Yup, I'm still around.

[vongrimmsy0]

Hello all! I've been back, lurking around the forums for about a week now.

To update, the game I was working on came to a standstill - my programmer buddy mysteriously vanished, and with him, any will I had to continue working on said project... What a bummer; hundreds of characters, and more than 50 different locations, all lovingly drawn with pixels and assembled for naught. I still have the files, but hell... My motivation to do anything with them is nil. Maybe another time...

But I digress--! I'm here about King's Field/Shadow Tower-related business, and am asking for assistance, if possible!

Lately, I've been on a real papercraft binge. Assembling buildings, props, paper miniatures, and things of the sort. So I had the idea to create some King's Field-inspired paper miniatures! I've already finished/printed a few from King's Field 2 (#1 in the U.S.), and plan on making more - and here comes my plea for help!

I need clean screen shots of as many monsters as can be assembled - all of them, from ALL of the KF games and ST, preferably; front/back shots would be ideal! As much as I love the KF series, I don't have the time to plow through them all again to get the pics, and SOM doesn't want to work on my Mac...

So, if anyone has a way of providing these screens, I can get to work in doodling up a King's Field-inspired menagerie of beasts and baddies!

I'll dig up what I've made so far and post em here, so you guys can see the first prototype!

Thanks in advance to whomever can assist!

-vg

[vongrimmsy0]

Here's what I've done so far. Printed em' out, and they are all roughly in the 30mm range, give or take...

While I'm not the best artist in the world, the monsters here should be easily identified I believe. My main gripe is that the small details I drew on some of these were lost due to being scaled down. In an attempt to remedy this, I've started redrawing the whole lot using vectors instead, and they look pretty slick so far. I'll upload that batch when they're finished!

I saw someone here had made actual miniatures for several KF enemies some time ago, but I think that may require a bit too much know-how for the average user. These paper minis only require a pair of scissors, a ruler, some craft glue (UHU glue pens work wonders, in my experience), and a sharp craft knife! A black marker also helps, in coloring the white edges - this small step really makes most papercraft models/minis shine!

STEPS:
(When printing, it's best to use cardstock and set quality to HIGH; using regular paper would be a waste of ink with these, as it'd be far too flimsy to even stand! Print at actual size, and do NOT fit to frame, or the size will be off!)
1 - Using ruler along the red lines, score (lightly cut/scratch) across the red lines to allow easy folding later.
2 - Roughly cut out the minis with scissors, then cut out individual minis for the next steps.
3 - Apply a thin layer of glue to the back inner (white, blank) side, and fold over - try to burnish (rub) the length of the mini to allow even glue distribution.
4 - Wait a bit until the glue is dry! Important, as otherwise, cutting will become a sticky mess!
5 - Using a craft knife, cut out all the 'negative' spaces, including between legs and arms if such spaces exist.
6 - Once cut out, you're pretty much done! You can edge the white paper on the sides with a black marker (dry erase markers are great for this, in my experience) to make the colors pop.
7 - Apply to a base of your preference - onemonk.com has a collection of free bases to print and use if you're lacking your own!

[Holy_Diver]

https://www.reddit.com/r/KingsField/ is a better way to share this. Personally, I don't understand this concept. Is it for a board game?

[vongrimmsy0]

Unfortunately, I can't seem to access Reddit in my region as of late. 

But yeah, they'd be for boardgaming to those that are inclined. Could also just be used as decorations by fans of the series, I suppose!

[Holy_Diver]

Well, I had an idea (what region BTW?) I know you can't use SOM with your computer (maybe you can install Windows on it? If it's not PowerPC that is) but since you're able to make vector graphics, would you like to help port King's Field II to SOM by making vector graphics out of its image files? TheStolenBattenberg has already helped a lot with deciphering the compact disc's contents. I have a feeling that the skins won't work so well in VR/HD if they are overly pixelated.

Think about it. Instead of making pictures of krakens, you'd be responsible for their skin instead! But I want to use the original images for the most part... so, remixing can wait until later.

[vongrimmsy0]

I think I could do that, most likely... I must admit that I'm rather new to drawing vectors, but I'm a pretty fast learner, and can't really foresee any problems arising with redrawing skins for the KF bestiary. If you get me the image files, I can start working on it as time allows. I've actually read through what you and TSB have been working on as far as what's been posted, and you two have made some awesome progress - kudos to the both of you on that! 

And I'm in China. Plenty of sites get blocked here, but usually it's on a temporary basis, outside of stuff like Facebook, Twitter, etc., so I may potentially have access to Reddit again at some point.

As far as SOM, I do have a laptop PC, but I primarily use it for printing papercrafts - I remember downloading and installing SOM on it at some point, years ago, and having it not work for whatever reason. I should probably just try again. 

EDIT: Unless said image files are in the SOM install..? If so, lemme know and I'll go fetch it and see if I can get it running this time!

[Holy_Diver]

Well! I think there are many ways (even online tools) to start by converting the image into an SVG. Then you just need to make little hand tweaks to make it look the way you think it's supposed to.

Here (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/ex/diy/) is a guide for installing SOM (you don't want the original, unenhanced version, obviously.) The gist is to use something like TortoiseSVN to download/update it.

I could give you the files right now, except they are in BMP, because that's what SOM's conversion tools use. But that's not good for attaching. So let me change to a different format. Maybe TheStollenBattenberg will beat me to it... if they have PNG files, or they also have files for the other games I'm sure. But I am personally only concerned with KF2 until the job is complete, so I cannot give you the other game's files.

Give me a little while. I hope you will get all the credit for texture work I'm not 100% convinced we have all of the images yet. But it's not impossible. Thing is, it can be really hard to tell what's what. On the plus side, the images are very simple, small, only fewer than 16 colors. So should be fun to work with them, and not overwhelming; like little curios, all.

[vongrimmsy0]

Sweet, then I'll keep an eye out for the files, and will likely get around to (re) installing SOM tomorrow sometime - it's getting late-ish here at the moment, and I'll probably be hitting the sack before too long.

About SVG files, I've got that covered in the form of Adobe Illustrator, so no worries there. 

All told, I don't imagine it should take me too long to finish this reskin project, depending on my available downtime. As I remember it, KF2 didn't have an insane amount of monsters to begin with~ 

I'm honestly happy to be involved, for what it's worth - I've watched the development of SOM for years now as a lurker, and have been very interested in it, just never had the time to fiddle around with it personally.

[Holy_Diver]

Well, the profile of this project is much more than anything that's come before. It's the beginning of a new era for SOM. Whether it will be a ghost town like the previous era... who's to say, but it will be a new era nonetheless

I've sent you a link to the image files, via PM. There are a lot more than you know. I wasted my time trying to make PNG files. The BMP files made much smaller ZIP files after all. But partly because I couldn't get Microsoft's WIC codecs to use indexed color... and I still didn't trust its PNG files to be lossless, so better deal to use BMP all around.

I gave you instructions, but just for readers, how I'd like to begin is to use the original colors, so that what the SVG files are doing is just providing hand tweaked contours between the colors. Some of them wrap around, but many don't. Even wall textures don't necessarily repeat in KF2.

P.S. I'm glad there is help appearing out of the blue! I've worked on SOM for 8yrs counting, and it's so rare to have help... in fact it pretty much has never happened before. It's nothing short of a miracle

P.P.S. I'm not recommending playing with SOM, but in the next two or three days there's going to be a new release, with a layer system, so that you can build passages that crisscross over/under each other, or even exist on top of each other, but there are no stock tiles that can do that. https://www.facebook.com/moratheia/photos/?ref=page_internal has a good looking project that makes SOM look like KF4 or the Ico games. It's an example of what SOM can do with original artwork. They are based in Taiwan and travel around Asia for work.

[Holy_Diver]

EDITED: I took down/replaced the ZIP file link I sent you, because I wanted to change the names of the BMP files.

I realized that the extra 0 in the name would likely always be 0, and so was unnecessary. If you downloaded before reading this, please check/download again if your file names start with a 0 like so:
0320x,000y    0034816.bmp (old)
320x,000y    0034816.bmp (new)

EDITED: And just for the record, don't worry about the textures that are just scrambled pixels. They cannot benefit from SVG. If necessary we will just have to find a filter that looks like whatever we end up doing with the SVG versions. A lot of the level geometry textures fall into this category. Many textures are actually very high-definition for 16 color palettes