Combine game assets into art.

nonamethanks said in forum #441029:

third-party edit is for alterations. merged layers is merely a reconstruction of the original image, it's not a third-party edit.

I think that's what some people will get confused by since technically, the background, sprite, etc. are the original images and you're altering them by stacking them on top of each other. And it's a more substantial alteration than stitching because you're replacing lower-layer pixels with upper-layer ones (or mixing them if they have transparency). It would be more accurate to say we're reconstructing how it looks in-game.

Following that logic, I agree that a properly reconstructed merged layers image should not be tagged third-party edit. Should we still add the third-party edit tag if it's done poorly (for example, asset #33522651)?

てはいさ said in forum #441027:

third-party edit:

From the list of accepted edits, only the "detexted" tag implies the "third-party_edit" tag. This suggests that there are edits that aren't problematic. The "merged_layers" and "stitched" tags are very similar in my opinion.

Stitched can be uploaded by the artist or edit by any one, while cannot.merged_layers ,If it's posted by the artist, is it still considered merged_layers?

thefoxne said in forum #441136:

Stitched can be uploaded by the artist or edit by any one, while cannot.merged_layers ,If it's posted by the artist, is it still considered merged_layers?

Stitched means that someone other than the artist combined the images. Same with merged layers.

When nonamethanks said these aren't third-party edits, he wasn't being completely literal. He meant that we don't consider them as such for tagging purposes. Most unnecessary third-party edits are borderline content at best, so having that tag means they are more likely to be filtered out by Approvers that don't want to approve borderline content. But tags like stitched are generally understood to indicate it wasn't the artist who put them together.

Keep in mind third-party edit shows as a warning in the modqueue as well. It could scare off some approvers who don't realize it was also tagged merged_layers.

The bulk update request #59889 (forum #441008) has been rejected by @nonamethanks.