I'm trying to get a fairly simple graphical style down for the upcoming MAGS.
Any opinions? Ideas? If someone has any ideas on how to improve the craters, I would be giddy with joy!
(http://www.whamgames.com/images/magsapril/concept01.png)
Looks fun. The craters would probably look better if you colored them even more darkly in the lower section of the hole.
How about a little bit more light around the inside rim of the crater as well? Some darker color to give the outside wall of the crater some more shadow, as in the perception of some cracks or uneven ground. Right now that outer base looks very plain to me, a bit like one solid material.
Is this going to be related to your FF6-sprite-esque character?
Here's another test image I made, open for critique.
(http://www.whamgames.com/images/magsapril/concept02.png)
I'll get back to trying out some tricks with the craters now, what I really need are some good reference pictures fotos.
@ Moresco: The FF6 project is a different game, and a longer project altogether, I'll use that thread to get critique on the characters for that project. I just decided to use that sprite as a base for these characters as it felt small and simple enought to animate for a quick MAGS project.
Quote from: WHAM on Sun 03/04/2011 20:54:51
I'll get back to trying out some tricks with the craters now, what I really need are some good reference pictures fotos.
... maybe something like this:
(http://www.planet-wissen.de/natur_technik/weltall/astronomie/img/intro_astronomie_krater_g.jpg)
(http://www.whamgames.com/images/magsapril/concept01_v2.png)
I tried darkening the craters and adding some simple noise for now. Improvement in my opinion. Also added some more junk and cover.
Quote from: WHAM on Sun 03/04/2011 22:46:00
(http://www.whamgames.com/images/magsapril/concept01_v2.png)
I tried darkening the craters and adding some simple noise for now. Improvement in my opinion. Also added some more junk and cover.
In my opinion you had the right idea early on, the craters are barely visible now, the picture of that crater looks really good....
I would go lighter around the top of the holes, and then make the walls inside the hole a little darker than the floor of the hole.I believe you need 3 colors there.
I used this tutorials when I was designing some maps for Close Combat, they are top viewed but maybe you find them useful.
http://closecombat.matrixgames.com/ClassicCC/dodamtutorials/Big%20crater%20tutorial.htm
http://closecombat.matrixgames.com/ClassicCC/dodamtutorials/Small%20Craters.htm
Thanks for the replies!
I'll have to look at that tutorial and see about lighting up the edged of the craters a bit, as NickyNyce said. Will post back later today.
EDIT: looked at the tutorial. It might just be a bit too detailed for this graphical style, but I'm sure I can pick up some tricks from it. I'm thinking of having flares and explosions create light effects that cause directional shadows on the craters and other objects.
(http://www.whamgames.com/images/magsapril/concept01_v3.png)
Another take on the craters. I lightened the endges and darkened the interior a little further. Are we improving, or degrading?
Quote from: WHAM on Mon 04/04/2011 19:17:52
(http://www.whamgames.com/images/magsapril/concept01_v3.png)
Another take on the craters. I lightened the endges and darkened the interior a little further. Are we improving, or degrading?
Improving, a little bit more light around the outer rim in places to make them pop I think.
(http://www.whamgames.com/images/magsapril/concept01_v4.png)
Lightened the rims a touch more.
They still look like buried tubes; here's a quick suggestion:
(http://i.imgur.com/1KhCX.png)
Fiddled around with Khris' suggestion, but I just couldn't get it to look right. :(
In my opinion the edges of the crater shouldn't be nearly that bright and all attempts at redesign and lightening of the edges has, in my opinion, looked a little less natural.
I'll see if I can come up with any more edits, or perhaps I will just leave the craters as they are now. At least I think the player should have no issue identifying what he is looking at. Next I'll try to improve and expand the indoor map elements a little, as well as add some more scenery I can gleefully copy and paste all over the battlefield, to make it bigger and better!
Reworked the crater a bit.
Also, the very light tint was a hint at a general issue with your picture: severe lack of contrast and resulting flatness. I did sloppy paintovers of one of the guys and one of the barricades:
(http://i.imgur.com/LtU5l.png)
At the level of detail you have, volumetric lighting is much more important than texture. The noise on the barricades and the slightly darker lines on the armor are practically indiscernible.
The earth noise is ok, the concrete noise on the other hand looks cheap. I'd ditch it and go with lines hinting at slabs or something like that.
Edit:
Sorry, I keep changing it, it's a great concept and I really like fiddling with it:
(http://i.imgur.com/myLco.png)
Tried to address the issues I mentioned.
Back from the dead! (the thread AND me, that is)
I'm still not warming to Khris's craters when I see them en masse, but the darker concrete blocks and the slab floor of the trench are looking interesting. I'll be snatching those and moulding the concept around those, hopefully even improving as I go.
I'm starting to work on playable demo, in which I would have a controllable main character, working medkits, working shooting and two of the basic hazards working, along with the cover system.
If all goes well I'll have that sent off to the testers by the end of the week.
Khris's edit on one of the soldiers got me testing stuff out, and I ended up with this:
Left is old, Right is new. In the middle is Khris's edit, which I still thought was a touch too bright.
(http://www.whamgames.com/images/magsapril/walksheet01.png)
I like the new edit you've done there WHAM. It's shows a bit more detail on the character. Love the added armband you put on the right arm, thou you forgot to put it on the front view.
Quote from: nads on Fri 15/04/2011 02:44:09
I like the new edit you've done there WHAM. It's shows a bit more detail on the character. Love the added armband you put on the right arm, thou you forgot to put it on the front view.
I'd forgotten it from the front view as a mere oversight. This has now been corrected.
Anyone have ideas on how to fix this? I have made a walk behind as seen in the picture below, and it works as long as the player is in a very precise position. Anyone have any ideas on how to make this look better? As you can see in the third picture, if the player walks to the side of the crater, you can see some unsightly clipping taking place.
(http://www.whamgames.com/images/magsapril/walkbehind_issue01.png)
I don't see a easy way out of this, at least not as easy as you've tried. I mean if you could get the clipping out, it would still look weird for him to just walk through the edge of the crater. I would probably try something with regions. Making enough regions on top of the crater that would control the y coordinate of the character. I can see some problems with that, but that would be my first though. That way you can actually have the character walk over the edge and into the crater.
Quote from: zabnat on Sat 16/04/2011 22:59:29
I don't see a easy way out of this, at least not as easy as you've tried. I mean if you could get the clipping out, it would still look weird for him to just walk through the edge of the crater. I would probably try something with regions. Making enough regions on top of the crater that would control the y coordinate of the character. I can see some problems with that, but that would be my first though. That way you can actually have the character walk over the edge and into the crater.
What Zabnat said, but affecting the character's Z co-ordinate would be better. Using a series of 1px wide regions so that the closer the player gets to the edge of the crater the higher they are raised, allowing them to step over the edge.
I feared I had to do something like that. There will be about a hundred of these craters in the game, though, so I'll have to see if doing anything with regions is worth the effort. If all else fails, I will just leave them as-is and accept a slight graphical shortcoming to save hours and hours of work.
You can do it using purely some calculations; in before fadein for each room, put the center coordinates of all craters in an array, then inside rep_ex, calculate the z.
Basically, check the character's distance from all crater centers (roughly doubling the y-distance as a first step to reflect the perspective distortion), and if they're close enough, turn the distance into z using a function whose graph reflects a cross-section of the crater.
Quote from: Khris on Mon 18/04/2011 10:27:42
You can do it using purely some calculations; in before fadein for each room, put the center coordinates of all craters in an array, then inside rep_ex, calculate the z.
Basically, check the character's distance from all crater centers (roughly doubling the y-distance as a first step to reflect the perspective distortion), and if they're close enough, turn the distance into z using a function whose graph reflects a cross-section of the crater.
Might be too complicated for me, but then again just might be doable, but my idea of having three different sized craters will add to the workload a bit.
As this is for a MAGS game, I'm still thinking of taking the simple / easy way out to meet the deadline.
Shouldn't you be able to tweak the walkable area so that a triangle of space on the left and right edges of the craters are not walkable?
- Cogliostro
But then, as the game moves primarily from left to right, the player would have to move up or down to get in or out of the craters, which will just delay the player for no obvious reason.
Why don't create an animation for when the soldiers leave the crater?, the animation can jump or climb the crater. You can create regions inside the crater and when a character leave the region you can change the view to the animation and after leaving change it again to normal view.
That might actually be worth looking into, deadline permitting.
Is there a limitation to the number of regions allowed per room?
There's a total of 16 regions, 1-15 are usable; 0 means no region. For limits to drawn stuff, just open the dropdown menu. Those aren't created, they're always there/available.
With that limitation the only way to do this would be to create a massive array of coordinates that have data on all the craters (30-50 per room) and then use the same regions on all craters, checking player coordinates and crater coordinates...
As far as I understand, this also gets quite work-heavy, so the deadline might prune it out too. As is often the case with creating code: there is no easy way out! =)
But I think that you only need a region, is the same region_id for all the craters, you only have to draw the region in every crater using the same region_id (only one), the areas of the same region is not necesary that be conected.
Here's my idea in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWL3h2WwMYU
And here's the script: http://codepad.org/sov52lJM
Then put import void AddCrater(int x, int y); in the header.
That's pretty darn awesome, Khris. 8)
I'll see if I can implement (read: copy/paste) this code in the evening and get it to work. 65 lines of MAGIC!
Looks like it's working like a charm. I had to move the part you had in repeatedly execure into repeatedly_execute_always, as I already use the repeatedly execute to detect keyboard inputs and when said inputs have stopped (on_keypress didn't seem to do the trick for me).
Thank you, again, Khris! ;)
You're welcome :)
There's a small glitch if one crater is too close above another; if the player is inside the lower crater, he'll also appear behind the upper crater's wall. Either move them further apart or use a second walkbehind and add a walkbehind parameter to each crater.
The glitch seems to trigger if two craters are above one another and the player moves from the lower crater to the one higher up, and even 200px range between the craters does not seem to make a difference for me.
I'll probably just work around this by removing craters that are too close to one another vertically, to save time.
EDIT: actually even moving a good distance horizontally and then moving up to another crater triggers the glitch for me. Drat!
EDIT 2: A "solution", I just removed the walk behinds from the craters. They might not seem as deep now, but the effect you built still gives them a good feel. Quick and dirty, just the way I like my solutions! =)
An alternative to what you're doing that may not only look better but will certainly save you some woe is to make the inner sphere of the crater a hotspot/region and then have it change the player graphic when over it so he's lowered in height and his waist is darkened a bit. This same approach is used in loads of games when a character walks into water, for instance, and this will allow you to avoid the ugly edges of the crater while making him appear to be stepping down into a hole. Just make sure you add a ring around the outside to switch him back to his default character animation and you're solid.