The Gimp could rotate it

Contribute art for mainline Wesnoth.

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shevegen
Posts: 497
Joined: June 3rd, 2004, 4:35 pm

Re: The Gimp could rotate it

Post by shevegen »

I think this is a general problem. I lately had a similar one when I was playing that
campaign with octopusses ... well cuttlefish.

They appear quite different depending on the depth of the ocean/water and I
remember mixing up units sometimes, in particular when the colour was similar.

I don't have a good solution for the graphic as such but from the interface, perhaps
some more visual cues could be given from the game code as such. Perhaps
the image on the very right being larger or more clear; or some way to highlight
a unit more prominently when the mouse hovers over it. Or something like that.

By the way, no real need for gimp - imagemagick commandline should allow
for simple image-rotations as-is. May perhaps even be used by wesnoth itself
in game.
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beetlenaut
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Re: The Gimp could rotate it

Post by beetlenaut »

Unfortunately, you can't rotate pixel art without ruining it. Wesnoth units use pixel art so they "pop" against the terrain. (Well, assuming they aren't half under water, anyway.) Rotating a grid of pixels isn't possible to do exactly, so computers usually use interpolation. Interpolation smooths the rotated image trying to make it look more like the original. That also makes the image a little fuzzy, which may not matter with a photo, but matters a lot with pixel art. Non interpolated rotations just move the pixels around without changing their colors, but that just leaves a mess. Here's a simple object zoomed in so you can clearly see the problem:
sword.png
sword.png (6.27 KiB) Viewed 19451 times
So, the only way to rotate a unit image properly is to completely redraw it.

If it's enough of a problem for your campaign, you could make a new version of swamp that's not as deep. You could copy and paste the three [terrain_type]s used for swamp, and change their submerge= value. It's currently 40% like shallow water, and you could change it to 30% like ford or even less if you wanted.
Campaigns: Dead Water,
The Founding of Borstep,
Secrets of the Ancients,
and WML Guide
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