[Feedback] Avatars, post your views!

[Spogfrawn]

So what do you all think of the new avatars? Why don’t we all post here and let the Dev’s know how we feel? If you love them or if you hate them post your verdict right here. Let’s give them scores out of 10. 1 being the worst thing you ever saw on your monitor and 10 being totally amazing. Here’s my opinion...

Male Avatar 2
Female Avatar 3

Cloth Clothes 2
Leather Armour 3
Metal Armour 7
Tokuno Armour 4
Elf Armour 8

When you play an online game one of the most important things is your avatar. It’s how other people in the game see you and choices are very important, leaving the game mechanics aside (that sometimes depict what you wear). Far from being heroic, upstanding warriors they just look plain weird to me. The male avatars look like they have some kind of serious back complaint, or that somebody has just kicked them in the groin. The female avatars are a little better, the pose is more upright but their hair is kind of shaggy and monotone.

The worst thing about the clothes are the parts that will not dye the colour you choose. Why not? Why are we forced to have brown and silver parts to our leather armour? Why have clothes with white parts that you cannot dye and parts you can? I want to be able to choose the colour, not be forced to match it with colours that I cannot change.

I really do not like the new avatars and this is the biggest problem for me. I can live with all the other faults to get those nice macros. Why not make something like Andrea’s Artwork?

http://www.andrea.net/uo/general/art/

Now these avatars would make me want to play UO again! Why can’t we have something like this? These get a 10 in my book -- easy...

 

[Fink]

Why not make something like Andrea’s Artwork?

Because it would be ludicrously expensive. One-off hand-drawn artwork is very nice and fine for fansites where time is no object, but to redraw every frame of every animation of every sprite in the game would take forever. The avatar system alone would be enough to bury you.

First you'd need an army of 2D sprite artists working on it, which would be incredibly difficult to assemble as the skills simply don't exist in number among the current crop of games artists. They're all well-versed in 3D and/or digital illustration, but traditional pixel artists are a dying breed. For the most part, games simply aren't drawn that way anymore.

Second, you'd need them all versed in the same style of drawing or things would vary in look from artist to artist, depending on what tasks they were given. They would have to be mass-schooled like Disney used to do to their people, so the set-up there would be a huge outlay.

Third, the scope of the project would be gargantuan. Check out Inside UO. Look at the "animation" section, "people and accessories" subsection, and click on "man". There are roughly 40 different animations for the male figure. Each is 8 frames long, and is rendered in 5 directions (the other three are made up by flipping them left to right). That's 1600 frames for the male figure alone. Naked. Presumably 1600 for the female figure too. That's already 3200 frames without starting into clothing, armour, and weapons.

Even the much venerated Legacy art, or at least the mobile stuff, was produced using 3D models. Hand-drawn is apparently fine for the environmental art or static items (given the "overwhelming" majority who asked for it to be retained in the new client), but 2D sprites have and will likely always be rendered from animated 3D models.

 

[Spogfrawn]

Why not make something like Andrea’s Artwork?

Because it would be ludicrously expensive. One-off hand-drawn artwork is very nice and fine for fansites where time is no object, but to redraw every frame of every animation of every sprite in the game would take forever. The avatar system alone would be enough to bury you.

First you'd need an army of 2D sprite artists working on it, which would be incredibly difficult to assemble as the skills simply don't exist in number among the current crop of games artists. They're all well-versed in 3D and/or digital illustration, but traditional pixel artists are a dying breed. For the most part, games simply aren't drawn that way anymore.

Second, you'd need them all versed in the same style of drawing or things would vary in look from artist to artist, depending on what tasks they were given. They would have to be mass-schooled like Disney used to do to their people, so the set-up there would be a huge outlay.

Third, the scope of the project would be gargantuan. Check out Inside UO. Look at the "animation" section, "people and accessories" subsection, and click on "man". There are roughly 40 different animations for the male figure. Each is 8 frames long, and is rendered in 5 directions (the other three are made up by flipping them left to right). That's 1600 frames for the male figure alone. Naked. Presumably 1600 for the female figure too. That's already 3200 frames without starting into clothing, armour, and weapons.

Even the much venerated Legacy art, or at least the mobile stuff, was produced using 3D models. Hand-drawn is apparently fine for the environmental art or static items (given the "overwhelming" majority who asked for it to be retained in the new client), but 2D sprites have and will likely always be rendered from animated 3D models.

I don't care if its 2D or 3D generated. It makes no difference to me HOW they do it, I would just like the end product to look better than the origional and not worse... They already have made new avatars. So they CAN do it because they HAVE done it. And they promised, and I qote, to, "Redraw the game tile by tile".

Also Andrea's avatars are not animated at all, they are the paperdolls and she didn't need an army of Disney artists to do that...

 

[Fink]

Also Andrea's avatars are not animated at all, they are the paperdolls and she didn't need an army of Disney artists to do that...

Avatar = the animated character in the game window.
Paperdoll = static character picture.

Evidently we are talking at cross purposes.

And they promised, and I qote, to, "Redraw the game tile by tile"

They did that with KR and people rejected it because it "wasn't the same". Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

*shrug*

 

[Spogfrawn]

Hey, did they just do a massive avatar (and paperdoll) upgrade in the latest patch or do my eyes deceive me?