[PixVoxel] Diverse Ortho Wargame Sprites
by TEttinger (2D Art, posted Sunday, December 20, 2015 - 13:27)
Tags: Modern, wargame, orthographic, pixvoxel, Strategy, 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 over 2.4 million images, in 296 palettes, with new (better) death animations, the same firing animations as before, cleaned up slighly, some approximation of quite a few human skin tones and lots of hair colors, a lot of variations on alien skin colors/eye colors/fire effect colors, 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) 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 5-10 GB of sprites.
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 296 possible color schemes (GIF-heavy, will likely crash Firefox but will probably display fine in Chrome/Chromium): standing, aliens standing, firing, aliens firing, dying, aliens dying.
The new .7z archive, "Diverse_PixVoxel_Wargame_Ortho.7z", is a mere 40 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 over 2.4 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. There were 8 palettes in the previous 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 colors and 208-295 are alien. Some human palettes are bald (hair color is skin color), and all aliens are hairless. 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 most noticeable change to the available animations might be the new death animations, where the previous gory/fiery explosion that everything used earlier is replaced with a individualized death animation. 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. Bigger versions are present for the super-sized units, of course! There's also some changes to artifacts that were in the last version; a fix to weird striping effects on the tops of some super-sized units should be noticeable on Plane_T in particular.
See the UNIT_INFO.txt file (it's the same in every folder they appear in) 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.
Isometric version is now complete, here on OGA. There's also the earlier revised isometric sprites, but other than a smaller download there isn't much reason to use them. Neither of these sets have the same viewing angle or image size as these ortho sprites, so they aren't exactly "compatible" with each other.
Enjoy!