Semi-serious solution: at least a few countries (I am thinking of specifically the U.S. and U.K. here) allow superlative advertisement as puffery (U.K. argument, as in it’s clearly not objective) or as a government definition (U.S. argument, as in all products are judged by the government to be of equal quality unless proven otherwise, therefore everyone is ‘the best’). Comparative advertisement, on the other hand, is always open to suit.
Replace every instance of ‘Improved’ with ‘Best’ and call it a day. If everyone is the best, than no one is, or something. Been a while since I watched The Incredibles.
Disclaimer: not a lawyer, not legal advice, this is my layman’s understanding of advertising regulations.
Calling it best instead of improved sounds even more like you’re being told to use it instead of vanilla. If everyone’s the best noone will be unless the vanilla isn’t also called best, in which case it’s worse
Genuine serious suggestion then: you should make a community post that polls hackers to see if the number of people who primarily use an animation’s name to make inclusion judgments is substantial. Setting aside the topic of “if these people exist, does that even matter”, if these people don’t even exist, you’re essentially asking for a refactoring of the repository for absolutely no reason.
Personally I’m not influenced by such things. I think berserker with extra frames completely misses the point, and I automatically think any animation that has spinning weaponry in its non-crit animation is inferior because of how spinning is visually coded in FEGBA (yes this includes vanilla Ephraim Great Lord). I imagine most people are like me where they have their own personal tastes, and I think the suggestion that significant people judge primarily based on name and then content is something that you have the burden to prove when a majority of the animations are available on https://emblem-anims.herokuapp.com/ with clickable gif samples. I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that the assumption that you’re right is unfounded.
It’s not just animations but also map sprites, I think a poll is a good idea but I’d ask if you’ve ever used a map sprite/animation because it’s called improved without looking at alternatives, since the point of the poll is to prove/disprove that significant people have chosen the thing called “improved” without judging other things, which makes things called “improved” a problem because it has stifled decision-making.
I’ve made some other points that haven’t been replied to
Yeah I don’t like the swingy berserker either, it’s supposed to be sudden
“Refactoring of the repository” sounds dramatic, it would take an hour I think
Hot take: If you’re picking animations and other sprites purely based off their name containing ‘improved’ or 2.0’ or whatever, you’re not going to make a good project in the first place. A good developer will check out many relevant animations, play them out several times, and ask ‘does this fit the tone I want for this character/class/game design reason?’
Also, I’m not going to change the names. Why?
^
I’m not going to put a crapload of work into an incredibly minor detail. If people just import the ‘improved’ or ‘updated’ animations thoughtlessly, they’re only hurting themselves.
Incidentally, this was uncalled for. Very rude towards Pandan unnecessarily.
I mean it was a bit ‘omg gushy gushy’ but still… tone.
A developer might pick based on it being “improved” to begin with (picking map sprites is likely to happen early on), but they can grow and become better then return and give their map sprites/animations more thought, it would be good if we protected new developers from themselves so they don’t have to go back and make those changes. If you still think it’s a minor detail after all I’ve said then I guess I’m fucked. Also it was very called for, he was praising everyone just to look good, that’s what politicians do… That probably sounds like a slight on his character but politician-like behaviour needs to be addressed to improve character, but I admit that might not be the intention
It’s a really strange assertion to assume that someone would pick an animation at all based off its title instead of, you know, the animation. Speaking as a “new developer” working on something, I can’t say that seeing “Improved” anything made me more likely to use the animation in question. Turning the discussion back to what actually matters (animations) instead of a pedantic waste of time (whether some should be called improved or not) has nothing to do with politicians, and saying that gives off big “we live in a society” energy, imo.
I don’t really think there’s much else to say beyond what Klok said here, but I just thought i’d add that after looking through a bunch of the “improved” or “2.0” animations, alot of them are objective improvements such as palettes being easier to use (like making darker skinned characters which is a big one) and edits to map sprites which make them take up less space or something, won’t go too in depth on that one because i’m not entirely sure about all the details lol
I’m probably repeating what someone said earlier and I apologize if that’s the case or if i’m not making much sense, but alot of these animations are improved for a new purpose if that makes sense, if you don’t want a huge bulky chunky fighter then Fighter 2.0 is an objective improvement, if you want a bad ass looking warrior that’s easier to repalette then Warrior 2.0 is an objective improvement, the improvements aren’t universal because it’s sorta hard to make real universal improvements beyond palette swaps and small size changes I think, if you prefer vanilla to the custom animations (like I do in many cases) then yes the “improved” label is weird, but it’s up to you as a creator to decide if they are improvements for you or not
What exactly does this have to do with anything? Pandan retired from site staff a while ago. That’s also actually his personality both in public and in one-on-one conversation, he’s a positive guy and likes to be supportive of others. This is a trait that is generally accepted as common sense to not need “improvement”, a word whose definition and appropriate applications you seem to have some trouble grasping.
More generally, you’d do well to drop the “praising things is cringe” attitude; this is a pattern you’ve repeatedly demonstrated and is a much stronger example of a character trait that needs “improvement”.
What it had to do with anything was I was responding to something someone said, no I do understand what improvement means thanks.
I’m not accusing pandan of virtue-signalling but I do think his praise was irrelevant and could be misconstrued as virtue-signalling (evidently because I did), which is something to learn from.
