What you're describing is basically working with "indexed" images, where pixels correspond to a palette index rather than coding for a colour directly. You can use indexed mode in Gimp to work with those. It works ok.
I remember tools like PaintShop Pro and NeoPaint having good palette editing features back in the day, but of course 8-bit images and palettes were more common then. For tinkering with the palette as you describe I would probably write my own dedicated code.
You have to make that image, and derivatives of that image, available for anyone you give a copy of your software to. They're allowed to redistribute those under the terms of the GPL.
The GPL does not say that you have to give stuff away for free. It just says that you cannot place restrictions on what the person you sell it to is allowed to do with it (the GPL says what they can and cannot do with it; they're allowed to resell or give away for free what they paid you for).
What constitutes a "derivative work" of an art asset in the context of the GPL is not so obvious (the GPL was not designed for art, it was designed for software source code). A direct edit of the image qualifies, screensshots probably do too. A program that loads and processes the image does not (the image is just "data" to the program, the program is not derived from the image). A bundle that includes the images also probably does not (there's some information on bundled stuff in the GPL text, as I recall).
All that said, I'm not a lawyer. Take legal advice on-line with a healthy pinch of salt.
Your project sounds interesting (something a bit like the Trek game I always wanted to play but never could), but at least for the purpose of this site linking it so directly and explicitly to Star Trek is going to be problematic due to copyright reasons...
Since we have the boy and the girl, I decided to go ahead and do the skeleton too. It probably doesn't make much sense to let him punch (at least not without a skeletal fist), but he should be able to use the sword normally.
Still, posting what I did manage to get done, maybe some day I'll get back to it or another (more talented) artist will complete the idea.
Hopefully one will. For now, I've done the base sprite. It's not too hard to make the changes to the base sprites, but it has to be done by hand so it's tedious. I may go back and do the female sprite later.
I actually have some colour-swapped versions of the base sprites lying around as well, I'll provide those too.
I saw your castle tile collection and bookmarked it. Looks great! Hopefully I'll find some time again to do something with them.
Regarding the licence, I suppose it's a little tricky. I think I treated this as a derivative of the LPC-style Well and the 16x16 Town Remix. The only licence compatible with both is CC-BY. Apart from that, I generally dislike the GPL for artwork. In my opinion it's a fine licence for software (source code), but it makes 0 sense for artwork (what's the "source code" of artwork anyway?). It's also not very "permissive".
It's not about my personal opinion though, it's about giving people options. I recognise that there is an issue in mixing CC and GPL art, and for that reason alone it's a good idea to dual-licence it (which is why the original LPC art has both, but IMO it should have had CC-BY rather than CC-BY-SA), and I'd be ok with doing that - but I can't change the licence on the art this derives from.
I'm not so sure that reducing the padding is a good idea. Obviously you can fit more content on, but I think it will also make the page look too crowded.
Just my thoughts. What do you think about this idea? Do you agree?
I understand the problem, I disagree with the proposed solution because whether you show 8, 12 or however many items, it's not scalable. The effect you describe can still happen.
A better solution, I think, would be to limit the amount of art that is shown by any one artist. Say someone submits 10 pieces of art. The 3 (say) most recent show up, along with a link "more recent art by this author..." that shows all of them. A refinement would be that if art is in different categories, you try to show range by giving preference to art from different categories over just 3 art entries in the same category. That's harder to do automatically though (maybe if you base it on tags). Both the amount of entries to show and the time when you no longer list things as "more recent art by this author..." would probably need to be tuned.
The old "experimental/alpha" solr search worked well for me, but the legacy search and what is in place now really don't... just now I tried looking for "item power up" and ended up getting multiple pages of duplicate results (about 5 or 6 different entries), some of which weren't actually relevant...
What you're describing is basically working with "indexed" images, where pixels correspond to a palette index rather than coding for a colour directly. You can use indexed mode in Gimp to work with those. It works ok.
I remember tools like PaintShop Pro and NeoPaint having good palette editing features back in the day, but of course 8-bit images and palettes were more common then. For tinkering with the palette as you describe I would probably write my own dedicated code.
You have to make that image, and derivatives of that image, available for anyone you give a copy of your software to. They're allowed to redistribute those under the terms of the GPL.
The GPL does not say that you have to give stuff away for free. It just says that you cannot place restrictions on what the person you sell it to is allowed to do with it (the GPL says what they can and cannot do with it; they're allowed to resell or give away for free what they paid you for).
What constitutes a "derivative work" of an art asset in the context of the GPL is not so obvious (the GPL was not designed for art, it was designed for software source code). A direct edit of the image qualifies, screensshots probably do too. A program that loads and processes the image does not (the image is just "data" to the program, the program is not derived from the image). A bundle that includes the images also probably does not (there's some information on bundled stuff in the GPL text, as I recall).
All that said, I'm not a lawyer. Take legal advice on-line with a healthy pinch of salt.
It's a small internet!
Your project sounds interesting (something a bit like the Trek game I always wanted to play but never could), but at least for the purpose of this site linking it so directly and explicitly to Star Trek is going to be problematic due to copyright reasons...
Since we have the boy and the girl, I decided to go ahead and do the skeleton too. It probably doesn't make much sense to let him punch (at least not without a skeletal fist), but he should be able to use the sword normally.
Hopefully one will. For now, I've done the base sprite. It's not too hard to make the changes to the base sprites, but it has to be done by hand so it's tedious. I may go back and do the female sprite later.
I actually have some colour-swapped versions of the base sprites lying around as well, I'll provide those too.
I saw your castle tile collection and bookmarked it. Looks great! Hopefully I'll find some time again to do something with them.
Regarding the licence, I suppose it's a little tricky. I think I treated this as a derivative of the LPC-style Well and the 16x16 Town Remix. The only licence compatible with both is CC-BY. Apart from that, I generally dislike the GPL for artwork. In my opinion it's a fine licence for software (source code), but it makes 0 sense for artwork (what's the "source code" of artwork anyway?). It's also not very "permissive".
It's not about my personal opinion though, it's about giving people options. I recognise that there is an issue in mixing CC and GPL art, and for that reason alone it's a good idea to dual-licence it (which is why the original LPC art has both, but IMO it should have had CC-BY rather than CC-BY-SA), and I'd be ok with doing that - but I can't change the licence on the art this derives from.
I'm not so sure that reducing the padding is a good idea. Obviously you can fit more content on, but I think it will also make the page look too crowded.
I understand the problem, I disagree with the proposed solution because whether you show 8, 12 or however many items, it's not scalable. The effect you describe can still happen.
A better solution, I think, would be to limit the amount of art that is shown by any one artist. Say someone submits 10 pieces of art. The 3 (say) most recent show up, along with a link "more recent art by this author..." that shows all of them. A refinement would be that if art is in different categories, you try to show range by giving preference to art from different categories over just 3 art entries in the same category. That's harder to do automatically though (maybe if you base it on tags). Both the amount of entries to show and the time when you no longer list things as "more recent art by this author..." would probably need to be tuned.
Any updates on the search?
The old "experimental/alpha" solr search worked well for me, but the legacy search and what is in place now really don't... just now I tried looking for "item power up" and ended up getting multiple pages of duplicate results (about 5 or 6 different entries), some of which weren't actually relevant...
Personally, I consider the search broken and the site barely usable until the solr search is back up...
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