ZylonBane on 16/10/2012 at 19:34

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I've found eBay, of all places, to be a surprisingly effective image resource. (http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=book+set) For example.

Renzatic on 16/10/2012 at 20:45

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I'd go with the bottom one, personally. Looks more natural.

...but I don't know if it works as a drop in replacement now. The shape is now off compared to the original, which might lead to some weirdness in certain situations.

I think this is where we're mostly disagreeing with. I think shape, proportion, and design are more important to the look and feel of the original, rather than complete adherence to absolutely every single shade of color on the original. I mean you don't want to go all out and make a red brick wall a blue one, but there is tons of room for reinterpretation when it comes to raw colors. Specially when you're going from a source that only had a limited selection to choose from during creation, and was tied to an even more limited color index per family.

Think to yourself why that panel is colored that way. Ingame, those purples and reds look like they're there to act as torchlight highlights. You're trying to make them into stains on wood, and you're having to change the shape and look of the texture itself to make those weird ass colors look even a quarter of the way decent.

Think of it like this: you're making a sprite for a modern console game, based off one on an old NES game. You want your update to take advantage of the miracles of modern technology, while still keeping true to the spirit of the original. The NES had 16 colors allowable onscreen, 320x200 resolution, and a 1200 color base palette (this isn't right, but bear with me). On the console, you have up to 1920x1080 resolution, displayable colors and palette both sporting theoretically upwards of 16.7 million colors. When you remake this sprite, you're going to want to capture the look and spirit of the original as closely as possible, but still take advantage of the extra colors and resolution you now have available to you. This doesn't mean you have to use one specific shade of blue for shadows, you have a much larger gradient to work with they did. They only had so much to choose from back in the NES days, and had to get by the best they could. With higher resolutions and a deeper palette, you have much more freedom. What the NES guys had to cheat at and imply to achieve, you can now draw and show.

In other words, you don't want to draw an 800x800 Megaman, then overlay the old 80x80 NES sprite on top of it to get the colors as close as possible. You have to redraw, and reinterpret.

Trying to stick as closely to the colors of the original Thief, as in every highlight, every shadow, every green 5 pixel cluster that's supposed to be moss, is only going to net you janky textures. Stick to the proportions, but reinterpret the colors.



Great! The more books I've got to work with, the merrier.

Nameless Voice on 16/10/2012 at 21:06

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The bevel at the top / bottom edge doesn't look like a real gap between two pieces of wood.

LarryG on 16/10/2012 at 21:34

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That "line' is actually part of the natural grain of the wood I used for the texture. But if it bugs you ...

I also tweaked the bevels to try and please NV.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1372[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]1372[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH=CONFIG]1372[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]1372[/ATTACH]

Edit: The shape is dead on. I've overlayed the original on top of the new one many times. All the major elements are the same size and location.

I had a version which was a much closer color match as well, but no one seemed to want that. So I'm bowing to the inevitable consensus of preferences expressed here as the definition of an acceptable drop-in replacement.

EDIT2:

Or maybe NV wants a wider shallower bevel? The request is still not clear to me.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1373[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]1373[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH=CONFIG]1373[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]1373[/ATTACH]

LarryG on 16/10/2012 at 21:50

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@NV: Which, the 1st or the 2nd?