I’ve been wanting to get more proper feedback on this one for a while now, but most discussions when I bring it up in discord tend to go off the rails pretty quickly so I wanted a more concise judgement. Is this something that’d be desired for upstream, or does it better fit in downstream forks? Should this strictly be displacements with a generic sleeve, or are unique sprites enough to warrant the change?
Most Hard/Softsuits have a distinct enough appearance to warrant unique sprites as opposed to a generic sleeve in my opinion, and while helmet displacements arguably should be the default (and some of these I’m not opposed to switching to that format): i’ve worked to give most of them more bespoke looks to them to help identify them as reptilian, or adjusted the shading on the front views accordingly.
In terms of displacements: I’d rather keep it as one single shape so it keeps the trend of making the silhouette properly identifiable. See a tail? It’s a lizard. There’s not much need to make it adapt to each tail type (and displacements can’t be done per marking I believe), partially due to keeping them generic ala the human disguises. If you saw one with a large tail and there was only lizard on station with a large tail… (or a snake tail if we ended up merging those.)
I’d like to eventually add unique suit features to other species like Vox, Moths and Arachnids in order to keep the playing field level, but I can understand that not being wanted, especially given the amount of work it can entail on downstreams modifying their hardsuits to some degree.
I’d mostly just like to get a good, solid read on this.
I love these sprites personally, but as you mentioned, it would now take 3 different sprite sheets for every hardsuit, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but this needs more discussion.
Only for one piece of each. The tails are unique sprites hiding the tail and then being placed onto the existing hardsuit, it’s not an entirely new hardsuit sprite.