SQS random thoughts

[Madison Lastrega]

I just wanted to make  a small section where I could place random thoughts during the creation process, and then one day when this project is complete, hopefully well get some laughs along the journey.......ML


Thought one....... It occurred to me that just one of my map tiles is larger than the entire earthworld and fireworld carts combined....... I'm already ahead of Atari.

Thought two..... That same map tile has more colors than the entire Atari 2600 color pallet.... Just a thought.

 


PS if anyone cares earthworld is a whopping 8kb and fireworld was 7kb and the map piece in question was 21kb and had 33 colors ... Oh how times have changed huh :-)

[HwitVlf]

It is amazing how far games have come. I remember reading an interview with a playstation developer when the PS2 came out. He said the system's abilities had really raised the amount of work it took to design a game. A single character model on the PS2 had double thew polygon count of an entire map area on the PS1. But at least the  tools have improved along with the demands.  There was another interview I read with one of the creators of the original asteroids game- he was saying how hard it was to program the sounds for the game from scratch. There was no standardized format or hardware capabilities back then so everything had to be figured out and designed from the ground up.

[Verdite]

Well being a dev myself  I can imagine how much simpler games were before. When I look at even really nice DOS games like Betrayal at Krondor I think... This all looks great for a DOS game, but its mostly all just image work. Photos, image editing, text.

3D looks and feels amazing but tests the artists observation ability at every turn. Its not only structuring the models efficiently so they look realistic, its using the vertices / faces minimally for game models that presents the challenge. When I look at the KF (PAL/US) models I can see how resource inefficient they are. But I do think it was a fantastic achievement to accomplish such great work on the PS1 and I still think the game looks great.

[Madison Lastrega]

Thought 3 : when your work starts to take shape you notice.....uhhhh dam it i gotta redo that door texture
ML

Hey Can I make this a real door now(MDL) or do I gotta leave it an Object and set events to move it?

[HwitVlf]

The simple answer is no one knows. X2mdl was riddled with bugs when it was released and Mick has supposedly fixed some of them over time, but last time I used it, there was a bug that would make it complicated, but probably not impossible to make a door.  The delicate part is setting up the collision. If you want to take the time to figure the method out, you should start by watching the youtube video linked in my PRF editor post. It has the basics of setting up CP triangles.

[Verdite]

I got CPs to work through luck, it seems like the CPs point towards the floor 9 times out of 10... Anyway x2mdl has a freeze frame option now to pose models so that they arent scrunched, so it may be easier to setup CPs.

[HwitVlf]

The model's starting pose has nothing to do with the CP triangles. The CP triangles are actually an entirely separate 3D model file from the MDL mesh - much like the MHM file is to the MSM. The problem with x2mdl is that it restructures everything including the CP file into a format that Mick thought made sense rather than the format that SoM requires. It reorders the CP triangles based on their occurrence in the source model, whereas SoM requires them to be in order of their color values. Spells getting launched into the floor is SoM's "default" when the CP file is botched.

If your new door matches the size and motion of an existing SoM door, you can probably just swap in the old door's CP file. Otherwise, you just have to do things in a precise order and make zero mistakes.

[Madison Lastrega]

hmmmmmm I will check that video out kind sir :)


Thought Four:   making one object can be fun .......Making 12 at a time well thats fun too, but tedious 

.............ML


PS I retextured that dang door too :)

[Madison Lastrega]

Got a question for you all?   I have been making my map sets for earth world and have a solid direction on all my chambers exept one..... Gemini.... Little detail first I suppose. Each chamber is a representation of one of the 12 zodiacs, luckily for me the script in the game lead all of earthworld underground ..... however gemini's chamber was in the comic in great detail, and was basicly a "hall of mirrors" with two twins, one evil, and one not so much.  The mirrors represented the constant conflict of the two.... Well we all know we can't do that in SoM for many reasons..... 1 no reflective texture output, and 2 even if you had them you(the character) would be invisable, because as we all know in SoM you have no real avatar.        So.... I need some suggestions on a good alternetive level for Gemini......... I was toying with doing 2 interconected towers, as to play on the actual twin symbol, and some of the comic story line as well, but as always I am open to suggestion.

So when yall think of Gemini, what enviroment comes to mind? Any one born in june ?  Thanks in advance.............ML

[HwitVlf]

The first thing that came to mind as twin-like was a dual world with "light" and  "dark" modes- which work quite well in SoM. I like the idea of two towers also, so I pictured two identical towers, one in the light world and one in the dark world, whose "existence" overlaps in their middle.

Also, the idea of seeing your "copy" in a mirror sounds intriguing. Seeing a non-mirrored copy of the player in a mirror-like dimensional window actually seems more interesting that just regular mirrors. Something like being able to talk to your own reflection which acts as an independent creature.

I wonder if you could make a convincing mirror effect for a room by making a regular window with a reversed copy of the room on the other side? If you made a short cutscene that introduced them as a mirrors that were also portals to the opposite tower it would go a long way to explaining what they were supposed to be. 

I was born June 26th so I'm crabby as opposed to bi-polar