Dog Sprite Replacement

[Nash]

Code: Select all

German Shepherd Dog Sprite

Modeled from scratch and rendered in Blender by Nash Muhandes.

Copyright © 2017 Nash Muhandes. All Rights Reserved.

Forum thread - https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=58035

Released under CC-BY - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Pull request: https://github.com/coelckers/gzdoom/pull/374

No animals were harmed during the making of this sprite asset

[Jimmy]

Top fucking stuff.

[Zeberpal]

Very well done!

[armymen12002003]

Not to be mean but these look kinda crappy the wolfenstein dogs look better.

[Rachael]

I very much disagree. Nevertheless, they can easily be pulled out of the archives for ZDoom's last official release, and then added to your autoload. Have fun with it.

[Nash]

Not to be mean but these look kinda crappy the wolfenstein dogs look better.

Crappy in what way? Need more details. Any suggestions on how to improve it?

[MartinHowe]

Unless I misunderstand what this represents, isn't this the sort of ui-breaking change people have been slating Microsoft for (e.g., Metro, Windows 10)? It also breaks visual compatibility with MBF which is where the idea came from in the first place. (You might as well replace the DoomGuy sprite with Duke Nukem or the menu skulls with beta lost souls LOL) I have no problem with the dogs Nash has made, as they are, but the de-facto standard for "we need dogs quick" is WolfSS dogs and has been for several years.

I can only think it's a GPL copyright thing , in which case shouldn't these be in the zdoom.pk3 -- but with the WolfSS dogs in the "tainted" pk3 recently introduced and used by default?

[Nash]

in which case shouldn't these be in the zdoom.pk3 -- but with the WolfSS dogs in the "tainted" pk3 recently introduced and used by default?

Actually you're right, that should have been done in hindsight and something I clearly forgout about. I guess Graf or anyone can simply re-add the Wolf3D dogs to zdoom_extra, so it's not a big deal.

(Man anyone who wanted to naysay should have when I was looking for feedback one month ago smh)

[Graf Zahl]

I clearly said I would not add the Wolfenstein dog to the extra PK3, for one very simple reason: It's a copyrighted asset that has no justifiable connection to any of the supported games (that is, aside from the fact that some other ports made the same mistake.) It has always been a somewhat sore spot to me that only survived due to lack of alternatives.
All other derivations from copyrighted graphics are there to blend in with the existing stuff.

[Rachael]

Look - I love 90's id Software artwork as much as anyone else - but the WolfSS dogs are not very high quality. They're very flat and unshaded, consistent with the lack of detail with a lot of Wolfenstein. That's not to say they or Wolfenstein are bad, it's just that I really think these dogs are higher quality because they have more detail in them. That, and their more permissive license for usage, make a pretty easy case why I thought that the WolfSS dogs needed to be replaced.

These replacements definitely are more "Doomy"-feeling, in my opinion, with the really low resolution pixels combined with the shading that's present makes it a lot more consistent with the rest of Doom's art, even if the dogs themselves are pretty out of place in the first place with the game. In fact, the only thing I really would change is to render them from a more overhead perspective since the dogs aren't supposed to be exactly eye-level with the player.

[Zhs2]

This is venturing somewhere off the topic, but while I think the sprites are fine, the new dog sounds are imo less evocative of "oh no, I'm hurting this poor dog" than the old Wolf3D ones.

[Rachael]

AFAIK they came from a sound set that Kinsie found a couple weeks back. If you can find better, I'd be happy to use that instead, but the ones Kinsie found were properly sourced and copyrighted so that's why we were able to use them.

[Graf Zahl]

This is venturing somewhere off the topic, but while I think the sprites are fine, the new dog sounds are imo less evocative of "oh no, I'm hurting this poor dog" than the old Wolf3D ones.

That may all be but doesn't change the fact that the same problem as dor the sprites applied: We do not want to use copyrighted material from a game that bears no relation to the Doom engine.

[Nash]

In fact, the only thing I really would change is to render them from a more overhead perspective since the dogs aren't supposed to be exactly eye-level with the player. ;)

This is a good suggestion and to be honest, has indeed been bothering me a little bit as I was playing in-game with these new sprites lately.

I might do an update pass and see if moving the camera up a little would make the sprite look better (and also take in any other suggestions other people may have, if they care to write something other than "it's crap lol"). :D

[Rachael]

if they care to write something other than "it's crap lol")

It's best to ignore such people. They're non-constructive, and as you saw I told him if the old sprites were so much better he could use them, instead.

If he wants to write something more detailed (and helpful) I certainly won't stop him - but otherwise, no skin off our back. The dog you made was good, and his opinion from what I've seen is really an outlier from the other feedback I've seen for it.