/tg/Station 13

Personally not a fan, they seem squished and "blurry", and I really liked the visual feedback that the older APCs gave. Plus, these ones are smaller and that just vibes weirdly with me.
What do others think?

https://puu.sh/x9VqN/10317fb3f6.png
Sprites in-game as of current.

Wow that looks bad

Not a fan

PS why doesn't the APC window background change color the way the sprites do to reflect external power status?

they're very bad

Gross

Absolutely disgusting

Come someone make a PR to put the sprites back then?

No
Coders know best

I haven't played much recently and noticed a few new sprites which just look really fucking ugly, like the new charger sprites. Why were they changed, or am I just a grouchy old man now?

Here. Can't guarantee it will be merged, but hey, I tried.

https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/28285

It was this pr. It also has the god awful recharger sprite which isn't surprising. Actually looking at it literally every new sprite I've noticed that looks butt ugly is from this pr.

Whelp.

Oh, actually the apc was in another one, but still.

People dislike new sprites on the basis of them being new and that's the most they'll ever admit. If you have an actual complaint that can be actually remedied that's NOT just revert it, please, tell us.

I adressed the muddy blurring issue with the PR, it's because I wanted it to appear like it's shining some light out into the surrounding pixels like how many, many machines already do. This was because I feared the screen would appear too small and hard to notice, so the light helps it be more visible. The blurring is mostly only really visible for when it's on charging, where everything is blue.

As for the colors in the screens themselves not being bright enough, I already brightened them up significantly from the original eris versions. I can make the text brighter still, but it stood out too much to me and looked ugly, so I decided against it.

WJohnston wrote:People dislike new sprites on the basis of them being new and that's the most they'll ever admit. If you have an actual complaint that can be actually remedied that's NOT just revert it, please, tell us.

This is an incorrect and inflammatory statement.
I like a lot of new recent sprites, however, in this case I find nothing redeemable about the sprite and dislike it.
Please don't throw out blanket statements.

WJohnston wrote:People dislike new sprites on the basis of them being new and that's the most they'll ever admit. If you have an actual complaint that can be actually remedied that's NOT just revert it, please, tell us.

I adressed the muddy blurring issue with the PR, it's because I wanted it to appear like it's shining some light out into the surrounding pixels like how many, many machines already do. This was because I feared the screen would appear too small and hard to notice, so the light helps it be more visible. The blurring is mostly only really visible for when it's on charging, where everything is blue.

As for the colors in the screens themselves not being bright enough, I already brightened them up significantly from the original eris versions. I can make the text brighter still, but it stood out too much to me and looked ugly, so I decided against it.

There have been plenty of new sprites added to the game that I like, but they're art assets - most of the time what more can I say than 'they look bad'?
For example the new charger sprite is a blurry, flat looking rectangle. Literally the exact same can be said for the apc.

The sprites that are the same but from a different perspective while I think are worse, they're not 'shit' so to speak, just the perspective doesn't mesh with everything else in the game and so looks out of place.

WJohnston wrote:People dislike new sprites on the basis of them being new and that's the most they'll ever admit. If you have an actual complaint that can be actually remedied that's NOT just revert it, please, tell us.

Terrible stance to take. Plenty of people can see that the sprites are bad, but they're not exactly art majors that can pick apart and tell you why, and if you follow this line of reasoning then even arguing with you is pointless. Like an anti-vaccination parent who believes anybody who disagrees is part of a conspiracy.

You don't need to be an art major or at all experienced in art to tell me what you don't like that's more descriptive than "I don't like it".

Bluespace brought up valid points, and I agree with him, there's a PR xhuis made to try and remedy some of these.
https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/29901

Be like bluespace, I can work with that.

I like the new sprites a lot. However, their pixel offsets are off and they do not appear in the right place on the walls. Fix that and they're great

also the "flat rectangle" complaint is fucking dumb, what do you think the old APC sprite was

I was pointing out that wj's demand for 'a better explaination' meant that my critisim of the charger and the apc is basically the exact same thing.
Also the old apc is much more crisp and has actual useful information in that you can see what is power turned on or not (enviro/lights etc) visually.

Yeah, my main reason for liking the older sprites is the fantastic visual feedback they provide to the user.
At a glance, you can tell absolutely everything about the APC, and they can be an actual fairly important part of gameplay, especially during traitor AI and during a power sink.

@Bluespace
I argue these ones can do that a little bit better. The UI is laid out vertically, with equipment, power, and environment all laid out on top of eachother. The new sprite now reflects that vertically too, rather than horizontally.

@Lumipharon
I think an increase in contrast is in order, xhuis already has a PR up to make the lights more visible, but I'll see what I can do to make them really stand out.

The new APCs don't have enough feedback. The old sprites had higher contrast between the frame and the light settings (blue for auto, green for manually on, red for manually off) and I've had a few rounds now where the AI almost or does get lynched because no one can tell the difference between an emagged one and a charging one at a glance and nobody is willing to check twice.

Up the contrast, make the charging screen lighter and the emagged screen darker and make the frame white is my two cents

Just fucking compromise and combine the two.

You should make the APC a little bit higher but it looks nice

By the way I was talking to Pubby the APCs we currently have are trash

Just like toolboxes.

pubby wrote:

what the heck thats so much better than these new ones

is this PRed yet

The pubby sprites are nicer but there needs to be a little bit of APC casing at the bottom, the black buttons blend with the wall.

PKPenguin321 wrote:is this PRed yet

It's on github but I'm not too hopeful it will get merged

https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/29922

They currently look like this:

WJohnston wrote:People dislike new sprites on the basis of them being new and that's the most they'll ever admit. If you have an actual complaint that can be actually remedied that's NOT just revert it, please, tell us.

repeating this anytime people express distaste for a new sprite is just as ridiculous

Qbopper wrote:

WJohnston wrote:People dislike new sprites on the basis of them being new and that's the most they'll ever admit. If you have an actual complaint that can be actually remedied that's NOT just revert it, please, tell us.

repeating this anytime people express distaste for a new sprite is just as ridiculous

old vendors were better tbh

idc about that, fuck new box sprites

Why are we adding new sprites again?

Because the old sprites are shit and anybody who likes them is clearly blinded by nostalgia and must be ignored.

My biggest disapproval if WJohn will only listen to artistic arguements is that the detail at the bottom does not transfer well onto differently wall angles, making them harder to use in map-making.

The "original" pre-pr APC was a featureless white rectangular box that could be positioned anywhere on the wall with ease since the casing was not the primary detail, whereas putting this new APC on a southern wall facing north causes some difficulties due to it having unusual proportions and being slightly 3d rather than perfectly flat and inset into the wall.

Essentially its too fat with unnecessary detail, same problem with pubby's submission being case heavy and low to the floor in which the content should not be defined by the APC case but by the interior screen being more descriptive/detailed.

a fwoosh post that I understand + agree with

what the fuck

you know, fwoosh, i am listening. there's a PR up that makes them not 3/4th perspective, that makes them more easily readable with increased contrast, and will be changing the pixel shifting so it's more aligned with the terminals. you really should check out the 4 something PRs up that were made in response to this change, and my contributions and thoughts on them, where i also point out the community's unrest.

or not.

There's also another saying that "don't fix it if it ain't broke", that doesn't require expertise counseling by yours truly to draw any conclusions from that as art lead.

A usable white rectangle that sits inset on the wall, or this contrasted semi 3d apc that people vocally dislike and its details actually draw attention away from what it might actually be trying to tell you and alienates mappers into different decisions (lightly grazing on my previous post.)

A compromise does not rectify these issues, and its reactionary to a unlikable change in the first place; i do think you place "art" over gameplay practicality and this is a good example of exactly that to deface something so simple with noisy features.

pubby's are way better than what was merged.
The others only got merged because they were bundled with more sprite changes.

It also included the increased contrast PR which was very popular.

To me, all the new ones are massively worse than the original. The 3/4th one is atrocious for reasons that should already be obvious. The rest all look just as much like flat boxes as the original, but completely fail at being as clear about what they're doing. If pubby's had the lights bigger, with some casing around the bottom, we'd basically be back to the original with better shading, which is where we should've gone from the start.

pubby's lights/screens are actually identical to the original ones.
the only thing different about his is the casing.

What exactly made someone look at the apc and go "gee, I really wish it was changed"?

To the same degree that people are arguing against change because it's change, I think it's a bit silly to change something just for the sake of changing it. The original apcs did just fine and people could easily discern information depending on the sprite.

This is on par with a codebaby and it really needs to stop.

Same thing happened to drink bottles & before that merged by wjohn themselves the pens & stamps where it was completely unnecessary to do so, and ambivalence to largely mundane and not interacted objects let it slide under the radar. APC's are actually important to multiple roles, station power and a antagonist.

• Absinthe has a enormous skull and crossbones on the front of it and looks like rat poison, how is this a improvement compared to the rest of the sleek (though not uniform artistically) bottles we had before?