FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

After reading this, I took time to look around textures in-game and in editing software. The purpose was to try to present you guys some factors that may help find a way to improve over them. First I want to say to thanks to all the people who worked on the textures of this game all these years, and I want to make clear that isn't meant to diminish their work. This is just a simple analysis to find the reason why many users find the textures weird. (Heck, I even got to the chance to contribute to the default textures.)

To avoid placing just a subjective statement, I took my time to study textures/pixel art from other great games and tutorials by pro's as a reference point. This is something I've been doing all those months of inactivity. However, I want to say some stuff may apply different to our game. The 2D RPGs have the blessing that they can decide where the light goes on their textures, and effectively establish mood through them. Sadly, in MT we must make them work with light from all sides.

After all the research,I am certain that the color choice and amount must be the cause of the problem. We have simple (3-6 colors) textures along with (20+ colors) complex ones. I may not be an expert on the matter, but something many pixel artists, or artists in general, agree is that contrast is very important. That's what gives pixel art's "crisp" look.


An example of the different amount of colors.

Add this the fact this texture pack was treated by many people along the development, so there is more discrepancies. Since the textures were made by different people, there is a lack of unification among the palettes of the images.



Look closely to the colors, we can see the textures for grass, rocks, etc. dont go over 4-5 colors.

Also if we where to take the colors and separate them... all the colors would "branch" out.


In summary, we can't just go with changing things one texture at the time. If we want better textures, we need someone who can do all of them. There many talented people here could do this, but first something must be done with the development process. We have the problem that each Dev have their own perspective of what the game should be. The textures we have are a mirror of that, neutral and ambiguous. What I say is that if unless all of them manage to agree on an overall look and objectives to achieve with these project, I recommend avoiding working on this.

TL:DR - The color choice, amount and overall style are the weakness of our textures.

I have been attempting to convince people of the same thing. It's becoming increasingly hard to add new blocks since only few reviewers actually look at how the new texture fits in with the overall style, and most people just ignore it ("But I prefer ....").

One person should redo all the textures in minetest_game.

I really appreciate this post. Very informative!!

Esteban wrote:If we want better textures, we need someone who can do all of them.

The problem with having one hero do all the work on any given area is, of course, that eventually they won't be around. I'm not a big fan of trying to standardize art of any sort. One man's art is another's trash.

If you want some sort of standardization, without depending on artistic genius (if such a thing really exists), I would recommend picking a reasonable set of palettes and forcing any new textures into them.



That way, contributors use the standard whether they like it or not. It'll still make everyone unhappy, but at least there won't be one hero bearing the brunt of all the complaints.

Trying to assign this to one person seems like introducing an unnecessary bottleneck to an already slow process, and bear in mind that any effort that goes into the default textures will be entirely lost on the many people using texture packs anyway.

Trying to assign this to one person seems like introducing an unnecessary bottleneck to an already slow process, and bear in mind that any effort that goes into the default textures will be entirely lost on the many people using texture packs anyway.

People use these texture packs because the default is so incredibly ugly. Go watch some youtube minecraft videos, and you'll notice just how few players use texture packs.

I'm not saying I want to kill texture packs, but they should become a toy, and not a necessity.

Most people actually don't dislike default textures, sofar...

Dragonop wrote:Most people actually don't dislike default textures, sofar...

Exactly, the default minecraft textures are really well done!

yes, I understood what you mean. But I disagree - there are certainly good textures, but they are really not coherent, styled and well-fitting together as a whole.

sofar wrote:Exactly, the default minecraft textures are really well done!

Ok, by default minecraft textures, you're talking these, right? ...or am I mistaken?



I have to say that they don't impress me over the default minetest terrain. They tile better, but that's easy (if tedious) to fix.* I don't remember them being especially great from minecraft, but I didn't play it much. You can only do so much with sixteen^2 pixels.

As an aside, my vote would be to increase the resolution to 32-pixel, at the least.


* Spread/Seamless goes from this:

to this (same resolution, no appreciable color change):


Edit: Correction, some of them tile better. Some look awful.

duane wrote:As an aside, my vote would be to increase the resolution to 32-pixel, at the least.

I think going 32² or even 64² is a good idea, but eventually it's a lot of work. It'll also "break" compatibility with existing mods (they'll look out of place). That said, we could have a Minecraft pack author release their 32²/64² pack under a free license and use it.

Calinou wrote:That said, we could have a Minecraft pack author release their 32²/64² pack under a free license and use it.

My vote's for Napiophelios' pack. I'm using it with a few modifications, but it's not complete.

Those are basically the same textures the complaints are about
and have the same issues.

I think Gambit's "PixelBox" pack is closer to what we need.

Most of our devs explicitly consider art as depending from tastes only and I once heard say that "they're not important"...

Well, you're demonstrating that this is complex science as well as coding. Would-be "artists" should just stop their improvised pixel-carnages in mainstream (which I include myself, honestly).

Thanks everyone for your feedback, that helps to bring out other issues and solutions to the table! I kinda got worried that nobody made a reply yesterday :P

sofar wrote:I have been attempting to convince people of the same thing. It's becoming increasingly hard to add new blocks since only few reviewers actually look at how the new texture fits in with the overall style, and most people just ignore it ("But I prefer ....").

One person should redo all the textures in minetest_game.

This will be our main problem. We need to talk directly to all the core devs i order to get them to help out establishing what is the overall feel they want out of the game. Without a clear idea of that, we will end up with neutral and bland textures. The textures must go had-in-hand with the objectives and the game play of Minetest, if ever one is fully established. So we need to clear out the questions of what will be Minetest and where it's going, to avoid wasting resources in textures that will need to be redone.

duane wrote:The problem with having one hero do all the work on any given area is, of course, that eventually they won't be around. I'm not a big fan of trying to standardize art of any sort. One man's art is another's trash.

I know it would be too much, but working in a group has it's downsides. Of course we can have more than one person working on them, but we need all of them to agree on a certain aesthetic/style. Heck, At one point, our default texture pack had 8 bit-esque textures in it, and went unnoticed for some time.

What I talked about color is not something about a standard, but rather something to take in consideration when making sprites.

duane wrote:If you want some sort of standardization, without depending on artistic genius (if such a thing really exists), I would recommend picking a reasonable set of palettes and forcing any new textures into them.

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

convert texture_in.png -remap palette.png texture_out.png

This is an interesting concept, but I don't know if it will work in execution. I've seen many texture enhancements/sprite fixing threads in other places, and most of the time it requires more than a forced palette, but rather adding/removing details and colors manually. If we don't manage to get someone to work on a new default texture pack, we could go with this, but I really don't recommend it.

duane wrote:...
Edit: Correction, some of them tile better. Some look awful.

Agreed, That's another thing we should focus along with the things I said in the OP. Many 2D RPGS break the grid by adding more sprites for the terrain, something we can't do in the default game.

Calinou wrote:

duane wrote:As an aside, my vote would be to increase the resolution to 32-pixel, at the least.

I think going 32² or even 64² is a good idea, but eventually it's a lot of work. It'll also "break" compatibility with existing mods (they'll look out of place). That said, we could have a Minecraft pack author release their 32²/64² pack under a free license and use it.

This is another great solution, a bigger sprite would give the artist a bigger canvas to work on. Some stuff that I said in the OP may apply, but not so strictly because it becomes more of an actual texture than pixel art. However,not only it would break compatibility with mods; but also it would make more difficult for mod devs to produce fitting textures, because 32x requires more skill because of the tiny details, etc.

jp wrote:Most of our devs explicitly consider art as depending from tastes only and I once heard say that "they're not important"...

Well, you're demonstrating that this is complex science as well as coding. Would-be "artists" should just stop their improvised pixel-carnages in mainstream (which I include myself, honestly).

Yeah, I heard that many times myself and I am also guilty of committing pixel-carnages as well... :P
and that's why I decided to go read everything I could find in order to improve :P

Once I read Tsugumo's tutorial, and in there he/she has an interesting quote:

Tsugumo wrote:The main character's sprite...Possibly THE most important part of your game. Yeah, you can argue that "Oh no, the programming is more important! Without it there's nothing else!" or "No the scrolling engine! It makes things smooth!" or "It's the music! Music is more important than art! The music sets the mood in the background!"...But no one will see the programming, a nice scrolling engine doesn't matter if you're scrolling over a picture of stickmen, and the music only sets up half the mood. If you're putting out advertisements or anything, making the back of your game's box because it's so amazing that it's going to consoles or whatever, you can't put music on it...Nor programming...You're down to screenshots. Screenshots are what people see first, and that's what they base their opinions on instantly, regardless of whether they realize it or not. If they check out a shot and see stickmen walking on circles of tiled grass, they have in their mind "Ugh, what an ugly game..." and when they play it (IF they play it...A lot of people won't even download or check out a game if the screenshots are ugly) they go into it thinking "This is an ugly game..." and the wonderful music and scrolling engine and programming you have are all ruined because the player is playing your game only half caring. Art is EXTREMELY important in making your game, and yeah, you CAN get away with ugly stickmen...But you'd better have one incredible plot, because you're going to have to make up for that. And even if you have the most amazing plot in the world, it's not going to matter if people don't sit through your ugly graphics long enough to find out about it.

Napiophelios wrote:Those are basically the same textures the complaints are about
and have the same issues.

I think Gambit's "PixelBox" pack is closer to what we need.

1+ I've seen his work and it's truly amazing.

Napiophelios wrote:I think Gambit's "PixelBox" pack is closer to what we need.

I just downloaded it. It is really good (just not 32).

I love that the grass sides are deeper. That looks so much better than the default style. (This is not PixelBox, but you see the difference.) I want grassy hills to look grassy.

+1
MT has a bad palette for default colors.

I think the main problem with the textures we currently have is the grass and "alive stuff" (trees, leaves, grass, flowers, etc). I think that overall the rest is "fine". Getting better textures for grass would improve the experience a lot.

As for 32x, I don't think this is a good solution, an important part of minetest are mods, and most of them use textures that are 16x16. Most textures would look out of place if we change that. Also, I have tested, and making decent textures in a 32x32 canvas is incredibly different (and way harder) than making them in a smaller one. Consider that most modders can't make decent textures in 16x, just imagine if they had to make them in a bigger canvas...

Way too much trouble for some textures. Let's just improve the default textures (or completely change them) in 16^2.
The best option in my opinion is to improve the current style.

The defaults aren't great but they solve the problems of trying to choose one texture creator or one texture pack.

I encourage players to find (or create) their favourite texture pack and use it, a pack will of course always be more coherent and because it's not 'designed by commitee' usually higher quality and more artistic.

However there needs to be a default, devs are always coming and going so it would be impossible to hold on to one person for consistency over the years. Sudden jumps from one pack to another would be a shock, whereas our current gradual evolution always retains familiarity while also being in a state of constant change. There is always a feeling of history, heritage, familiarity and character to the textures even though most have changed over the last 4 years.

If you say 'lets have a group of creators who try to stay consistent to a style' we have that already, the default textures do have a loose style and new textures are chosen to be reasonably consistent.

The arguments over who to choose, or what pack to choose, would be insane and mostly unsolvable due to personal taste.

So i see texture packs as the 'thing to use' and the defaults as a reasonably good solution to the huge problems of any other approach. They are fairly high quality, fairly consistent and look better than most texture packs i have seen. If you don't like them it's just your personal visual taste.

paramat wrote:The defaults aren't great but they solve the problems of trying to choose one texture creator or one texture pack.

I encourage players to find (or create) their favourite texture pack and use it, a pack will of course always be more coherent and because it's not 'designed by commitee' usually higher quality and more artistic.

However there needs to be a default, devs are always coming and going so it would be impossible to hold on to one person for consistency over the years. Sudden jumps from one pack to another would be a shock, whereas our current gradual evolution always retains familiarity while also being in a state of constant change. There is always a feeling of history, heritage, familiarity and character to the textures even though most have changed over the last 4 years.

If you say 'lets have a group of creators who try to stay consistent to a style' we have that already, the default textures do have a loose style and new textures are chosen to be reasonably consistent.

The arguments over who to choose, or what pack to choose, would be insane and mostly unsolvable due to personal taste.

So i see texture packs as the 'thing to use' and the defaults as a reasonably good solution to the huge problems of any other approach. They are fairly high quality, fairly consistent and look better than most texture packs i have seen. If you don't like them it's just your personal visual taste.

First of all, thanks for sharing your thoughts, I wanted to see a dev giving feedback on the thread.

The current textures are good, but something we all agree here is that they can be better. Sorry, but thats what I've seen many say. I know it sounds difficult, but its something the game can benefit from. I also understand that how minetest is currently, it wouldn't be worth it. I want this thread to help once the foundations of this game are established. The textures would fall flat with the lack of content.

However, I think this attitude of "if you don't like it, go make..." won't help us go beyond this little site. I would understand if this project was made with that in mind, but the truth is that's used more as an excuse. I yet to see one community-made subgame in a stable release...

I would appreciate if the rest of the core devs left their ideas here. If all of them agree on your statement, i would end the discussion there....Maybe afterall I'm actually the only one seeing a problem with the textures...

It is very difficult to have a consistent style unless the people making the textures are really good at it, or if the textures are all maintained by a single person. The key-word here is "difficult." It's not impossible, but it will take a long time to get right.

As far as textures needing improvement, the cobble texture comes to mind immediately; it looks sloppy and needs better shading. The default ore textures have a similar issue. The jungle tree texture is also especially bad; it doesn't fit well on a square block, is way too blurry, and doesn't fit the color scheme of the rest of Minetest (I also despise the current look of the jungle biome in general). I don't even know the words to describe the default player textures.

The issue is compounded by the fact that most of the mobs that exist in mods look really terrible.

The high-points in the default texture pack for me are the chests, furnaces, and to a lesser extent ingots, torches (if only they could be rendered better) and the tools. While the single-hue shading is not quite my taste, the quality is definitely there and it gives a nice "dreary dungeon" vibe.

I think pixel art technique tutorials should be taken with a grain of salt, since voxel textures require different designs to look good, and most professional pixel artists probably don't have the time or desire to teach people their techniques. Also, a restricted color palette is not necessarily a sign of good pixel art; it's an imitation of the limitation of older computers to display a certain number of colors on a screen at once.

The current reasons given for why 16x textures should stay are good ones; there are also performance hits associated with using higher-resolution textures, especially when mods are taken into account.

asanetargoss wrote:The current reasons given for why 16x textures should stay are good ones; there are also performance hits associated with using higher-resolution textures, especially when mods are taken into account.

You probably will never notice the performance difference between 16², 32² or even 64² textures.

What about making a contest, where community votes for each texture? Everyone can make a texture, and the best one wins.

lisacvuk wrote:What about making a contest, where community votes for each texture? Everyone can make a texture, and the best one wins.

Without establishing some form of standards, that would lead us to the same result. However it would be great having feedback from the community to help deciding out a final texture for something instead of a few. Currently, things are proposed and approved over on github. :P