DxSard's new Sardaukar minigunner sprites (data for modders)

[Fey]

hallo

so DxSard recently made these kickass Sardaukar minigunner sprites:


aren't those so freaking cool?

but their firing animation lacked a muzzle flash, death animation was a little funny, they were built for the Sardaukar palette, aaand there was no recorded alignment for the sprites. sooo i fixed that i guess

boring details lol

Spoiler

here's a short clip of their touched-up firing animation in three directions, and their improved death animation: https://i.imgur.com/zgblO4C.mp4

here are some idle animations. you know, fiddling around with the minigun and stuff: https://i.imgur.com/Hx9Khs2.mp4

they do in fact explode on death, like, they deal damage and stuff. so that explosion that kills them is actually meant to be their on-death effect. it was removed so the actual animation could be more clearly seen during the editing process. under normal circumstances, the explosion effect spawns on their corpse on death to better indicate that they are exploding and dealing damage to nearby units. in the demonstration clip, that's an off-screen Storm Lasher megaturret killing the unit with an identical explosion. the idle animations are just spinning the barrel without the ammo belt moving or the weapon firing. also, the colors being adjusted for the Saboteur spriteset means these sprites and the original Sardaukar sprites can be used simultaneously. so, maybe that's useful to somebody else?

the Saboteur's sidebar icon has a fucking weird palette, but I did what I could to adjust the icon for the palette. this is how it appears in-game:


call it 'stylized' if you want. not much I can do about that red; trying to use the minigun's actual colors just makes the weapon gray, which doesn't work with the gray background.

if it's of any interest, I'm doing up these sprites for use as the player commander's spriteset in my Summers campaign. here's relevant info about how the unit is meant to function:
     Summers' Ixian-built power armor enables her to lug a massive burstfire minigun into battle. It shreds any target by unleashing hundreds of rounds in seconds. If death or capture are inevitable, the armor can self-destruct to prevent recovery by enemies.

so that maybe explains the explode-on-death behavior, or the lack of rapid fire. it's burstfire! lots of damage all at once in a blinding hail of bullets, yay.

EDIT: I took a longer demonstration video. here's a link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l67cDhHohec

there's meant to be only one of this sort of unit on the field at any given time, which is why it's overpowered. the balance in this demonstration is irrelevant; this is meant to showcase the animations.

anyway I thought I'd just mention I've got these sprites touched up. here are the raw sprites and the sidebar icon:
Sardaukar Minigunner.zip

and here's a data.r16 with the alignment info. Saboteur frames begin at row 2149:
DATA.R16

please note that the data.r16 file above contains a bunch of other modded stuff and isn't suitable for just dropping in somewhere to use these frames. if you wanna use 'em, import the frames to their appropriate places and adjust the alignment data in the resource editor using this data.r16 as a reference only. so, this data is for modders only pretty much, but if you're a player then maybe you'll see these sprites in a few maps. if you have questions, ping me.

@firefly101 perhaps you'd enjoy this spriteset for your infantry-focused mod?

alright, that's all for now. have fun

Edited October 2, 2020 by Fey

[firefly101]

There is a possible use for the Sardaukar units that are recruited in MP which I use for the Starport. Maybe calling them Heavy Mech Sardaukar or something.

[Fey]

1 hour ago, firefly101 said:

There is a possible use for the Sardaukar units that are recruited in MP which I use for the Starport. Maybe calling them Heavy Mech Sardaukar or something.

Sardaukar Elite? Sardaukar Commando?

[Fey]

hallo. got some more sprite data for modders here

Thumpers are popular for being overwritten, but they're difficult to work with because their "firing" animation is only to the right, and they use it for thumping. uhh... and someone may want to keep Saboteurs while also using these new Sardaukar sprites, so I went ahead and did some color correction for the Thumper palette:

Spoiler

colors restored where they were absent, colors removed where they shouldn't be, shadows fixed, all that stuff. Saboteurs have a slight blue tint to their bomb, as you can see on the left there. it comes out more gray in the final result, so it's not exactly true, but that's palette conversion for you. it at least looks "correct"! as close to correct as it can get

with regard to using weapons, that's also possible if the unit kills itself. see here for an example:
https://i.imgur.com/XbIvTKW.mp4

I use the original Thumper graphics to make a point.

in clips one and two, all normal behavior works exactly as intended. Saboteurs can execute a suicide attack and all that. this works 100% of the time because the attack instantly kills the Saboteur. it skips over the firing frames - or lack thereof - and straight to the death animations. however, in the third clip, I've swapped their suicide attack out for a shotgun blast. as you can see, they perform the thumping animation when facing the right. this works, but any other direction, such as down, will crash the game.

this is probably a bit too late for Cm's latest campaign still in development, but for any future desire to use new Sardaukar sprites, keep the old, and use Saboteurs as well, here are the raw sprites color-corrected for the Thumper palette as best I could do with a short little patch job:
Saboteur over Thumper.zip

so yeah hope that helps lol

[Amander]

Minigun Sardaukars almost looks as big as Tanks while original ones looked like in the movie.
Maybe call them Sardaukar still since both look relatively compatible as one.