of this game. Therefore the current situation is not acceptable.

I think the solution is that we really must do without commercial products and concentrate on freely available software products/ file formats:

I propose to:
  • For every artwork document the process of creation thoroughly so somebody else can reproduce it or change it later.
  • Make comments (in a text file) and save the artwork in a comprehensive file format which keeps intermediate steps and is readable by an open or free software.
I know this means some kind of limitation and a bit more work but it is necessary in order to have a continuous development and in order to deliver a great game. We simply don't have money to buy commercial software for every contributor and I don't want to alienate potential contributors.

So what I can think of as good free software products are: GIMP, Paint.NET, Inkscape, ...

Of course there might be reasonable exceptions and we should discuss them here. For example commercial products that save into open file formats might be ok.

Anyway I will need to ask every artwork contributor to provide information about the steps taken in creating the artwork and about the software used.
Veneteaou
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Joined: Sat Aug 25, 2012 4:23 am

Re: General Style - Guidelines

Post by Veneteaou »

I like it. Add MyPaint to that list, it's what I've done all the terrain artwork in (although it doesn't handle layers unless images are saved in the Open Raster format which I have not done to this point). I'm also going to take a heavy look at Krita - it has some watercolor brushsets floating around, I just need to make sure I can match functionality with Mypaint. Hopefully I can, because Krita is like the holy mother of open source art suites.

As long as we are all pushing into the same open formats, I don't have an issue if people want to use CS or other mainstream tools.
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Trilarion
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Re: General Style - Guidelines

Post by Trilarion »

Sure, if you prefer MyPaint or Krita, use it.

So from now on I would like to encourage everyone to also save the artwork additionally in the most comprehensive (containing layers, ...) file format. Either the file format must be open (SVG) or software must be free or open source.

Even better would be to only save in such a format and do not deliver any PNG, JPEG, ... since I can do the conversion later for myself and the less files are around, the better.
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Trilarion
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Post by Trilarion »

Before I forget it I should mention that with using Python support for scalable vector graphics is now a given. So you can easily also provide artwork as svg file.
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