Sword of Moonlight Forum
King's Field Related Games => King's Field Series => Topic started by: TheStolenBattenberg on April 03, 2014, 12:20:36 pm
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December, 20 years ago From Software released probably one of my all time favorite games, King's Field... I have very little expectation of From Software realizing this, and actually releasing something to commemorate the date, so it's up to the fans I guess. Hey, I have free time to burn!
For this very special day, I've got something planned which will probably be one of the bigger PS1 modding undertakings.
I'll be taking a break from SoM 2.0 while I do this, but it should only take a month if I can do the textures with my very limited skills.
The eventual product will be a windows launcher, which'll have some fancy graphics and a pre-configured PS1 emulator, with configurations to get the games working perfectly, and an inbuilt PS1 image patching tool to install the mods. It'll be released ON THE DAY KF-Japan was first released.
First on the list is KF-Japan,
Some special thanks go to HwitVlf, for (I'm pretty sure this was him) translating the original KF-Japan into English, so I can mess with it without being confused. And even more for creating KFTool and giving a basic instruction on how to replace/add files to PS1 isos, without messing them up.
NOTICE: I'd like to ask HwitVlf a few questions should he see this, regarding to a pretty big idea I had with PS1 modding, caused by a very nice error I did replacing TIMs...
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What a cool idea! I wonder if Fromsoft will remember this anniversary...
You can contact me at weissvulf at yahooo dot comm if you like :smile:
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Crossing my fingers in hopes for a King's Field V announcement.
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Crossing my fingers in hopes for a King's Field V announcement.
That would be VERY nice!
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You know, Hidetaka Miyazaki did step down as director of Dark Souls 2, I'm starting to wonder if it's because he's doing work on King's Field V next. Fromsoft has been know to develop multiple games at once afterall.
I think it'd be awesome if he managed to pull off Souls combat in a first person perspective, as not many games have gotten it right (except for maybe Chivalry and Mount&Blade).
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Looking forward to it TSB.
It is possible that after all the reception KF has recieved from Dark Souls (yeah, you'd think it should be the other way around...) I would say From could one day chance a new KF release that would have better reception in the west due to the Souls series.
It might have a caption like the western ST cover art had... "From the makers of Dark Souls" :biggrin:
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In my honest opinion, From Software are geniuses... You always here people talk about how games like Final Fantasy 7 have revolutionary graphics, yet in all honesty they're not that great from a technology perspective. (not that I'm saying it's a bad game...)
King's Field is like the Doom of PS1, when you really break it down you can see why it was such a slow game.
Physics, real time 3D, multiple enemies all with AI... Hell, even though the textures were low quality, they're 128x128, and there's a pretty high tiling count on them.
The engine was rich with features, BSP-Trees; occlusion, frustum and distance culling; level streaming... The gameplay was rich with features too, the lore is deep if you take the time to find it, and that music... Best soundtrack ever.
I fear for From Software though, as money to any cooperation can mess them up. And with the success of Dark Souls...
But in the end, maybe King's Field should stay where it is? As a monument to gaming, it's something good, but modernization I fear would hurt King's Field... Sure I'd love another entry in the series, but I know I'd end up complaining that it's too fast... Hah.
\Rant over. Hehe... Sorry. :goodnight:
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Agree with you on the technological limelight, and the quality that From put in to make KF what it became. I think thats why most of us here love From's games, just trekking through DS2 made me think "not many game companies make games this big" and I really hope that From keep up with their quality standards and dont take the Capcom route to cack. So to speak.
But for me, its not so much the tech side. Somehow, From have a very consistent art form that naturally takes a hold of your imagination and... Somewhat quenches it. Sounds odd, but thats the attraction for me, its almost like From know how to design great creatures, equipment and items to make them feel believable, while maintaining an appealing surreal effect. The Dark series isnt as surreal as Demons or KF / ST, and probably so to appeal to a wider audience, but its still there.
But in the end, maybe King's Field should stay where it is? As a monument to gaming, it's something good, but modernization I fear would hurt King's Field... Sure I'd love another entry in the series, but I know I'd end up complaining that it's too fast... Hah.
Yeah, but somehow I cant see From taking the Skyrim route, because their level design and pace wouldnt allow it. From seem to know how to link areas together without straining the player... So a new KF would likely progress something similar to the Souls games (hopefully more DS1 than 2) obviously with the warping more a privelege than a nessecity. Plus the quality artwork would make it shine :smile:
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its almost like From knows how to design great creatures, equipment and items to make them feel believable, while maintaining an appealing surreal effect.
That pretty much sums what I feel Fromsoft's strong points are. I've played too many ultra stinker games made by them to feel like they are a infallible geniuses. But I think they are really good in the areas of innovation, art design and setting up "battle systems". They seem weak in balancing games and coming up with meaningful stories in my opinion (for what that's worth ha ha).
I think Agetec was a part of what made the KF games excellent. They changed the story at least and I remember reading long ago on the Agetec forums that Agetec had made a presentation for a huge new KF game to Fromsoft (which they turned down). That would suggest that Agetec was involved in at least some aspects of the KF design. Which would also explain why KF(Jap), which made before Agetec cam on board, is widely considered the least of the KF games. Since it appears that Agetec is no longer in partnership with Fromsoft, a new KF would probably be something different that the previous ones.
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How is this going?
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Sorry, been experimenting trying to make the game load different textures, guess I forgot to post here.
I've been working on textures etc, it's easy to do textures for the enemy files in KFJ, since it uses a 8-BPP image, and there's only 8 different textures.
I've still been having trouble with your KF-Tool, it seems it doesn't like the PAL copies of the games or something, any attempt to replace the images just breaks the game... Also there's so many duplicate files in the game, that I'm not exactly sure which ones are used...
Also, I've been working on a small tool which will help in re-writing all the dialogues/fixing translation errors, which lets you write a sentence and have it render into the king's field font. Not sure if anyone wants it when it's done, for SoM games etc.
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Please add a text-editor. I wanna make Turkish translations of the games
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The 're-insert' process is very simple. It just reads the image and the palette from the TIM and inserts them at the given locations. If you look at the inserted image/palette, you should be able to see what is going wrong. If you extract an image and reinsert it without editing, you should be able to compare the before and after ISOs and see what is going wrong.
I mentioned in another thread that I had found a quirk in some of my code that produced write bugs on Unicode systems. I think I had already fixed my programming method, when I made the tool, but it could be an issue.
Sorry it's be a nuisance :smash2:
knighTeen87, Nice to see you! The PS1 King's Field games mostly use graphics files for their text. You should be able translate them into Turkish with a simple TIM editor. The menu text might be more problematic. how many letters are in the Turkish Alphabet?
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thank you man. it's nice to see you also. there are total of 29 letters in Turkish alphabet. some of them like "ç, ş, ö, ğ, ü" are not included in yours. But i can do an acceptable translation without those ones, just like my Clock Tower and Final Fantasy translations :)
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I have a Turkish friend, who speaks fluent English and can help you if you get really stuck. :smile:
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I'll release the 'text-editor' next week once I'm sure it's working correctly.
However, since it'll be outputting images, you'll have to do the task of replacing the files with the image the tool outputs.
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I have a Turkish friend, who speaks fluent English and can help you if you get really stuck. :smile:
thank you so much, but i think i can handle this. I WANT TO HANDLE THIS :) Cuz it was like a dream to me: Translating a KF game to Turkish :)
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Been a while since I've replied to this; I have been doing work though in-between other things. Here's a screenshot of a re-textured King's Field 1 intro. :)
(http://i.imgur.com/FphRftz.jpg)
It's not really much, since I'm not good at creating textures. I hope it's enough though, since the rest is in raw .tim files at the moment.
The actual launcher for the entire project is under construction still too.
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Wow, no clue how you figured out this stuff, but its sweet, keep it up!
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I stared at that opening long enough during the translation to see how much it's improved. Nice.
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Photoshop is pretty good at squeezing all the colour it can into the palette, eh?.. :P
It really does need more work. I'm trying to find away I can edit the actual models that this stuff is made of, which is quiet easy to do in KFJ due to the simple file structures.
I'd of been working on implementing that into the new Alternate Image Viewer thing, but I haven't felt very creative with designing a user interface...
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Heyhey, it's been a while. This project sorta dropped off the radar didn't it? I've still been working on it though, I've just had some complications, and stopped for a little while.
FIRST, Updates:
- I've been working on cracking the format KFJ uses for it's levels, this means that I can edit the texture coordinates on the models, letting me use different textures. For example, the corridor in the intro and outro sequences uses a weird tile texture on the walls, but I think it'd look better with bricks.
That area has way too much slowdown for my liking, so I'd also like to change the amount of times the textures tile.
As it happens, the format is essentially one giant list of TMD files, with multiple objects, and a 32bit int at the start, telling where the next file is starts.
Aside from editing texture coordinates, it also means I can fix/edit model geometry and normals. I always thought the pillers holding the crystals up in the intro looked a little shit, myself. I might also be able to change what texture each model uses. At the moment, it uses 256x textures, maybe I can reduce that to 128, and make them all 8BPP. Would be intresting, no?
- I replaced the first loading screen with something a little nicer, feels weird to brand a game with a company other than my own... :P
You can see some images of the progress below: