FreeOrion

I'm a 3D / 2D artist freelancer. I was looking for a way to help
FreeOrion regarding artwork.
From what I understand FreeOrion mainly use static images/sprites,
with a few animations.
I wanted to know what should be improved or if there is a
ToDo list regarding stuff to do regarding art.

I can mainly do: Planets, Landscape, Space art, GUI design, Icons.

A few examples of work I did:




Kind regards

It's amazing how artwork adds so much to a game especially hand drawn stuff.

We don't, currently, have an art todo list, we haven't got intot he habit of putting art requests onto Github and I've had a tendency to reuse old art for things we removed when I create stuff.

However, we need one, I suspect a Github label would be the best bet.

The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is the Space Elevator, that needs its own icon. There's undoubtedly other stuff, but we recently had virtually all the ship hulls redone, which was nice—there are a few still using dated dev art that could do with work, the higher end energy hulls being the most obvious.

There is a non-maintained list of graphics work here: http://freeorion.org/index.php/Graphics_Work

It's not of much use though, and we haven't really had a working graphics lead for a while now.

My suggestions:

For immersion purposes, having relatively large and similarly-styled artist's impression of all the species, to include in their pedia articles might be nice.

Many of the ship hulls could use fancier graphics as seen on the design screen.

Various techs, specials, buildings, and similar content could use updated icons.

Some GUI icons for different part types in the ship design screen to replace the text button labels...

Update some of the tech category icons in on the tech tree filter widnow, particular to make it clearer which are selected or not.

Feel free to suggest things that need updating if you notice them in the game, as well...

MatGB wrote:I suspect a Github label would be the best bet.

I renamed the "game asset" category to "art music text assets". https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/ ... t%20assets Should hopefully be clearer. If there are enough issues specific to art and it seems useful, the category can be split.

Hi Sam, welcome to the forums!
Other than what has been mentioned, there are some galaxy shapes (in the galaxy setup window) that don't have their own graphic yet: disc and box.

Geoff wrote:For immersion purposes, having relatively large and similarly-styled artist's impression of all the species, to include in their pedia articles might be nice.

Yes, I'd love to see that as well. They will also be useful when we implement diplomacy (at some point).

Yeah, finally found an IP not blacklisted

I can now write a proper post, first of all thanks for your answers. I will check what can I do for the space elevator icon. What kind of style should be used ? What are the dimensions ?

I'm working right now on the galaxy shape. From my experience I suggest to create pictures at bigger resolution and keep them even if in the game it will be a small resolution. Because we can in the future use the bigger/better picture .

[edit] What is a galaxy with the shape of a box ? [/edit]

I had also a few questions regarding the game:

1) What engine FreeOrion is using ?
2) What are the possibilities (especially regarding animation)
3) Is it possible to use several layers for a particular image ?

I was thinking to improve the Welcome screen at the begining, by separating into several layers a picture and adding small animations. For instance a slow moving nebula or clouds around the planet.

Sam

sam wrote:I will check what can I do for the space elevator icon. What kind of style should be used ? What are the dimensions ?

What's needed is a building graphic, 64x64 px should suffice. (A general icon already exists: https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/ ... evator.png). Examples for the style used for building graphics can be found here: https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/ ... s/building (e. g. archive.png or palace.png).

What is a galaxy with the shape of a box?

There's no such thing in reality - afaik

Larger icons (within reason) is also OK, as long as they still look OK scaled down to standard size in the GUI.

1) What engine FreeOrion is using ?

The freeorion engine? Depends what you mean by engine, I suppose... SDL, Gigi, a bunch of custom code.

2) What are the possibilities (especially regarding animation)

See the asteroids in-game, which are an animation made by looping a series of images: https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/ ... /asteroids
Textures can be rotated and scaled, such as the system and fleet selection indicators, or translated, like the fleet movement lines.

3) Is it possible to use several layers for a particular image ?

Yes, see fleet icons, which are a composition of heads and tails to indicate different information.

If there's something specific you want to do, then let me / us know and it might be doable or implementable.

I started the redesign of all galaxy icons. Not sure what you will think about it because they are quite different compared to the current ones:

All galaxies have their specific color + a very minimalist vector icon

http://imgur.com/a/sBMLw

Let me know what you think about it and if I should continue this way or you prefer me to keep the current design and only add the box and the disc galaxy

Switching between the different big white icons feels / looks nice, but the different colour backgrounds seem a bit odd. The aspect ratio is different, so it looks a bit weird in game, and the extra horizontal shaded region is iffy.

Thanks for the feedback. I have the gimp source file so I can easily resize/remove things.

I added the black shaded region to increase the contrast between the background and the logo. About the aspect ratio, I can also change it easily, the extra space around the logo is designed for that.

Sam

I definitely like the basic idea though—I'm guessing we'll all have aesthetic quibbles but the logo/background idea is a really good idea.

sam wrote:What is a galaxy with the shape of a box?

Heh. Legacy code

Awhileback Vezzra was working on the new galaxy generation model and I commented that the then Irregular layout was more like a square than irregular. So he created a new, actually irregular, layout. But, the old layout was fun to play on, even though it made little sense in terms of the observable universe. So we kept it and renamed it Box. If anyone comes up with a better name for it, that'd be cool, but we want to keep it because, well, gameplay trumps realism, always.

I finished the icons

All icons aspect ration can be easily changed, I'm just used to do everything in "Power of Two" textures. Maybe we can also make the icon bigger in game.

All icons have a distinct vector high contrast logo + a background. I can animate the background (like stars glowing and sparkling). I renamed the "box" galaxy, Diamond galaxy because I think the name is better.

I also used color to distinguish galaxy classes. All spirals galaxies have a general blue hues, while circles/disk one have a yellow/orange, etc

http://imgur.com/a/9p6rI

Maybe my changes are too radicals compared to the general style of FreeOrion.

If you have any suggestions about the icons, feel free to write it!

Sam

Hi sam,

Great progress here, just to compare with some generated galaxies: http://imgur.com/a/qOFII
A semi quick mash-up, so not at the exact same zoom levels.

I left spirals out as those are pretty straight forward.
The difference between cluster and box is more prominent with the smaller system count.

One tiny nit pick
Galaxy 'Branches' are traditionally referred to as 'Arms'.
Looks good.