Caves of Qud Wiki:Sprite Uploading

Autoupload
Currently most of the sprites in the game can be automatically loaded, coloured, and uploaded to the wiki by QBE, which is used to automate the creation and updating of the articles on this wiki. However, some sprites may be new, not be able to be coloured, or you may want to screenshot areas covering more than one tile. The techniques below may be able to help.

Individual tile images
For most of the tiles in the game, they can be rendered by the Discord bot on the Caves of Qud discord server. Use the command, where ID is the 'wish ID' shown in the infobox on the item or creature's page on this wiki.

Capturing High-Quality Screenshots
In Steam: In Caves of Qud:
 * Go to View > Settings > In-Game and enable Save an uncompressed copy for screenshots.
 * Define a working folder with the Screenshot Folder button.
 * Set your render resolution to 1280x800 windowed.
 * Go to Options > General and disable Display Vignette and Display Scanlines.

You are now ready to capture screenshots which preserve the defined edges and aspect ratios of sprites. When capturing, ensure particles and the chat log do not overlap with your subjects.

Wishing for  will take you to an empty map, wishing for "calm" will pacify all creatures, and then wishing for individual creatures/items by name can yield many subjects per screenshot.

Editing Screenshots with GIMP2
I will be using GIMP2 for the remainder of this guide. We will require a few specific settings.
 * Go to Edit > Preferences > Default Grid set the Width to 160 and Height to 240 pixels.
 * Set Line style to Solid.

This will allow you to quickly select a whole sprite and preserve their size in relation to each other.


 * Open your uncompressed screenshot and use the Rectangle Select Tool  to select only the visible map, not the UI or border. I recommend zooming in for pixel accuracy.
 * Press >  to quickly Crop to Selection.
 * In the Layers - Brushes list, right-click your layer and select Add Alpha Channel.
 * Use the Select by Color Tool  and click on the background.
 * Press  and now you will have only sprites and transparency.
 * Press >  to open Scale Image, then set your Interpolation to None and scale the image x10 (this should result in 12800x6000 pixels).
 * A dialog will popup to warn you about the file size, click Scale.

Here I recommend going to File > Overwrite screenshotname.png to overwrite the original screenshot, in case you need to come back and fix a botched/missed sprite.


 * Press >  and  >  to activate the Show Grid and Snap to Grid options.
 * Use the Rectangle Select Tool  and following the borders, select one sprite.
 * Press >  then   to crop and export the lone sprite as a .png.
 * Name the file to match the in-game name and replace the spaces with  underscores.
 * Press  until you return to the full image, and select another sprite.

Uploading Finished Sprites

 * With your completed 160x240 sprites go to Special:Upload.
 * If you have multiple files, you can upload them all at once using the Yes radio button above the browse button. This option may not appear until you refresh the page.