Official cRPG Loading Screen Graphic competition! 1 mill. reward + chadz Torch!

[Kajia]

I'd like to participate. I'm serious.
But 2-3 weeks is too short for I won't have my PC till one month from now ...
End of september would be great, I mean it's the loading screen, this is important!
You guys will see that everyday, it gotta be beautiful! And beauty needs time, trust me ...

Ok, I go now and torture my pencil -

[Joxer]

Kajia give us some scetch or wip so we can see where you're going. Thing is we might even extent the timeline if you got a good idea if there isn't that much of competition.

[Kajia]

here you go:

rough sketch --- NO frame or something yet, just like i said, i'm not able to finish this till ... y'know

(click to show/hide)

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Typical shieldwall situation:
- everybody knows it
- everybody can identify with it (i hope so)
- classes are neigher ridiculed nor favored
- theme goes well with Strategus

There is still place to put guys in or out - like a peasant and his pitchfork maybe - i liked that idea ;)
Or maybe even guys doing fist-fighting behind the shieldwall, dunno.

It is also quite calm, I'd like that, but you/the community might like some more action oriented stuff:

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(even more rough)

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But actually the first is my favorite as loading screen, the second could be used as a nice menu though.
And as it is with ideas, i think i might have some more soon, too tired now ...

About the style:
As you can tell from how i drew the 2H guy in the first pic, thats like the way i want to go with these works, maybe a bit more detailed. And i think about coloring or using the lineart more like gazda in his loading screen (the one with the equus africanus asinus).

Thats it for now. I just instantly digged me into this just after i stumbled over this thread a couple of hours ago
I'm up for some competition, if you let me ...

Peace!

[Joxer]

Looks promising. Damn I envy people who can draw. That's why I become a photographer  My idea was not a combat situation. More of pose thing. Since in crpg you can have any equipment + stuff native doesn't have I'd show some of those. Also a ninja peeking from behind a rock on the background

[Glyph]

multiple scenes in one would also be cool, that you see how relaxed everything can be when your team is camping, and then it fades out into a battle scene. with the shieldwall you made.
could you place the shieldwall a bit to the front so you can have a charge at the shieldwall. tha would be cool, from infantry or maybe even cavalry.

[ShinySpoons]

Maybe a triptych sort of thing. Something depicting 3 scenes at once.

[Glyph]

and is it possible to make like 3 screens and that they switch at lets say 5 secs?

[Kajia]

triptych sounds good, DotA has it too, but -
see, if you have like three pics side by side they would be more square shaped. but mind, the shieldwall pic itself appears more calm in that horizontal and widescreen shape. i don't know yet how to combine several different scenes and atmospheres to one. composition is a tricky thing - but nevermind for thats my job ...

if i am to fill up a triptych, i need more sketching first.
so if you have one or two good ideas, like the ninja thing or good fighting scenes, just like "tincan gets his ass kicked by naked guy with a club", or maybe sth more serious - just post them, they might have some influence onto my works or other works, too. keyword: community!

and if there is a way to have switching screens, that would be the best solution, i guess.

and i don't like to envied, lol.
just grab a pen and scribble everywhere you go, you'll get better over the ... years

[Joxer]

Believe me. I've tried. My brain just stops working when I try to draw.  I can imagine all kinds of wonderfull pictures in my head but I cant draw a stick figure. I've but thousands of euros on hardware too and even that didn't help

[Thomek]

in my personal opinion (keep in mind im not in any kind of jury here, powerless completely..)

I think the graphic should somehow represent the soul of crpg, or what crpg wants to be.

cRPG has a lot of different playstyle, styles, group play etc, so the graphic could/should somehow represent this.

What makes this whole thing difficult is the very different perceptions of what cRPG "IS" that are floating out there.

A Ninja probably see and FEEL it totally different than a Knight, or an Archer, or a hoplite or the trolls in irc:// Who knows what the D:O:N:K:E:Y himself imagines in his mind.

This freedom of play, is at the core of cRPG soul, but representing it in a graphic the way "YOU" feel it, would certainly piss off 80% of the players. Imagine the Templars loading up cRPG with a big black Ninja graphic to look at.

Without going into the history of art, identity and aesthetics, I would love to see a good situation in the image. (like your first sketch, kind of flat and straight, but it has a situation of waiting soldiers. I sense a kind of tension there, which I very much like.. Putting the situation at the beginning of the battle would also be interesting, as well as after, or when there are very few left on one side. Rendering a typical and funny situation we see every day.)

Nothing is funny for ever though, and I'm getting to like your first drawing more and more. Just to give you some ideas for it:

What if one or more soldiers is downed by arrows?
How close or far is the enemy?
Should the graphic show the moment before the charge hits?
Should it contain some kind of "target" Hill, castle or town?
Should there be something in the close forground? (shadow of a ninja or tip of katana! or ninja jumping from the sky somewhere..)
There should be some kind of interaction.. I like the guy talking to the horseman. More situations among the soldiers!
The sun is great where you have it, but add some "fog" or so?
nervous peasant.

etc etc.. good luck!

Disclaimer:
I'm strongly against "Art by comitee" and have to repeat myself. I have NO decision making power in this.

[Jarlek]

Thomeks post made me think. What about a big group photo with all the different variations of players/classes we have/can have? Like there are templar knights, black plated steel shielders on plated chargers, robed querterstaffman, pure agi and athl daggerman, ninjas jumpslashing and loads of other "normal" "whacky" and "weirdo" fighters we have in cRPG?

They would all then be facing us and doing whatever heroic pose/ weird animation /funny thing or whatever?

I would really like this.

[Mala]

Damn you, you steal my ideas .

[Joxer]

Zapper that's kinda what I had in mind. I recall TF2 having a similar picture somewhere about the classes. Just make the pose in a battlefield setting and add a little action on the background. A ninja peaking from behing a rock or a wall and an archer running away from a tincan etc.

[Noctivagant]

DDS in fact stands for Direct Draw Surface

Most of the animated DDS files are volume textures (water, light, fog etc). Can an we make animation with dds? sure as sequence of separate DDS files. Most of the water bump is handled that way for example ocean bump. It really depends on the engine. What we are doing here is replacing textures with an another single texture. If the engine is not supporting animating the sequence we are simply out of luck. What can be done is : if you are familiar with BRF pacts you'd know that menus already exist as object files in native commonres. But that would mean also coding the whole new menu.
If I'm not wrong TF2 was using video files on the back ground as presentation of the classes.

If you check the menu objects you'll see even normal maps are not assigned. Its just a simple flat texture without any bump specular or light map. So I highly doubt if they can be animated without spending days maybe weeks on coding a new menu. I've already spent some considerable time on adding normal maps to buttons in the past. I always ended up with some sort of Frankenstein.

[Overdriven]

It would be interesting if the screens could switch. If not is there a way to make several screens that load randomly each time you load crpg? So you potentially get a different one every time.

I like the idea of representing different classes. But if what I asked was possible, I suggest doing a different scene for each. Not all of them in the same scene (something that looks quite typical and bad in my opinion). If you could have a screen with a class in a very specific class related situation for all of the main classes, then that would be amazing.

SO:

2H
Polearm
Horse Archer
Crossbowmen
Archer
Lancer
1h Shielder
Ninja
1h Cav
Pikemen

and any others you can throw in there.