Redrawing the Character Portraits?

[CT]

The demo of LOL is really impressive, but the low quality of the character portraits during dialogue scenes is bugging me out.

Is there some way to edit them? I'd like to replace them with my own, upgraded portraits.

[Hiro_Antagonist]

All of the graphics in the game are completely modable.

Sometime soonish I'll release a 'graphics mod guide', detailing the specifics of how to edit all of the images.

In the meantime, here's the super-fast explanation:
-If you replace any images, don't forget to back up the originals in case you decide to go back. The easiest way is probably to just zip the whole images folder before you change anything.
-Your new files should use the exact same filenames, image types, and framesizes as the current images.
-You can replace one image, multiple images, or all images -- your choice.
-There are 5 shades of team colors used in images with team coloring. (unit tiles, full unit images, group photos, flag images.) These colors, in order of darkest to lightest are:
#661430
#CC295F
#FF0055
#FF99BB
#FFCCDD
You can see how these colors are used by cracking open any of the existing unit images. Basically, anyplace you want to have team-colored pixels, use those colors. The engine will change those colors to the team colors automatically, with the general shade/hue of the color above matching the shade/hue of the final team coloring. You will never actually see the color listed above in the game, because it's replaced.

If you'd like, feel free to post any replacement art you come up with and want to share with others!

-Hiro_Antagonist

[CT]

Hiro,

Well, I gave it a shot and threw in the towel. I learned a few few things on the way, though.

I like how LOL uses common file formats, but there are a couple of things that work against contributors hoping to better character portraits. I'm not saying this to rip on LOL, and I'm sure that advanced graphics-handling routines were the last thing on your mind while developing such an engaging strategy game. But hopefully these few remarks will help your next project be even more modder-friendly:


1. Dialogue portraits are clipped regions from Battle portraits
The biggest drawback to me is a side effect of a clever trick you used with the graphics: the portraits used during dialogue are just clipped regions of the "versus" graphics that are shown during battles. The problem is that I can't change the region that is used so I have to be very careful about the position of the head in the versus graphic, lest it be in the wrong spot during dialogue scenes. Not only that, but a fighting portrait isn't always the best expression during conversations. It would look better (and be easier on any would-be modder artists) to have dialogue-only portraits for various emotions and keep them separate from the battle images (which I personally turn off anyway).

2. The file format is GIF
The GIF format is pretty restrictive for in-game art, versus some other common formats. It doesn't allow for many colors and doesn't have any alpha shading properties (good for merging outlines that aren't 100% black into the background). 24-bit PNG with alpha shaded transparency would probably offer the most flexibility in this regard.

3. Only five team colors
The five team colors are also limiting. I can't blur two team shades with the line art or each other without using at least a few colors outside of those five. This is a huge drawback, at least to the way I'm used to coloring. A more forgiving team-coloring method might be to use a mask over a grayscale base image and apply color to masked portions via some sort of blending method.

So, that's what I've found. None of this is meant as a harsh criticism of LOL- I'm hoping these observations will help you make your next project even more modder-friendly. It will encourage more participation if everything is working for would-be artists as much as possible.

For what it's worth, I whipped up a conceptual Elf Runner image before throwing in the towel. Here's a side-by-side, for comparison's sake:


The uncolored line art is here, if anyone would care to mod the mod. ;P

[Hiro_Antagonist]

Hey, that looks really good.

You're absolutely right about the character portrait crops -- I hadn't even thought about that being an issue.

I'll keep that in mind, and see if I can come up w/ any easy way to let players override those.

As for the gif's and 5-color team coloring things, yeah, we recognize those are atypical limitation, but we made those decisions for what we thought were good decisions at the time. And even still, I don't think they were horrible decisions given the constraints of LOL, but we're going to do things differently in the future. Specifically, our plan is to use much smaller images (no more 400x600 or anything close), and do 2-layer images (w/ alpha). The 'bottom' later will be the character, and the 'top' layer will be a grayscale crop of just the team-colored areas, which would be dynamically colored at runtime.

I apologize for not thinking about the effects of the cropping rectangles on the finished product, but you really have made a super cool piece of art!

-Hiro_Antagonist

[Combat Wombat]

Wow thats nice

[Quitch]

Allow me to come in late and say what a great bit of art that is.