Varying Sprites

[superking]

You state variously that there is only going to be about 60 different character sprites in the finished game.

If you havn't already, why not just use a colourmask (like you did for team colour on ship sprites in AI War) for each item of clothing on a sprite, and allow those to be randomised/varied? the same character sprite would look very different with a black jacket, grey t-shirt and jeans, to the same sprite with a sober grey jacket, white shirt and grey suit trousers.

similarly, skin tone of sprites could be modultated.

that way, those 60 sprites could become 600 

[x4000]

Unfortunatey, color masks tend to look really awful except on things like spaceships -- because I'm using diffuse coloring, if you're familiar. That takes away any lighter highlights in favor of the color, which leads to a very flat, dull look. Very dark things cant be recolored at all with this. It would also be pretty hard to even extract pieces of clothing to mask from the movement dictionaries.

I see the appeal of the idea, and Keith and I have talked about it some previously, but I don't think color masks will do well for this game. Much as I'd like to increase variety!

[superking]

so how is varying clothing being done? manually changing hue of each sprite in photoshop?

[x4000]

Actually, I'm going to use a shader to do hue shifting on the GPU.