hey !
thank you for sharing this, good work

edit, after watch all your theme, i have to say a bigger bravo !!

would you like if it was on dlc ?

if you know how it work and want to do it
for now i tried, but i'm fighting with pngcrush aha

Thanks.

Tried to upload there a theme once, but it didn't work.
pngcrush or something. Don't know, how to repair and I don't really fancy doing that.

Holy shit! That’s a lot of work you did. A fucking shitload of themes. Of course I totally have to comment on this. Have to. Comment. On this. Now! Here are my comments on all those themes, in reverse alphabetical order:

Skull
There is a minor issue with the flying skull. A part of the lower bone has been “cut off” which looks … stupid?
In general it’s good to see that someone creates some “dark” themes for Hedgewars. See also my comment on Nightmare.

Smoke
The building object is interesting because of it’s shape.
The background effects are simple but I think that’s what make them good. Just lots of … smoke! Keep it.
The estinguisher is not a very good idea for a sprite here. Why should any sane hog build an extinguisher into the wall? It would make sense as a rare object, but it need to be significantly bigger for that. Perhaps even a new graphic would be neccessary. But also I am not sure if extiguishers would fit into this theme at all as it is obviously primarily an outdoor theme, not an indoor theme. Probably the theme would be best of without any fire extinguishers.
This theme clearly needs custom sudden death clouds and flakes. As this theme doesn’t have those, Hedgewars uses the default which means white clouds as clouds and skull and bones as flakes. Sudden death automatically destroys the entire name-giving feeling of the theme.
I explained how to add custom sudden death flakes in Nightmare. For sudden death flakes, I suggest to simply use the same flakes as in non-sudden-death mode. Maybe a bit darker and probably slightly more of them.
Same suggestion for the clouds. The name of the sudden death clouds file is SDClouds.png.
It would be a huge plus if you’d add custom sudden death water, too. I suggest to make it look like hot red lava (because of the volcano). This is a bit trickier: The sudden death water files are SDWater.png (sudden death counterpart of BlueWater.png), SDSplash.png (counterpart of Splash.png) and SDDroplet.png (counterpart of Droplet.png). Sudden death water is refered in theme.cfg as sd-water-top, sd-water-bottom and sd-water-opacity; they use same syntax as their non-sd--counterparts. You have to add these into the theme.cfg, otherwise the water will have the default color in sudden death which is … purple … it sooooo does not fit into this theme. Make sure the color values you add into the theme.cfg match the color of your SDWater.png (if you do this at all).

Nightmare
The faces made actually made me

It is interesting that you tried something different in this theme.
I would say this would be the “better” halloween theme but sadly the name “Halloween” already has been taken. In fact the “Halloween” theme is in fact more like a “generic” horror theme because it depicts nothing from halloween.
There is a very minor issue with the background, there seem to be some white pixels on the horizont trees which don’t belong there. Can you fix this. Oh, I do not mean the faces of course!
Your theme would become even more awesome if you’d add extra-flakes for sudden death, too. Instead of “happy face” jack-o-lanterns, those would be “evil face” jack-o-lanterns. For your information, the file for sudden death flakes must be called SDFlake.png and are configured in theme.cfg as sd-flakes with the same syntax as flakes (I think it is a not very well known fact).

NewYork
Objects are way too small and the color is all way too grayish. The size of the objects is not very important here. What really breaks the theme is the too grayish color of the objects.
Graffiti is a very good idea, there should be more of them and some different tags. Also, a subtle use of semi-transparency for the graffiti sprites would most likely improve the looks.
The “I <3 NY” sticker is okay (it kind of looks like a sticker).
The U.S.A. flag looks blurred and the stars don’t exist even in a subtle way. At least the "stripes" should have a sharp shape. Probably the stars can be simple made by single pixels if the size of the sprite permits it.
The background is fine, the fade to transparency has been made correctly. I guess the flakes refer to the stars in “stars and stripes”.
A big surprise in this theme is the land border. It looks like a very curved sidewalk. Keep it.
The hot-air-balloon adds nicely to the overall impression.

Moon
I see you’ve added a green contour around these trees. I don’t think this was a good idea at all, because the trees already had a thin black contour. I think the trees were much better without the 2nd contour. Please revert. In overall impression, the theme minus the background was better in the 1st version. I typed “minus packground” because in the 1st version the background had serious issues.

Jungle2
This looks like a “friendlier” version of Jungle. If Jungle wasn’t kitschy enough, then Jungle2 certainly is: smiling bees as flakes, happy birds. If there You didn’t make really big changes like a totally new terrain or stuff like that but that’s just okay. You certainly made enough changes to make your theme stand out, the name “Jungle2” is therefore acceptable.

The overall looks of Jungle2 were pretty good if there weren’t that issue with the background. Sky.png is obviously fucked up, it totally destroys the whole background. It’s that contour problem again seen in some other themes.

Planet
No comment (yet).

Geo
The existing objects are fine. The idea of geometric shape has to be thought further. I would like to see following basic shapes (as object, sprites or flakes):

• cone
• cylinder
• rectangle
• pentagon
• hexagon
• trapez
• parallelogram
• rhombus

I don’t see how the sprite “YEAH” fits into the theme. It does not make any sense for me.
I don’t like the water; I don’t think that darkest blue fits into an overall very bright theme.
The theme would probably work best if Hedgewars had terrain generators which generate terrains that look itself like geometric shapes.
I noticed the theme works currently pretty good if you use it with the “floating island” terrain generator.
The bridge is ultra-simple but absolutely legit in this theme. Lines are automatically featured in this theme, too. Good.

Fantasy
Again there’s the tree from the Moon theme with the unneccessary green contour. It does not fit into here as all other objects, simply because all other objects don’t have such thick contours, too. Solution would be to either give all objects an equal thick contour or an equal thin contour. For this theme, simply reverting the moon tree to the first version would be my favourite solution.
The balloon obviously disqualifies your theme because it has a gradient. I guess redrawing the balloon in the Hedgewars style wouln’t be too hard as it is almost just a circle.
The bridge tiles do not look very good, especially the contours of the wooden plates are way too gradient-ish.
If I am in a good mood I may draw you a new balloon but not a new bridge.
The background music should be Cave.ogg

Fakes
Oh my! This theme is annoying but that’s probably exactly the whole point of the theme. I first didn’t understand why this theme is called “Fakes” but after I’ve looked closer … You get the point.
Besides that, horizont.png is slightly flawed. Around the top of the image, there is a rectangular semitransparent part. You can actually see it ingame slightly above the clouds. It looks … strange? I guess you should just crop the image properly (only the landscape is visible) so that strange rectangle gets deleted.

Dragon
The butterfly animation is a bit flawed, if you look close there is one animation frame with an extra-pixel which makes me go nuts.
The bridge tiles look surprisingly good.
In general, for the Dragon theme, thicker contours for the dragon and knight objects wouldn’t hurt. Be sure to use the same color for the new contour as the existing one, I don’t want another Moon tree.
The tower is a very bad object, it is way too small in relation to the dragon. It should be removed. If you want towers, then it should be at least twice of the height of the dragon, not half of it. Dragons are big, but not that big.
The terrain obviously breaks the Hedgewars style rules. But I guess you just don’t care, right?

Construction
Overall, it’s a nice remix of the Brick theme. One should use it if one does not like how the bridge in the Brick theme is shaped and prefers straight bridges.

Colorado
The birds in the background look as they were on acid. If possible, fix the animation. Additionally, the birds have a visible fade to opaque white instead of transparency. I can help you here if you don’t know how to fix that (see conclusion).

Coins
Overall, it is a very nice theme. The name “Coins” is totally correct here.
The background music clearly doesn’t fit here as I wouldn’t expect singing birds in the night.

Casino
This theme doesn’t load on my GNU/Linux machine. It’s just a typo. In the theme.cfg you should write “Chip1.png”, not “chip1.png”. Then it works.
The dollar bills in the background seem to look very strangely. This means: The animation looks bad; either get rid of the animation or make it look smooth.

Candle
I already liked the original very much.
The background is clearly better than the original, I see you responded to your critic here.
There couldn’t be a better re-use of the Art.ogg music than for this theme. Good choice.
The land texture is very simplistic but adds greatly to the overall atmosphere.
Overall the objects are very clearly cut, fit all into the the
The new flake was good idea, too.
Actually, it was my favourite theme of your themes. And it is still.

Burger
The background is not very good. The thing I don’t like is the fact that the contour of the building does not “smooth away” nicely into the background color. Changing the sky color to [color]129,146,166[/code] does not fix the problem entirely, you’ll still see a contour so you would have to fix the building and grass image manually. I can’t help very much here besides telling you that the contours of the bulding and the grass must be in some way in harmony with the sky color.
On the other hand, you may ask yourself wheather it was actually a good idea to blur the background so strongly. Even the “BURGER” letters are blurred; I think that was way too much blur.
The moon is totally wrong here and should be removed.
What confuses me most are the flakes. Ummm … bubbles?
Good are the burgers and the ketchup because of the clear shapes and bright colors. Semi-good are that drink and the chips. The also have clear shapes but the colors are not so bright. They a bit “grayish” for me. They also lack a “shiny” effect like the ketchup does. The chips object should have an outline as thick as those from the cheeseburger. It should be black, too, not grayish. I suggest this only for a consistent style. The drink has a really flawed outline, it’s outline is thick at the bottom and thin at the top. This also breaks consistence within the theme; if possible, redraw the outline of the drink so it’s equally thick at all places.
The terrain is surprisingly well-made.
theme.cfg: water-top should be 9,35,58 to fit the color BlueWater.png. water-bottom may be the same color or darker.
I could swear I’ve seen a “chips girder” (girder the player may place) somewhere on the forum. I wonder why it isn’t already part of the Burger theme because it’d perfectly fit into the theme.

BoysToys
I just don’t understand why the theme is called “BoysToys”. I don’t see TV and HiFi and smartphones as toys at all. And playing cards and gamepads aren’t exclusively touched by boys only, that’s a stupid prejudice.
The name should be changed (pro-tip: at least remove the “Boys” part).
Currently the theme looks more like it’s trying to depict a living room or a children’s room.
If the theme should be about toys
The clouds should be completely removed.
What the theme is clearly lacking is diversity in toys. There should be way more different toy objects.
I am not quite sure if I like or hate the land texture.

Bath2
This theme looks like a bad copy of Bath. That’s because it is a bad copy of Bath. I don’t see any improvements over the original Bath theme. Instead, the subtle changes you probably made makes the theme look worse than the original. It was a bad idea to blur the background. Congratulations, you successfully degraded a once good theme. Simply delete this theme. This theme is obviously the worst theme you submitted.

Autumn
There is clearly a lack of “nature” objects (trees, bushes, etc.).
There should be at least one autumn tree. The dead tree should appear seldomly or not at all; I would expect dead trees to be in winter or horror themes.
The umbrella needs a slighly thicker outline just as the dead tree and the lantern.
The background looks a bit strange. What is that in the horizont supposed to be? Smoke clouds? Besides from that, the background is fine.
However, the overall expression of this theme is nice.

Arctic
I see the intention you had for the water, but actually it looks bad in practice. The problem is that the ice simply looks as if somebody just has “painted on the water” (which is actually the case ) instead as if the ice would swim on the water. It would be interesting if the engine would support background objects actually swimming on water but sadly this is not the case. For now it is the best solution to revert the water.
The Horizon has trees, probably even with leaves?! How does that justify the themes’s name? The trees clearly have to be removed from the background.
The land texture could hardly be even be more simplistic than that. It is rather boring and also does not really fit into the overall atmosphere of the theme.
The theme objects are all fine, especially the teddy bear .
The flakes are simple but perfect. There is no need to touch them.

Africa
The sky color should be 26,28,32. The sky color you used does not match to the color of the top of the Sky.png and SkyL.png images and you clearly can see where the background image ends. You have to scroll high to see it. Just set the new color in the theme.cfg file.
I already critized the bridge somewhere.

Nice overall impression.

general notes
Remove the Thumbs.db files from the archive. It does only increase the archive size but is absolutely not needed for the theme. These file are auto-generated by Windows and are annoying as hell. See also http://www.ofzenandcomputing.com/zanswers/98/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumbs.db#Thumbs.db. Affected themes:

• Smoke
• Skull
• Planet
• NewYork
• Moon
• Jungle2
• Geo
• Fantasy
• Fakes
• Dragon
• Construction
• Coins
• Candle
• Burger
• BoysToys
• Bath2
• Autumn

Use a different text editor to edit the theme.cfg files, because yours does not handle line breaks very well. I suggest Notepad++ for a simple text editor which handles them correctly automatically or jEdit for a more powerful text editor (altough it’s called “Programmer's text editor” you don’t have to be a programmer to use it) which also handles line-breaks correctly (and automatically).

Please check the background and water colors of your themes if they fit to the color of the background images and the water image. Especially the water color in theme.cfg doesn’t match nicely the BlueWater.png color in many themes. I have given you exact color numbers for some themes but I think you should be able to find the correct color on your own for other themes using the color pick of your favourite graphics program.

I suggest following for future themes: Please create a new thread for them, but please just only one thread per theme, even if you produce a lot of themes. The reason for that is that it makes easier to discuss on a single theme. Throwing >20 themes in one thread simply results in giga-posts like this one.

conclusion
You seem to have worked a long time to create all these themes. I really apprecieate your work. Please do not think that the fact I have made much criticism to your themes that I think they suck. Most of them are pretty good but have their small issues.
I didn’t give you very feedback on some themes; I will give you detailed feedback on those themes later. Maybe.
If you need help, feel free to contact me on XMPP. I am Wuzzy2@jabber.ccc.de.
I do not suggest to add the entire theme package into the DLC section because the Casino theme has a case spelling mistake (breaks on GNU/Linux and SomethingBSD systems), because of the Thumbs.db files (add bloat) and because of the pointless Bath2 theme (sucks). If Luelle gets rid of these problems, I’d be fine with DLC.

First of all: You are a freak! I like that.
Thanks for this monster post!

As you can see, I am not a graphic designer or something else. Just a guy, that got bored of the existing themes.
So I began to create new themes without any idea of doing that at first. I started over 1 1/2 years ago for a friend and me, cause we play HW each week since 2010. So 1 or 2 themes a month resulted of a small investment of time... felt not like that much work as you believe. By doing that I learned how to use photoshop and something about coding. That was a cool side benefit.

Everything is fine. I know they are far from perfection and all your points make sense. I could give you an answer on all the hints, but what should I say? - You're right!
In most of the cases... Sometimes it is just a matter of taste. I tried to get them near to my personal 100%. With your eyes it's only 85% cause you are better in that. Absolute OK for me!
I often worked on problems/mistakes you describe, but most times the themes got worse when I was doing that...

If you like to help, feel free and edit the themes you like, to get suitable for the DLC page. Maybe you can stop your WarMUX conversion project for a while...
I don't want to invest more time to get them perfect. For my friend and me it's enough to have a bigger choice of themes.
To give variety to our weekly matches I prefer to create more "uncomplete" themes in the future than reworking the old. We don't care about the details that much...

But it would be nice, if you're itching to do that!

.

By the way: the thumbs-problem is effected by switching between Win XP and Mac OS 10.4 with my themes... I knew that, but I didn't have a look on it everytime. Sorry.

nice work luelle! can't wait to see these themes in dlc!

Rope Brothers Founder

If you still don't have installed for 9.19...

Here again with a new theme in it called "Baby".
Was a present for a friend who became father.
NewThemes.zip
(click on SMALL DOWNLOAD BUTTON in green and copy to folder ~/.hedgewars/Data/Themes/)
Also updated in the first post.

Preview:

I had the idea of the hedgewars store in the achievements post by star and moon. If it becomes a reality, your themes should be there

The themes have been on DLC for a couple of days now.