Dragon sprite

[Sangel]

The dragon portrait is shaping up very nicely.

Though it does make me pine for 700x700 pixel portrait support. I can picture in my head the first time a dragon has speaking lines - suddenly, a huge red monster dominates your entire game screen, with words to the effect of "ROAR!"

[Girgistian]

Looking good so far - I'm liking your style with the portrait. I'm not completely sure about the jaw here, it could be a little off right now, but it might not be an entrirely bad thing. You could just have some drool dripping to a certain direction to make it look as if it's lunging its head to the side a little, so the jaw's kinda lagging after the rest of the head.

About the wings: you might want to consider having them both in a pretty horizontal pose, so we could see the farther away wing going as far as it goes from the camera and giving the portrait a good deal of depth and perspective.
I'd also like to see a bit more muscle on it's shoulders, but that's entirely up to you.

PS. Something's continuously drawing my attention to its cheek/chin area... Looks really good.

[lostnumber]

Now I'm just a newbie and I dont pretend to know all the technical art stuff that you big shots do.

But I'm a little confused as to how this sprite isn't mainline quality? In my opinion it looks better then most of the sprites already in the game, especially the dragons that are currently in the game.

[thespaceinvader]

It's more a matter of style and technique than it is of quality.

[lostnumber]

ok, well I guess you art guys would have a better understanding of that kind of stuff then me. Personally I think it looks great though and prefer it to Eternals version, which looks way too noisy to me.

Regardless of what sprite gets used though I sure hope this guy does the animation, attack animations are one of the weakest parts of Wesnoths art imo, and this dragons fire breath attack blows about 90% of the attack animations in Wesnoth out of the water.

[thespaceinvader]

Good for you.

Big animations generally do look more impressive. Particularly when a significant amount of wesnoth's other attack animations aren't done yet...

[Jacques_Fol]

I am pleased to report that, with the gracious support of pixelmind who not only drew this beauty but also provided me with the images I needed, I have included both the sprite art and two portraits of this beautiful animal in my A Rough Life campaign. For more on the actual campaign and the update in question, see the ARL thread. Here, let me just recap what was used and how:

- as for the portrait, I'm using both the head image and the one showing a bit more of the neck and shoulders (but no wings); alternating between them makes for an interesting effect of having the "camera" more or less zoomed in on the unit as "it" speaks,

- as for the sprite, I have coded both the S and N animations of the fire breath attack, and the S animation of the backhand snap attack; here, be gentle, as I have never coded animations before and did my best to emulate the perfect smoothness of pixelmind's animations in this thread, but would be happy to have an expert improve on the code to really bring them up to par. For those interested in detail, here's how I did it:

Spoiler:

First, I took the Fire Dragon unit.cfg file as the base and created a custom-made Dragon Lord unit type. It is pretty similar to the Fire Dragon, just that it only has two attacks instead of three. (It also claims (in its own description) to be better than Fire Dragon, and if you play the campaign, you may end up agreeing.)

Then, I looked both at the original Fire Dragon animation (which uses an outdated code) and the Vampire Bat animation to give me ideas on how to code the aminations, and studied the AnimationWML page. I've never yet done the animations, but WML once again proved to be very user-friendly, and I was soon coding away.

Pixelmind kindly provided me with the basic order of the frames to achieve the animations. I may have misplaced (or could not find) one of the frames for the snap animation, but even that was solved with some recycling. What I had to do was primarily to try and figure out the duration of each frame to achieve a similar effect to pixelmind's smooth forum animations. Having two computer screens next to each other, one showing this forum thread and the other my in-game animations attempts, was most helpful; as was "accelerating" the game to one fourth of its original speed (now I know what that is for).

Finally, two attack-specific challenges.

For the fire breath animations, I had to try and match the fire missile (aka jets of flame) to the positioning of the unit, a task further complicated when it came to the straight-north- and straight-south-facing animations (where one is in danger of the fire either not coming out of the mouth as it's supposed to or missing the unit that it's supposed to be hitting). I hope I did a decent enough job, but would be entirely happy if one of the coding wizards showed me how to improve it.

And for the snap attack, I had to find some way to make the big south-directed swipe work for north-oriented attacks. The easy way was to have the unit barely move when doing south-directed attacks and skate towards the northern-placed hexes when attacking the units there. Not perfect, but satisfied me. Again, improvements would of course be taken on board.

I have also added some basic defense animation; not that this beast would generally worry about defense much, of course.

I have to say that it works in-game just as well as one could hope. Both the unit and its portrait make an impressive entrance in the scenario in which they first appear. For those familiar with the campaign, you know what I mean. For the others, the best way may be to simply try it out.

Spoiler:

The dragon, which is the main villain of the campaign, appears in scenario 7. The first six scenarios are very short (the only partial exception being scenario 5), so it shouldn't take too long to reach scenario 7.

If you are really interested in seeing the dragon in action and can't find the time to play the first scenarios of the campaign, however, a quick fix to the campaign code may get you right to the action. If you don't know how to do it, send me a PM and I'll help you.

Thank you again for this wonderful art, pixelmind, and I hope you like the way your creation works in game. Let me know if there's anything that should be fixed.

PS Oh yes, I forgot to mention this:

Spoiler:

The image folder also includes all the images that would be needed for the flying animation (the one seen here, if I'm not mistaken). Now, I didn't use it yet, as I felt it would be too big a challenge to figure out how to do it properly. (For instance, it would probably not work as an idle animation, at least not for this particular character.)

That said, I wanted to include the frames with the bundle so that if anyone more skilled decides the flying animation could be added to the unit's animations, they can do so and/or let me know how to include it. It was the flying animation that got us all so enamoured by this dragon, after all, so it would be nice if it could eventually be used.

[SomeOneNamedMe]

This is pretty late but in the portrait and the sprite the horns are to small and look to me like a young goats horns when i think they should look more like they did originaly.

Also both dragon sprites could be used (if remade in the pixel art style) in mainline as different dragons, Eternals a rouge and reckless dragon. Pixel minds would be a more intelligent dragon.

[Huston]

yes pixelminds dragon does look better (no offense eternal) but i doubt they'd include 2 variations of the fire dragon in the game.

[thespaceinvader]

Please don't try to second guess the art team's decisions. We'll include what we choose to include, when we choose to include it. Unless you have anything to say in terms of critique of the art, please don't say it.

[lostnumber]

Please don't try to second guess the art team's decisions. We'll include what we choose to include, when we choose to include it. Unless you have anything to say in terms of critique of the art, please don't say it.

So wait, let me get this straight. The community isn't allowed to have any input into the art design of Wesnoth? That seems a little silly for a game that is created by the community for the community.

I mean obviously not every art choice can just come down to a poll, but to say "well we are the artists, we dont care what you players think" seems pretty self-centered to me...

[thespaceinvader]

Discussion moved to PM to avoid cluttering the thread. Further off-topic replies will be deleted.

[pixelmind]

C'mon guys,
no more discussions whether or not this dragon is going to mainline because it will not in it's current form.
Though every UMC-creator is free to use it.

Here is an update of the impact-attack


And another take on the wings

[thespaceinvader]

I like the cracks, but they're definitely not appropriate for all terrains - I think you could probably do with improving the 'splash' overall. That small point aside, though, that looks great. The portrait is coming on well, too.

[Exasperation]

As amazing as that animation looks, I think it doesn't reach far enough when it hits. Instead of having its feet land back where they started, I think it should land with its forelegs stretched out farther towards its enemy, then have a couple frames of recovery to get its feet back where they were. I made a quick mock-up from your prototype of the animation to show what I mean.