[PixVoxel] Very Diverse Ortho Wargame Sprites
by TEttinger (2D Art, posted Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - 22:16)
Tags: Isometric, pixvoxel, wargame, Strategy, pixelart, Modern, zombie, complete

TL;DR version: This is an update of my previous ortho wargame sprites (which were already a revised version), with a wide range of improvements! There's about 3.8 million images, in 304 palettes, two new units (Flamethrower vehicle and Recon vehicle), quite a few human skin tones and lots of hair colors, a lot of variations on alien skin colors/eye colors/fire effect colors, new female soldiers for units with a visible human in addition to the existing male soldiers, with slight differences in pose, shape, and face, new zombie versions of all units, with battle damage on facilities and vehicles and gray-green-skinned, red-eyed, head-wounded zombie soldiers (of both sexes they could have had in life), new terrain that should be less distracting, and of course all 36 units, 12 super-sized units, and 7 facilities (in normal and super sizes) that were in the last version. There's a massive (when extracted, about 15-16 GB on disk) archive of all images with "real" color, and a much smaller archive that has "blank" images that you can apply a palette to with code (such as in a shader) so players don't need to download a "metric zillion" GB of sprites. You will need the free program 7-Zip, or some equivalent for your OS, to extract the files.
How's it look? Here's a preview of just PNG still images of all units/facilities with the 8 main paint colors and only one skin/hair color scheme; it may take a while to load but hopefully won't break Firefox. Previews with some of the 304 possible color schemes for humans, aliens, and zombies (GIF-heavy, will likely crash Firefox but will probably display fine in Chrome/Chromium/Opera): standing, aliens standing, zombies standing, firing, aliens firing, zombies firing, dying, aliens dying, zombies (re-)dying.
EDIT: In the first upload of this set, super-sized models in this ortho mode had a problematic visual glitch; this has been fixed in the current download.
The new .7z archive, "Diverse_PixVoxel_Wargame_Ortho_A.7z", is a mere 69.5 MB to download. However, it will extract into a massive folder that will, depending on your system, take roughly 16 GB of disk space, since there are nearly 3.8 million images here. The majority of these are palette swaps for different skin and hair colors, but about a third are "Alien" species with non-human skin/eye colors, no hair, and "unusual" technology that produces different colors for fire, sparks, and smoke, a large amount are "Alt" versions that use an alternate image (not just a palette swap) to show a female soldier instead of a male one, and a decent amount more are "zombie" equivalents of everything, with battle damage all over the zombie-like units. There were 8 palettes in an early version, with 8 different paint colors for vehicles and clothing but the same caucasian-like skin color for 7 paint colors and an alien skin color (pale green, with green fire effects) for 1 paint color. Now there are 304 instead of 8 (!), with each group of 8 repeating the same 8 main paint colors but with a different skin/hair color combination. 0-207 are human skin colors with a variety of natural and non-natural hair colors, 208-295 are aliens, and 296-303 are zombies. Some human palettes are bald (hair color is skin color), and all aliens are hairless. The bald palettes looks strange on the "Alt" female units due to their slightly longer hair (which becomes longer flaps of skin when colored with a bald palette), and the previews use a different hair color for female units when the male counterpart is bald. Some humans have non-natural hair color for people who dye their hair or to go along with anime conventions (bright green, blue, and pink hair are possible for the "standard anime" skin tone, all skin tones have gray hair as an option, and there are a few extra palettes for normally-rare skin/hair combinations, like dark skin with blonde hair).
The set of terrains here are new, but don't have height or slopes; in practice, getting movement to look natural while changing height wasn't exactly possible for significant height differences, and very small height differences weren't at all apparent. These terrains use a "camouflage-like" effect with overlapping chunks of color, and use muted tones so the colorful military units stand out instead of the background terrain tiles.
The death animations this uses are about the same as the previous set, but still may be new to you if you only saw the earliest set. Humanoid units are knocked onto their back (90 degrees) by an explosion, their weapon flies away, and they lie on their back engulfed in flame (any cases where there was any gore, except for zombies (where it is green), should be gone now; any time blood would appear, non-distinct skin-color does instead). Ground vehicles do a full flip (180 degrees), possibly scattering into pieces. Naval ships explode and sink into the "ground" (which of course should be water for a ship). Planes and helicopters tilt, crash into the ground, and THEN explode, scattering a wave of flaming debris across the ground. Buildings still are reduced to dust in a wide explosion. Bigger versions are present for the super-sized units, of course!
See the UNIT_INFO.txt file (in a top folder after extracting) for some important information on how things are structured. One missing piece of info is how the receive animations work: in short, palettes 0-7 are used for all the human and zombie palettes (humans from 0 to 207 and zombies from 296-303, with palette 0 used for all multiples of 8, palette 1 for all 1 greater than a multiple of 8, etc.), but the alien palettes (in folder "Alien", numbered 208-295) use the same palette for both the attacker and the receive animation due to fire color changing. The folders are split up so it's easier to remove colors you don't expect to use, or remove aliens and/or zombies entirely. Removing units is a little trickier, but, for instance, all the Tank images with a given palette are in a folder called Tank.
The isometric version of these sprites was released here on OGA earlier this week, but it is not "compatible" with the same viewing angle and unit size as these ortho sprites.
Enjoy!