Cool!

Could we have black and the famous green bear too? (green bears are real!)

The return of the old sprites!

William, How would they be different besides the color?
I just don't see how the bears would be different enough to have 2 or more types...

sketch your sprites ruuule! what program do you use? i keep asking my frined who makes animations to tell me, but he won't. can you tell me pleese?

Sketch, you are awesome. I so need tips from you for my spriting (I make games). WHY MUST YOU BE SO GOOD?!

I use photoshop 5.5 to make the sprites and Macromedia fireworks to make it into an animated gif. Why your friend would know what animation program I use is simply beyong me :P

Oh cool I always wanted to be awesome. My tips would vary a lot depending on what look you want for your graphics. The main things that improved my pictures was always keeping a black border and making a tablet of colors that you plan to use before just coloring right away. For sprites in particular it would be (in my opinion) best to draw how you want your charactor/object in key places of their animation then draw the other pictures between the "key frames"
Example if I want to draw a guy swing a sword I would draw his base stance, about halfway into the swing, his fully extended swing, then about halfway into the recoil. Then I would go back and make the pictures that I want in between the key frames. It helps me focus more on what it should look like than how they should get there. If you want to see what I mean look at my iron gollem drawing where I made a bunch of clips of movement rather than on key positions.

Awesomeness is hard to obtain. But some of the "Suggestion Geniuses" around here come Right up and knock on the door.

I'd say that the bear should, first of all, not have multiple types, and secondly, should be thought out entirly before a removal is decided upon. (I'm not suggesting that, don't worry Sketch :-))

I like it, but only in one type. A good, simple character.

I have never seen joe102 before but now, in every comment I read I see his name, man I wish I could be that activ but I have to study a lot...

personally there are so many magical creatures in the game that a bear would almost seem out of place. it still looks great though, sketch.

Err, thanks Mr. I actually am not that concerned about it making the game. I posted the suggestion because I already had graphics for it. Would be neat to have but it is not one of my favorite children :P

I don't think bears are out of place. I mean, you've already got sumo wrestlers and army-hat-wearing-lizards. Nothing is out of place after that.

point taken.

Lol. I love this place.

yeah its great.

How do u get the photo shop prog. 4 free???

You can't. (Not legally anyway.) But you can get GIMP for free. It's not as good, but it's good enough for our purposes.

http://www.gimp.org/

You can download some guides I made for how to do MR graphics on it from the downloads section.

http://www.themetalbox.com/?page=downloads

Good luck!

Normally it is not free.
You would get it for free by knowing someone who has a disk use the disk to install it on your computer or download from a file shareing site. Both of which are illegal.
But the gimp program steve recomends looks like it would do just as good a job for MR graphics anyway.

I plan on making a bear skin rug out of him!!!
nice idea. gotta give ya props.

You could alternatively see if there's a demo available. I use a demo of GraphicConverter which means it's free while remaining perfectly legal. Same with Felt Tip Sound Studio 1.5.4, except they kinda messed it up; it's not supposed to let you save after 30 days, except it still prompts you to save if you quit without saving, so you can save that way, and have the demo running just as functionally as the full program (if you don't mind having to quit each time you want to save).

you can get a fireworks 30 day demo for free...

Hey Sketch, if you take that sprite sheet, then invert it, then invert the colour table, then they all end up like lilac outline drawings (except fort the bear & thorns, which are coloured in lilac). It's pretty interesting.

BTW, for everything I talk about, I'm going by what GraphicConverter calls the effect/option-thing, so I don't quite know what they do; I was just messing around.

If you do colour permutation - chromatic involution, then they look like... well, they look like a pallet swap monster, like in sprite based RPGs (e.g. FF I through VI, Chrono Trigger, and others).

...

In fact, you can get some pretty neat pallet swap looking versions if you play around with the colour permutation options in GraphicConverter.

...

Heh, this reminds me of when I used to make new ships & stuff for Escape Velocity. I love games that come with editor programs. I didn't have the skill to make my own ships, so I took existing ones and recoloured them (I think I generally used the brightness, hue & contrast sliders for red, blue & green until it looked neat). They looked pretty good, in my opinion. Shame they weren't compatible with the Ares editor, which both had a different number of images per ship (as in, for turning), and you had to have the picture formatted in a different way (EV was in a grid, Ares was all in a row).

Anyway, I wander.


...


Meh, nothing I can get is really good enough to be worth showing. I mean, it's just like 'hey, look at what I can do with Sketch's sprite sheet by mucking with some settings'.

Oh well.

I'd like to see those sheets, I'm having trouble visualising what you're talking about but it sounds interesting.

This might work well fo r a new team actually, like an angry stag, or walrus (a must)

It's mostly just different coloured versions of what's there. I didn't save any of them anyway.

Sound interesting feel free to muck around :)

THIS MIGHT SOUND dum but to make the bear a little cooler not that im saying its not you could maybe make it transform into a ghost bear or a undead bear after you kill it giving it magic powers like a flying claw maybe. and sketch your well animation is awsome!!!

I agree with wyatt it could be some cooler or at least funnier now it just a bear but give him a high hat and clown head (just take a picture from internet) and it looks more like a merlin monster

That might be okay. Clown... not so much.

I reckon the bear should have sunglasses.

Maybe a monocle.

I like that idea lol

Monocle bear is an awesome idea.

is a Monocle one of those half glasses for one eye?
.o

Yep it is

and a beard and assaultlt rifle on it's back shooting bullets. or it could shoot bat pelletsﾟﾟﾟ

GIVE IT MONOCLE!!!

Kewl bear, also i've rescently found Paint.NET, which in my opinion is better then gimp for making still images. Though, i still use gimp for anims.

it could be a profesional bear with a monocle and a suit. double o bear, or bears go british. wow im rambling maybe i shouldb't be up at 430 in the morning

see? no grammer

This animal is vicious cant wait to see it in the game

I think that when you were hit by it you wouldn't reel very far, but be left in the reel for a long time(like if a bear hit you on the ground, it would take time to get back up).

Probably

Nahhhh.I think it should reel far because you are getting clawed by a bear which is like 7-times bigger than you.

Love the graphics. 5! Keep up the good work Sk...he isn't active, I forgot.

Lol. Yes, I love the graphics too.

I love the sprites. I like the bear. There is only one thing that annoys me. It is the walk anim. Look at the front right leg. Look how it moves compared to the front left leg. It just kind of looks weird to me.

♪ ninja edit: Also, bear's heads are in front of their bodies, not above.(my problem with it)

Oh it says in the suggestion. I am stupid...

Yes I agree. I mean I don't agree that your stupid but I agree that the walk has a bad spot.

The head thing is also weird too.

Working on this now.
(it's the easiest thing to do atm)

So, note, how are you, and how is MR? :D

MR is currently in Steve's hands.

I'm not sure if he's done anything with it though

As far as how I am and what I've been up to; I learnt VHDL, and am about to figure out how to use embedded soft processors, which precludes any game dev thinking/work. (though I have been thinking about how to implement a good update loop timer using a moving average, maybe an exponential one)

Meh, I'm not in for details however important micro-optimization may be. But, er, keep it up? :D

Sounds cool.

The idea for the update loop stuff is to ensure a fairly stable frame rate, while taking as much advantage as possible of the processor's available speed. I'm debating whether I should also include some amount of interpolation in the drawing thread as well... and then, have one more thread to parse inputs, at a near constant framerate(as constant as possible) which can signal the update thread.