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[SatchelCharge]

I like the new one overall but I think the bulbs around the turret mounts are too pronounced.

[Bobakanoosh]

I like the new Eagle look! Although, I somewhat agree that a sense of scale can be lost if certain ships are "smoothed out" too much. But then it makes you think about the canon side of things. Like how all these ships, to my understanding, are produced in automated factories. The ship design with the thousands of plates welded/bolted together indicated that workers made the ship, but a large ship made with fewer, larger plates indicates that it was made in a robotic-centric production line, where robotic arms that can handle the extra weight move and attach the pieces.

The color of the new Eagle makes me think of a new model that hasn't been painted yet, but has a corrosion/rust preventative coating on it. It'd be great if there was a way to change the color of a given ship in-game.

[icepick37]

I was super defensive of your greebled style coming into the article, haha. I have loved it for years, but you totally sold me by the end.

That new eagle looks pretty sweet. Maybe a little bubblier, which could ruin it's "Imperial death machine!" vibe if taken too far, but with the guns mounted it still looks right.

It's fun seeing how you've grown as an artist over the years. Keep rocking it!

Also, yes more ships please, always more ships. 

[kazi]

I freaking love the new Eagle and the new ship. DON'T LISTEN TO THEM DAVID!!!! 

Any plans to redraw existing ships in the new style? I think the Condor and Gemini could benefit most. The current Condor sprite never quite truly captured the "Millennium Falcon"-feel of the original concept art.

[xenoargh]

There is a key line in the post that I think applies to the point you raise: "The impetus for this revision is, really, driven by a desire to create some ‘skin’ variants. And doing so was bloody impossible with all those greebles mucking things up!"

Hmm! Hmmm.

I agree with that sentiment and I get the problem.  Trying out specific paint schemes with a greeble-covered ship is somewhat harder and can be really annoying  

That said, I think that the point about a sense of scale is probably the biggest issue.  The easiest solution for that is to simply add some functional-looking specific greebles that stand out, or some pixel-art touchup to bring out some things.  Here, I gave it a go:



I didn't touch any of the features or invent any new forms.  I just brought what I could see out a little bit more, which helps re-establish scale quite a lot.  It isn't perfect but I think it describes what I'm talking about better than more verbiage might

[David]

That said, I think that the point about a sense of scale is probably the biggest issue.  The easiest solution for that is to simply add some functional-looking specific greebles that stand out, or some pixel-art touchup to bring out some things.

I forgot to mention in the post: another reason why I'm wary of relying on classical pixeling is the fact of Starsector's changing zoom level and sprite rotation. If you can guarantee that a pixel is always exactly a pixel, then it can work with that precision. If you can't, then traditional pixel art techniques can lead to some weird artifacts as you zoom in and out and rotate. Not to say that the techniques are totally inapplicable, just that they might need to compromise a bit.

And the sprite one posts on a blog, or on the forum, or draws in Photoshop isn't what players will see in-game. It's what is experienced in-game that must be of absolutely overriding concern.

[SafariJohn]

I prefer the white-ish color scheme of the Eagle on the left, but that one on the right sure would be intimidating to encounter!

[xenoargh]

I think the zoom level consideration is one of those technical factors that's largely out of your (and Alex's, for that matter, given how he's rendering) control; different GPUs will handle the fine details of rasterization at different zooms differently. 

About the only way to get semi-firm control over that would be to render the sprites with a shader pass designed to arrive at a very specific outcome, in terms of what people will see.  It's quite possible to run a shader to do pixel-pixel comparisons, sharpen up heights, etc., although once again, you get into some compromises, such as having to be quite careful about adjacent pixel values for some things, using some very specific colors as control objects, etc.

So there's a lot of that that's kind of beyond your control as an artist.  the main issues are, to my mind:  "does it look really hot at 1:1, in the equip screen" and "does it look terrible at max zoom on our test hardware because <insert thing here> is problematic as pixels get averaged". 

If neither is an issue, it's working about as well as it's going to.  With shaders filtering the results to a very specific requirement (i.e., rendering out all ships, weapons, etc., to a FBO first, then manipulating, then writing a quad to the screen), you can tune things better.



Here, we're looking at what could happen with different filters, at 2X zoom.  This is bicubic, bilinear, nearest neighbor, bicubic_smoother + nearest neighbor @ 50%, bilinear  + nearest neighbor @ 50%.  This is further out than Vanilla lets us zoom out, of course, but you can see a lot of difference, in terms of quality and feel.  Most GPUs are basically doing bilinear passes, but aniso steps in to re-sharpen a bit, if enabled, so it's a good starting place but suffers from a bit of mush.  With a shader, you can control it a bit better across hardware.

A shader could even do a bit of rebalancing after that filter is done, adjusting contrasts a bit, like using Curves, resulting in better overall recognizable shapes and such, too.  Bilinear, with enhancement (a Curves step, basically just a push filter, followed by a Sharpen step, which is a nearest-neighbor filter):


And that could happen in a really subtle way, based on a zoom value sent to the shader as a uniform, so that it doesn't pop from one thing to the other.

Anyhow, there is a lot of stuff that's possible there, at a technical level; shaders to do post is probably the best single tool besides what's in the art.  I agree that what's in the art can make or break the piece, but I think there are things that can be done to minimize the impact

[selkathguy]

[...]
About the only way to get semi-firm control over that would be to render the sprites with a shader pass designed to arrive at a very specific outcome, in terms of what people will see.  It's quite possible to run a shader to do pixel-pixel comparisons, sharpen up heights, etc., although once again, you get into some compromises, such as having to be quite careful about adjacent pixel values for some things, using some very specific colors as control objects, etc.
[...]

This post is insightful and deserves attention.  Considering Alex is very interested in the artistic aspects, and as a developer myself with HLSL experience, this seems fairly important as it can can strongly affect the feel of the presentation.  However I am selfishly eager to play with the new features since, judging by the blog posts, v.65.2a is way behind the trunk.

[Schwartz]

I agree with the gist of it, but not with your opinion of that particular oil liner ship being overly greebly. Look - you have distinctiveness everywhere. Distinct engine compartments, a distinct side cockpit, some industrial foundation and a very recognizable red tank theme. They all work to create a spaceship with a distinctive look. You allowed yourself some room for 'technobabble' and some room for bigger, distinctive shapes. That creates a nice contrast. Now look at the Dominator. It's just -some kind of shape- with sub-shapes drawn on it. You may say it's less greebly, but it's also less distinctively a spaceship. It could be a high-tech shield, the front view of a robot or a massive futuristic power plant. I'm not trying to take a shot at your designs. They're very cool and unique, but I feel equally as important as 'noise' is the idea of distinct pattern clusters. The red tanks are one such cluster, the engine array is another. The Dominator also has nice engines, but it feels more 'flat', probably largely because of the way that it's coloured in gradients all over. If the middle triangle was, for example, an orange, and the two arms were red with a menacing pattern.. it would suddenly pop out that the triangle is meant to be 'above'. Just some food for thought.

Also a part of the problem is that weapons can be so big that they overshadow the sprite work underneath. I'd be curious to see how they looked if they were all downsized a bit, maybe with fixed-guns halfway hidden and layered 'underneath' some kind of fitting manifold distinct to individual ships or tech types. More ship, less distraction.

Nice Eagle by the way. Love the little sphere islands for the guns.

Anyway, keep doing what you're doing and go for your own vision. Redesign where you feel it's due. You can't go wrong there.

[xenoargh]

I am selfishly eager to play with the new features since, judging by the blog posts, v.65.2a is way behind the trunk.

I actually agree with you on that; it's not really broken and these issues are mainly about polish; but we all love watching David fussing with polish

[Marrow85]

I happen to love your Greebles! I'm an old school gamer and am sick to death of the over simplification of graphics in modern games, I loved the old dark graphics of diablo and the classic space pixel art. I find the drive for smooth shapes, bright colours and easy user freindlyness just plain ugly and childish. Ok maybe loose the odd bit of piping but please don't go all MMO on us! Any real spaceship should be held together by nails and gaffa tape, with the odd bit of tinfoil poking out (these are the bits nasa don't show you and the reason space x hasn't got going yet... not enough bodging, too many PR committees)

[Xanderzoo]

Overall, I agree with you. Too many greebles can confuse the viewer and detract from the ship's design. However, the new Eagle just doesn't work for me... It feels like a scaled down concept art rather than a finished ship. It's just a little too smooth. I quite like the little shuttle ship you made!

[Megas]

I thought old-school ships were vector outlines (early '80s games made by Atari or Cinematronics), simple sprites (Galaxian/Galaga), or crude polygons.  Smooth is really old-school probably because of hardware limitations.

[xenoargh]

Yeah; real Old Skool is basically about limitations on memory and hardware in general more than anything else.  When I see it done on purpose, especially to the point of ridiculousness (16-color palette for a whole modern game rendered using modern tech, for example), I generally cringe.  There's absolutely nothing wrong from learning from the genius of the past (pixel-art palette tricks and the wonderful tricks they used with ramps, yo) but that doesn't mean that I just want to see it repeated over and over again ad nauseum.

It's one of the reasons I quit playing Reassembly pretty fast; it's pretty swell... for vector art that isn't Out of This World... but it's still very flat and I honestly wish its game-design depth was presented more effectively, visually.

I think that SS's best ships are, if anything, very much not of that world; they're firmly in 32-bit and they're huuuuuge by Old Skool sprite standards, which I like a lot.