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[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

pics

In the 2020 demo (very late months) I did a bit of butcher job on the green stone tunnels to try to make them work. Something has to be done because they just can't translate to filtered textures and IMO they only half work because they're not filtered, otherwise the design is really questionable.

Today I woke up with the intention of finally rebuilding these from the ground up. A better 3D artist could probably do something a little more creative to capture the spirit of the originals, and they're welcome to, but I knew I had to fix this for the next/upcoming demo. I'm pleased with the results. It can use some polish, and hopefully there will be time for some, but at least I can check it off my list like this.

Another reason these need work, beside the design, is the texture maps on them are way too low resolution. The brick size I ended up with was based on the arches, which have much smaller bricks for some reason. (They don't match up at all.) But ended up being made a little smaller to match the stair steps height. It takes a little getting used to but is not so bad. It definitely has a different feeling.

EDITED: For the record, the 3D polygons are unchanged. Also the surface lighting is hard. It can be hard to tell with this texture. It looks smooth either way really with all the confusion and polygons falling on the texture lines.

Formerly "Holy Diver" ("Holy") [Holy will be back as soon as I'm back to full form]

[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

Here's a GIF of a slime made with an animation movie export system I cooked up quite a while back. It gets the job done. I think this is probably accurate to the game but I've not sat down to scrutinize it just yet.

It certainly looks different to me... almost like stained glass because the edges of the triangles don't (all) hold together. I made some slight adjustments to help the dark edges line up where they didn't quite meet sub-pixel accuracy. That's the only part that holds throughout the animation.

P.S. If anyone's reading this, I'm still trying to publish a demo by the end of the month, but this is likely to take up all my time until then. I'll just have a few days to try to do a little bit to add some missing item models and patch up some animations. It's going to be really rough. I have a feeling the new monsters will just be walking in place without sounds unfortunately. I just have to publish what I have. Their textures aren't cleaned up enough to give them a good show, so I feel even a little better if they're more like placeholders. There will be a follow-up in the coming months with everything touched up. There probably won't be another big demo this year after that.

Formerly "Holy Diver" ("Holy") [Holy will be back as soon as I'm back to full form]

[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

home stretch

I'm going to upload a new demo before the month ends. I'm making a list of last things to include (it's going to have to leave out a lot that I'm not sure I could do right now if I had the time to anyway... I'm getting very near maximum burnout.)

1) Finish channels in fountain room.
2) Some clipping obstacles in the village areas, raised entryways, Nola's fountain.
3) Make the windows on houses see-through, remake their super low-res texture.
4) Try to improve tree fuzz on the blue sky model's skyline.
5) Many item models. Try to get all of them... as quick I can work.

Things that won't be in the April demo are, any new sound effects, any new moving/fighting monsters (they're walking in place), any AI improvements or fixes for flying/swimming monsters.

Things that will be are, cross into zone #2 without loading pause (if your PC is at least as good as my very low-end work PC), all of zone 2 visuals wise, except the dark village area is using the same textures as the regular villages, and significantly improved color.

Most of my work since I set out to do this has been on the 3D model editor side. I've done everything this time around without Blender or anything else. Just SOM and my MM3D editor. It's been very pleasurable. A fully streamlined experience.

Formerly "Holy Diver" ("Holy") [Holy will be back as soon as I'm back to full form]

[Holey Moley]

Holey Moley Website System Administrator Offline

look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology

Holey Moley says,

Yesterday I worked on the remaining "item" models and went down a particularly absorbing rabbit hole with this model (pictured) because of troubles with the design on the stomach.

I actually started on it the day before (lately I've been in town and had a tire explode on me) and got derailed because of upscaling artifacts on the same design. As a result I decided the upscaling system I'm using has to deemphasize diagonal pixels, and this is a significant improvement, although it makes it more generic looking perhaps. There were noticeable unsightly artifacts in some of the textures, like the cliffside beach walls' one, that are eliminated now.

Still, after making this fix, how the design on the armor (pictured) is executed seemed not good enough for this project. So last night I did the best I could on short notice to try to remake the stomach area. In the original the gray gradient on the stomach is part of the design's texture. This looked too bad, much like the ghost, so I tried to remake the stomach to use the same gradient pattern as the rest of the armor, and change the design to a decal.

I couldn't get the colors I wanted, so it's quite a compromise. This is because it had to be an additive transparent decal. This can be improved later when I plan to switch the art system over to outputting a texture format that can enable alpha data alongside the RGB color. As for the decal itself, I've just upscaled it, blurred it and resharpened, and made a few hand tweaks. It will all have to be redone (hopefully better) when the rest of the set is done. In theory it wouldn't be that difficult to remake the design(s) from scratch. I'm sure it would look better. It definitely requires more resolution. I want to be proficient with SVG at some point. Surprisingly tools like GIMP don't offer any good automatic solutions for upscaling. I looked into some of the recently popularized solutions for upscaling old games and media but found nothing of use.

I think I'll be done with my plans for the new demo by the end of my day today. I don't know if I'll get to generating the final game files, I'll find out. I think I've settled on names for all of the "items". (Edited: Not just those in the new demo.) For this armor set I've decided against calling it "Merrel Ur's Armor" etc. That's what the Japanese says, except for the gloves and boots it calls Ruinas. I looked up the katakana for those two, I think it probably means something like "ruinous" as related to ruins, but most common associations online relate "Ruinas" which sounds like a proper noun. It might be related to something in Spain, I can't remember what I found. Sometimes Japanese loan words come from older pan-European sources. I was thinking of calling them Ruinas, but I've decided it's too quirky and "Ruined Armor" etc. probably scans better in English. The word "ruinous" I consider too baroque, or even too on the nose if it's meant to portend  tragedy. In English "ruinous" is more like cursed, and I think the meaning in Japanese is closer to ruined, as in both archaic and dilapidated. I guess those two pieces of the set are named differently because they've somehow become separated from the others and handed down as heirlooms. As for "Merrel Ur" I just find it too clunky. I think I'm going to call the arm band piece Merrel Ur (Something) since I think it's said to be inscribed with a message from the artisan who made it. The artisan's name is given. (Sorry, I can't recall it now.) Because its design matches the rest of the pieces from this it can be concluded they once belonged to "Merrel Ur".

Note, the pieces are covered with "runes" (of sorts) however the Japanese does insert an "i" sound after the "u"'s that suggests it's not meant to be read as "rune armor". Currently I have the arm band called Merrel Ur Pass, suggesting it's a badge conferring a title which allows "passage". This is from my future plans for a KF project, which I don't mean to tie into this project necessarily. But there is a problem that this item needs a name that works in English which this overcomes. It suggests the arm band is more than just a decorative flourish, and that perhaps Merrel Ur is a title instead of a man. although the name is used to denote the last man (or high elf) who held this title. (I think maybe the "'" (apostrophe) doesn't render so well in the Japanese font SOM uses, so I'm leaning toward avoiding it in names. It's a little too wonky for video games anyway. (If this is its name it might be worth adding some kind of bonus section that's only accessed by wearing this arm band.)

[Edited: I think I meant to also say here that I'm seriously considering calling one of the rings Lulufon's Ring, drawing a connection to the Shadow Tower series, so I'm not taking this extremely seriously. This ring is really called the chirei ring, which if you know from playing Megaten for example, chirei are spirits of the earth. But the only real use of this word in Japanese is for a semi-famous play called Earth Spirit about a wild woman of the new century named Lulu, and anyway, it looks like something she'd wear, and I can't think of an English translation that scans, so I'm thinking about using this just as a pun. Lou Reed--a hero of mine--wanted to raise a production of this play, Lulu, and named his last major album done with Metallica Lulu. This is moreso me leaving my own (esoteric) mark on this project as an Easter egg. (Ascribing to it some literary pretensions for good luck.) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Spirit_(play))]

Anyway, this isn't exactly how it looks in the SOM game. This screenshot is out of SOM_PRM (actually ItemEdit) which has different lighting. The original game has false lighting when picking up items and in the menus. SOM uses the environment lighting, although I suppose I should offer an alternative. Or it could be the item itself has false lighting. To fake this I turned down the "diffuse" component and turned up the "emissive" component.

Formerly "Holy Diver" ("Holy") [Holy will be back as soon as I'm back to full form]