[PixVoxel] Mini Isometric Wargame Sprites
by TEttinger (2D Art, posted Sunday, October 30, 2016 - 00:58)
Tags: Isometric, pixvoxel, wargame, Strategy, pixelart, Modern, complete

TL;DR version: This is an altered subset of my previous, larger isometric wargame sprites, with less files but a smaller size for each image that should be more suitable in games that need a lot of graphics. There's about 2.6 million images, in 296 palettes, with some relatively new units (Flamethrower vehicle and Recon vehicle, present in the last isometric version), 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, re-added sloped and stackable terrain that should be less distracting, and of course all 36 units and 7 facilities that were in the last version, except for the zombie and super-size versions. There's a massive (when extracted, about 10 GB on disk) archive of all images with "real" color, and a 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" 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 red and blue for 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 296 possible color schemes for humans and aliens (GIF-heavy, will likely crash Firefox but will probably display fine in Chrome/Chromium/Opera): standing, aliens standing, firing, aliens firing, dying, aliens dying.
The sprites here are essentially the same as the earlier versions (albeit without the super-sized or zombie units), but since they are smaller, they can fit in far fewer textures when used with texture atlases. Using the blank sprites in texture atlases and a separate image for palettes only requires two 4096x4096 texture pages to be bound, plus a 256x256 page for the human and terrain palettes (256x512 if you want all the aliens too). I haven't linked example code for the palette swap shader recently (maybe at all), but I have an open-source game in Java that you can grab the GLSL shader code from. You can also get the already-compressed assets, if you want the blank sprites assembled into texture atlases in LibGDX's format. Note that whitespace is stripped from the edges of each image, which requires some extra handling to display but allows much tighter packing into the texture atlases.
The new .7z archive, "Diverse_PixVoxel_Wargame_Iso_Mini.7z", is a mere 39.2 MB to download. However, it will extract into a massive folder that will, depending on your system, take roughly 10 GB of disk space, since there are nearly 2.6 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, and 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. 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 296 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, and 208-295 are aliens. 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 slightly expanded from the last set and have slopes; although, in practice, getting movement to look natural while changing height is difficult for significant height differences, and when I tried smaller height differences they weren't at all apparent. Most of these terrains use a very subtle set of shades of one color, and use muted tones so the colorful military units stand out instead of the background terrain tiles. The new Volcano and Poison tiles, notably, are much more bold, since they represent obvious hazards.
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 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.

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 palettes (from 0 to 207, 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 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 ortho version of these sprites has been uploaded here on OGA, but it is not "compatible" with the same viewing angle and unit size as these mini isometric sprites. The larger isometric version isn't exactly compatible either, but is more detailed and is also here on OGA.
Enjoy!