Saturn Valley Online

So, as the people who played the old SVO a lot may have heard me blabber on about, I've been planning to change the graphics over to a 'paperdoll' system for a while.

"What's paper and dolls got to do with my SVO, Mr Darkfrost?" you ask?
Well, as you remember in SVO... Everyone looked the same. There were like, 10 bodies to choose from, and 80% of people picked the Ness one. So everyone looked more or less the same.

With paperdolling, instead of having only 10 bodies to choose from... You pick a pair of legs, a top, and a head... leading to huge amounts of customizations!

"Sounds awesome! So why are you posting about this here?", you say?
Basically, making a crap load of paperdoll sprites is a lot of work. And as most of you know (Especially Skye...) I'm pretty lazy. So I figured "Hey, why not beat the SVO community into slaving away making sprites instead of me?"

"Awesome! I'll help aslong as you don't beat me!"
Well, I won't promise NO beatings, but the help is awesome, thanks.

"So, how can I help?"
1. Download paperdoll.zip
It contains a few examples images I made.
base.png - This is the base layer which all the other layers go ontop of. It's just a slight edit of the m2 Magicant ness.
example.png - This is just an example image of what a completed sprite might look like ingame.
Also included are paperdoll.psp and paperdoll.psd. These are layered images for Paint Shop Pro (7), and Photoshop, for those of you with them. They just contain all the layers ontop of eachother, to make editing easier.
Then, there are 3 folders. Bodys, Heads, Legs. These contain the paperdoll layers.
Layering order, from top to bottom, is Head > Body > Legs > Base. Just keep this in mind so you don't end up drawing it places you'll never see.

2.Take a look at the gfx in the 3 folders. These are the kind of things I want you guys to make
3. Edit them to be all fanciful!
4. Upload them here, and as long as they meet quality & content standards, they'll probably end up ingame. If not, I'll give you feedback about what to change, or make some slight edits myself.

Remember, the there are a few rules about gfx:

1. Nothing offensive. I'm pretty sure what this means should be obvious.
2. Background colour must be eye-melting pink (255,0,255), as this is the transparent colour.
3. Standard size rules apply. Bear in mind the image is cut into pieces automatically by the engine, so you have to keep the sizes the same. This means you can't have things going from one frame into another, sorry.
4. Please, no eye melting colours. Try to keep the saturation levels down a bit. 180ish is good. Nothing over 200 please.
5. EB style. This means no taking gfx from other games, keep the style consistent.
6. PNG. I cannot stress this enough. Other formats are liable to ruining your image. Do not EVER, save pixel art as a jpeg.
7. Anything else obvious I forgot to mention

Any other questions, feel free to ask.

Example of the kind of results you can get:

This is Poo head + Jeff body + Ness Legs

After working on my NVQ, which I nearly messed up because I was spending so much time on the forums:

I have finally found time to return to SVO, not that you'll notice anything different.

Who wants to do some spriting?

<3

Hey guys,

As you all have seen, development has somewhat stalled the last few weeks/months. This is caused by several things including school, work, real life issues, .. But have no fear, as you also have seen, we try to keep the server up and running at all times.

And now the real good news:
The development of the new engine called netGORE (basically vbGORE but rewritten and made better in C#) is nearly finished. This engine is more flexible (e.g. the movement can be more precise just like in Earthbound), the lag issues should be fixed,it is supposed to be easier to code new features into and it gives us all a reason to start working on SVO again.

There's one catch though, we're planning on remaking the EB world first so we're not releasing the netGore SVO to the public until we got everything done up to Twoson. The older maps will not be in this version of SVO. This being said, we'll keep the old SVO running until we're happy enough with the .net version and release that.

I hope this clarifies some of the questions people had.