Mageziya's Irrelevant Sprites

[Noah Buttes]

I made a dumb proof-of-concept thing for fun.


Behold, the Crown of Nice and Happy Feelings, or just the Marble Crown. It's just meant to be a thematic opposite to the Obsidian crown. Clean and symmetric to the wild asymmetry of the obsidian crown, while still being pointy and having an eye. It also uses some personal designs.

I'll probably only make worn sprites and attempt to further clean up the sprite if its wanted for actual use, though the concept is pretty dumb.

I fucking love it and will totally make a patch for it if I get enough time.

[Mageziya]

Well, that's a reason to keep working on it. I'll work on worn sprites and a DMI in the meantime.

A question though it, what would it exactly do? It probably wouldn't exactly function as a clone of the Obsidian Crown.

[Noah Buttes]

Well, that's a reason to keep working on it. I'll work on worn sprites and a DMI in the meantime.

A question though it, what would it exactly do? It probably wouldn't exactly function as a clone of the Obsidian Crown.

An exceptionally easy way to implement it would be to give it all the friendly banter that the obsidian crown provides, minus any of the effects.

Basically, a buddy that fits on your head.

[Mageziya]

Maybe since its the thematic opposite to the obsidian crown, apply that in its function?

The obsidian crown's purpose its extremely self-centered, essentially a tool for someone to become the ultimate robuster, at the eventual cost of their life.

The marble crown would probably act in a more group-centered manner, meant to help people at the cost of someone's own life. The closest that I could think of would be to heal others, like the healing touch mutation. The problem with this though is implementation and balance.

There's also the ultimate problem of the obsidian crown being tied to the broad tele-sci lore, which would cause people to reject the marble crown regardless of what it does.

---

I managed to make worn sprites.


And the DMI is attached. Do note that I don't know any of the file naming conventions for this game.

There's also a item-sprite in the DMI where I tried messing with transparency to create smoother edges to the crown's item sprite. You can ignore that.

[Nnystyxx]

what if the marble crown is actually just some circuitry inside a plastic doohicky and has no function but to chat with you a la the obsidian crown
someone actually literally made a knockoff of the crown that is left sitting around in the debris field or hemera or something

[Mageziya]

Yeah, sounds like it could work.

Now that I've thought about it, making a "serious" marble crown ultimately is headache and just confounds stuff in the game "lore" that making it literally an obsidian crown knockoff would work. So the initial idea of it being a functionless obsidian crown would work.

"Serious" crowns are in such a way that any addition would have to be done by and official codemin. After all, the sprite was just made as a "what if."

[poland spring]

If someone did want to go for the lore angle, giving it a triangle shaped hole on the front (or in the description) could work for some of the weirder parts of the lore. I still think it should be a cheap knockoff though

[Frank_Stein]

Maybe it's Nanotrasen's efforts to build an artificial crown to replicate the effects without the downside? It still teleports people, but uses technology similar to the teleport gun to do so. 

Maybe the bugs weren't quite ironed out though and extended use gives you migraines and the like

[Mageziya]

Alright, so I'm in over my head but I've decided to try and resprite the gas canisters found on the station.

Here's a preliminary oxygen canister.

Criticism is very welcome, along with pointing out any weird missing details from the canister. Colors are stolen from official sprites, more-so the newish stationary tanks.

If I do go along with this project, I'd need to make a sprite for Plasma, CO2, Nitrogen, NO2, Air, High-Capacity Air canisters, and neutral/empty canisters, along with a broken canisters for each, the open panel sprite, and the canister-bomb overlays. (The gas-gauges on each sprite shouldn't need to be changed, since the location in the 32x32 square is the same.) I may literally just be writing this here as a personal checklist. Most of these are recolors, though the way I'm spriting means that  I don't have an efficient way to recolor the sprites.

I got the idea for this because I remembered that the canister sprites are ancient. They're so old that other servers actually use them and variations of them. They're also not in fancy new-goon perspective.

[Frank_Stein]

I really like it, though it looks shorter and fatter than the current ones.

[Mageziya]

Yeah, size is a little off. Actually, just going to ask people, I made several size variants, so which looks best?

In order: Fat, Fat-Tall, Skinny-Tall, and Original dimensions, along with references for size.

After this I'll work on the handle at the top. It's been giving me the most trouble, in that it's difficult to make it both recognizable, in perspective, and stand out from the non-handle parts of the sprite. I tried making  it match the color of the canister, just darker, and it didn't stand out at all. It also currently doesn't stand out as much as I'd like it to. It also doesn't help that the original sprite is a little vague, so I'm not even 100% sure its supposed to be a handle.

The other and final major problem of the sprite is the weird rumple-zone in the center. There's not enough room to convey the meeting of two differently sized cylinders, so it just looks odd and messy.

Edit: Well, in my impatience I went along with the tank in the original dimensions. I also made a plasma canister, as making modified versions of the sprite helps point out flaws, which I did find.

I fixed up the weird crumple zone to look less rough and dirty.

I also figured out what the hell is going on with the handle. Basically, someone tried translating a propane tank into pixel art and did a bad job of it, leading to the unique appearance of canisters in SS13.

I tried correcting the handle to match a propane tank, but the gas meter causes it to look...

...dumb.

[Grek]

Out of the new sprites, I like Skinny-Tall the best.

[Mageziya]

After some talk on the IRC, I tried fiddling with the propane appearance to make it not look so bad. The problem though is the gas meter. the sprite is fairly detail-dense and there isn't any proper location to put the gas meter.
Spoiler!

I personally like the wrought-iron-looking handle over the propane tank look, but it has the problem of not making sense.

[Mageziya]

After even more fiddling with the canister sprites in MSpaint I've found that there isn't really a way to make the propane-tank top that doesn't look bad. The weird-handles I had before looked better.

So I decided to say "screw it" and just make the sprites, even if I have to alter the tops of the sprites later.

A bunch of before and afters. These are not final, many of them still need tweaking to some extent with colors and shading, but overall I'm happy with the canister sprites.

The CO2 canister's handle is red to both stand out from the black canister surface and also to match the red valve handle. The valve handle on the N2 and NO2 canisters are grey to better stand out from the red surfaces and to match the handles on the canisters.

[69andahalf]

They seem too washed out in terms of colour, and the bits on top seem out-of-place and hard to see. But their shape looks good!