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STICKY: 2020 King's Field II port progress report

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Holey Moley:
A section of KF2 in SOM without any lighting or decoration. It's just the first such image so far. The fog is not meant to match the game's.

EDITED: Here is another, in 16-bit color. I usually prefer this mode for screenshots, but wasn't thinking about it when I took the picture. The AA is better (although it looks very good in the other) and it has a more retro feel, and the colors seem to be less overcast. On the other hand, the stipple effect can be a little too obvious on the PlayStation VR display.

Holey Moley:
A teaser after 3 days of hand editing the shore/cliff tiles, including the sky. I faked the moon. I think maybe one of the models is the moon itself, but SOM will not apply lighting to the model if so.

I haven't worked on any of the cave entrances, the lighthouse, or the bridges. The water interfacing tiles often come in sets of 4, so that the water flows in a different direction in each one. I just grin and bore the preparation of the copies, not wanting to give it a thought, so that the job was in many ways more like doing 3 zones than 1, and I have a feeling its shore is a lot more varied than other level geometry.

I wanted to go ahead and develop the water area so I can figure out how to get SOM to make the water transparent. It's the next programming job ahead. I think I want it to be more rewarding, to see all of the water become transparent at once. So the water in this screenshot is not see-through. It should look exactly as it would if was however... I believe.

It's funny to see it this way. I won't lie, it isn't the same. Something will have to be done to summon something approaching the PlayStation's charm, but without trying to emulate the past.

Holey Moley:
SPOOKY STORY

I made this latest screenshot after having spent a lot of time trying to figure out what decides the order of the sky's layers in the MDO file. After I succeeded in getting everything to look right (the glow behind the moon was being animated) I made this screen, and didn't want to go so far as to fire up a game of KF2 to confirm the position of the moon in the sky.

I was just looking for a nice view of the moon, that also included the water (and no unfinished tiles) and liked this one... wanting to incorporate a familiar location if possible.

I didn't think this was where the moon was supposed to be (edited: I just chose this position in the sculpting software, having to pick a side.) But I liked the shot anyway. But I was just now in the emulator and it occurred to me to check... and as it just so happens this is the moon's position in the sky!

I kind of expected it to be on the opposite side, because I can now see that there is zone-wide directional lighting (which I've attempted to reproduce) and if the light was the result of the moon, then it would make more sense for the moon to be on the opposite side, or actually, now that I look again, on the SW side.

Strikeout: Maybe there are lights shining from both SE and SW so that more or less it is from the south. But also the lights point up at the ceiling, and so it's not cut and dry that the moon can be a source of the light... obviously not indoors. I think the moon is in the north.


I might move it to the south side yet, so that the light sides of the cliffs line up with moon's position.

The glow in the emulator seems much fainter. And the moon is smaller, but looks very similar. I thought the circle would have a 3D highlight, but it doesn't actually. It looks like the screenshot. Except it seems a little oval... which might back up my impression that the horizontal/vertical FOV is not in line with the aspect ratio... or it might be because it's said that old televisions would make the picture wider for Super Nintendo games, and so it might be the same for PlayStation... but if so, the emulator isn't simulating this.


EDITED: For what it's worth, I've left the sky model so that the stars actually move like the clouds in SOM's skies. I think I may leave it this way. The PlayStation's stars twinkle as you move, so something like movement in the stars is a substitute. Although, what I find funny is that the stars closer to the ground seem to not move at all. I can't understand why not. It likely means that the sky effect must not be so straightforward.

Holey Moley:
This screenshot has a color function I cooked up that while not based on SOM's classic gamma ramp, is doing something like it. I think a normal gamma function just makes all of the colors progressively darker, but I don't know if that has effect of bringing out mid-range colors by pushing light and dark colors to the margin, but that is what I've attempted to do here.

It makes the picture look like KF2 on the PlayStation. I don't have the foggiest idea why it does. The colors are very dingy without being transformed. If I didn't know the PlayStation only has 32 shades to work with, I'd guess that KF2 modifies the palettes at run-time so that colors become more vibrant like this. It's possible it does so despite its limited number of shades.

The sky texture is much brighter than it appears in the game. Oddly the stars appear much larger than in SOM. There are two potential sky model files, one of which I couldn't successfully export/import. It is green for some reason. It might have a different UV map.

The next release will probably have a gamma_function extension for injecting arbitrary code into the effects shader, and something for stereo (PSVR) in case it requires a different function.

EDITED: The image looks kind of dark against a light frame. It looks just right on back bordered display. The textures look a little crumbier. I think higher resolution textures will help.

Holey Moley:
This screenshot is the first zone with textures. The image is processed to make it easier to read. Midtones are inverted to make the outlines. The color is adjusted for better visibility.

Interactive doors and other elements are missing. The textures are assigned by hand. It took me several days to do ever tile's. The water tiles come in groups of four, so that the workload is quadrupled. I'm going to reduce everything down in time.

The section over the waterfall with the wind crystal is green, because it's actually identical to the cave areas. At some point the images in the PlayStation's memory are simply replaced. I am generating the MAP files right now, so it isn't worthwhile to edit them. I have a feeling the tiles are identical to some other section of the game's. It will be easier to replace them after the MAP files are finalized.

EDITED: A month later I'm now noticing things I missed, like the green cave floor is usually a different texture, and caves (which I couldn't readily access then) are identical to the polished stone walls, with sand floors. I guess the stone is carved out of the mountainside. (BTW: I didn't say so before, but the area across the bridge is actually identical to the green caves. The texture just gets swapped. The same happens to the floor texture of the green caves with the save point inside. Oh, and the stairs in the caves are green.)

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