Eternal X 1.2

Discuss and unveil current Marathon projects.
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Pfhorrest
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Some new textures I'm actually not too dissatisfied with tonight:
Screen Shot 2018-04-11 at 12.29.08 AM.jpg
Screen Shot 2018-04-11 at 12.30.12 AM.jpg
Also touched this one up a tad:
Screen Shot 2018-04-11 at 12.33.27 AM.jpg
Erich, what do you think of this idea?
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Pfhorrest
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Apparently I was really lazy in differentiating tonight's pair of textures from last night's when I made the old ones, and despite a half assed attempt to do so I'm apparently too lazy and depressed to successfully fix that tonight. But here it is, all vectored and bumpy and shit, anyway:
Screen Shot 2018-04-11 at 10.26.13 PM.jpg
And of course there's a vertical version of it too (fyi the main difference between the horiz and vert versions of textures in eternal besides the obvious is that horiz fit a 20fold repetition so as to work with both .25 and .2 WU elevation changes, whereas vertical ones fit a 16fold repetition because who's going to bother measuring out a line another other than multiples of 0.125 WU grid markers), but i couldn't easily find one and gave up trying.
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Pfhorrest
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Screen Shot 2018-04-12 at 11.58.50 PM.jpg
Screen Shot 2018-04-12 at 11.58.25 PM.jpg
I guess this one is okay by itself, but the one it's replacing had a more metallic sheen and some nice waviness, neither of which I can seem to replicate in Illustrator, and i kinda wonder what the point of any of this is if it's not actually going to look better than before. i guess at least it's kinda bumpy.
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Wrkncacnter
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Perhaps you should be posting before/after pictures, if you're looking for opinions on whether it's better or worse than before.

Are people going to have the option of using the old textures?
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Pfhorrest
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I don't see how it would be possible to include two switchable texture sets in one distribution, and even if it is that sounds like it's not something that would be worth it for most people.

Before and after shots are a good idea, though I'm not sure if I will actually get around to doing it since adding more overhead would be a stretch already. Maybe I can just include the one texture and new texture by themselves (not screenshots) along with the screenshot of the new texture (which is just to show bumpmapping). That wouldn't be much additional overhead.
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Wrkncacnter
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Yeah, not sure if it's worth it to most people or not, but it may be if the general consensus is that the new textures are worse than the old ones. That's kind of why I was curious how these compared to the old ones, as I really have no idea. Sorry, I'm really trying to stay out of this and not be a dick, but I'm just not good at that.
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Pfhorrest
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For the most part I at least think the new textures to look better than the old ones, it's just every now and then I make one that I don't like more than the one it's replacing, but then it would look out of place to leave the old one in (and I wouldn't be able to make bump maps that match the old one if I can't recreate it exactly in vector format anyway).
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ravenshining
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I don't have much more to add right now other than "oooh!," "aaaah!," and "wow!," in various forms.
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President People
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Pfhorrest wrote:Erich, what do you think of this idea?
Not too sure about that one. It's a lot of extra work just to rearrange the eyes. Some more unique sprites to help them really stand out would be better, I think. For example, if the cloth accents from the XBLA Fighters were ever added to the original sprites, I'd totally use those.
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ravenshining
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I was playing around with S'pht'ia, trying to make the start a little more intuitive and eliminate the tearing effect, when I realised A1 isn't confined to the -9 WU to 9 WU space - with a little testing, it seems A1 can handle up to 32 WU of height difference between polygons within the players view before artifacts start popping up.

So, I thought I'd extend the view from start to the tower. At first I wanted to connect the start and the foot of the tower to the aerial views from the tower, and while it looked cool, it was too prone to getting cut off due to 2.5D geometry, and even at 32 WU high it did not look tall enough to match the terminal pictures. So, I just extended the tower to 32 WU (from the bottom of the lava pool) and connected the start and foot-of-the-tower areas. I had to nix the platform switch in the start area, but that's easily solved by making the platform a door and "caving in" the area to make it look unfinished.

Then I realised I ought to do the same thing to S'pht happens, and here we are. Pull request is up on GitHub:
Sphtia_0001.jpg
I have those S'pht above to only activate before the player reaches them if you manage to hit one from 25 WU away while falling from the now 32 WU sky. Maybe it's not supposed to happen, but if you pull it off you deserve it I say.
SphtHappens_0006.jpg
There's also some slight adjustments to the terms on S'pht'ia - changing the S'pht description of the war to the present tense, and routing the player through that term before they get to the tower.
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Pfhorrest
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Awesome thanks!
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Pfhorrest
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ravenshining wrote:I was playing around with S'pht'ia...
I just finally got around to playtesting that, and I noticed a few bugs, including one apparent game-stopper.

The game-stopper is that the door to the citadel seems to be locked and the drawbridge sunk, and I can't find any way to activate those platforms, so I get to the foot of the citadel and just have to quit.

The smaller bugs are:

- the very first pattern buffer seems to have its ceiling raised through the roof (literally) somehow

- in the awesome new views of the tower, there are some angles where the landscape texture surrounding the pit you're in obscures the views unnaturally.

- similarly, some parts of the roof of the smaller building next to the tower seem either cut off by landscape textures or else perhaps have landscape textures applied to themselves, in a weird unnatural way.

But the awesome tall tower views are awesome! Thanks again!
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ravenshining
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I was thinking, to make the level more interesting, that you would need to access a history term to give Leela a better idea of when you are. So, the tower opens after you find the history term- the switches you have to pull to access the history term also open the tower and trigger the #FINISHED messages. I thought it was already implied in the existing dialogue and didn't want to step on the writing too much... so, I could either have Leela spell it out, say:

Roomy as the worldnet is, it appears the S'pht are fragmented into eleven separate clans at this point in history, and I can only access one clan's information from this terminal. I need you to access another terminal so I can pinpoint where we are in time and see if there's any sign of Hathor that I'm not seeing from here.

or I can cut out that whole mechanic and leave the way clear how it was.

Sorry about the pattern buffer. Eat It and The Hard Stuff were overlapped in 5-D, so I sunk Eat it by 3 WU in order to edit it without going insane, and I may have missed a polygon or two.

Fixing the angles where the landscape cuts off is really hard because of 2.5D - if you have an area under an overhang, you won't be able to see above it. I've got some new ideas on how to fix the tower view at least, and will update when I get a chance. The building roof is a lot trickier, if I extend it out further it gets messy above the entrance. Best solution for that I can think of is to recreate that entire vista in a separate 5-D space.
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Pfhorrest
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Thanks Lia. I'll see if I can find that other terminal and see how that mechanic works. It sounds like a nice addition, something more to do on the level than wander around and avoid dying.

The easiest thought I had for fixing the landscape cut-off problem was either to raise the height of that overhang so that the solid part of it is what's obscuring the distant geometry, or get rid of that part of the overhang so there can be a direct line of sight to the distant geometry.

New textures tonight that I'm actually pretty satisfied with:
Screen Shot 2018-04-18 at 12.39.19 AM.jpg
Though I still need to fix some details about the bump map surrounding those little light blobs.

And thinking about it now, I might decide to make them not actually lights at all, but rather just glassy baubles like in the original. That's probably a better idea.

Previous version of this texture for comparison (in a different color table though):
15.jpg
And there are vertical versions of these of course but I couldn't be bothered to find one in game to screenshot.
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Pfhorrest
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Another new texture I'm kind of satisfied with, though I think maybe those black stripes are too black and it needs more prebaked highlights because it's not nearly as curvy-looking as its bump map suggests it should be:
Screen Shot 2018-04-19 at 12.18.05 AM.jpg
Here's the original for reference, though vertical and a different color so
26.jpg
Also slightly improved the bump map for this one, but it obviously needs a little more work still:
Screen Shot 2018-04-19 at 12.13.54 AM.jpg
And I need to figure out why this base texture, which is used in the first new texture above and looks fine there, looks so low-res all by itself here, compared to the other new texture surrounding it:
Screen Shot 2018-04-19 at 12.14.20 AM.jpg
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President People
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Made a little something that may or may not help in testing the new textures. A group of maps with each texture from their respective collection, and all landscapes.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n3wfigurepg2o ... s.zip?dl=0
Spoiler:

Code: Select all

• Textures are separated into color groups. 
 · Northwest: Red
 · Northeast: Green
 · West: Gray
 · East: Switches, Landscapes
 · Southwest: Blue
 · Southeast: Violet

• Lights can be toggled to test glowmaps. The switch is at the back of the East room.

• Landscapes can be viewed fully by pressing action within their respective polygons.

• Liquid texture can be raised to reveal a matching liquid pool.

• Window texture can be walked through. It can also be lowered to show a HOM effect.
While I made them to help Forrest compare new and old textures, they could also come in handy for anyone else interested in seeing the changes firsthand.
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Pfhorrest
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that's a great idea, thanks!

first results using it...

old
Screen Shot 2018-04-19 at 11.07.04 PM.jpg
and new
Screen Shot 2018-04-20 at 2.01.04 AM.jpg
too exhausted for analysis tonight

might decide to make next week a cleanup week because i feel like im so fucking tired and rush lately that im churning out mostly crap
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ravenshining
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Fleshed out the roof...
Sphtia_0009.jpg
...by connecting the start to the roof elevator walkway instead of the tower entrance:
Sphtia_0011.jpg
And fixed the landscape occlusion in the starting area:
Sphtia_0010.jpg
Also elaborated the terminals to give you better directions, fixed the pattern buffer, made it so you can get back into the starting pit if you blast yourself off-target while falling, and did some other miscellaneous tidbits. PR up on GitHub.
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The Man
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I've skimmed about ⅓ of this topic, and found I was able to make sense of... about ⅓ of what I skimmed.

I remember sending you (Pfhorrest) a fairly long email detailing what I liked and what I didn't about Eternal X. I think it was an email. It's probably in my Gmail history still. I'm pretty sure you responded to it, and I don't recall responding to your response. Apologies if I didn't. This was probably around the time I just kinda... fell away from the community again. I seem to have habits of doing that for a long time. I think I had a fairly long burst of activity from 1997-1998 or so and then another one around 2008.

I don't know how long I'll have ample amounts of free time, but I'd like to contribute to this in some fashion or another over the next three months or so. Bear in mind that I haven't made maps at all in like 10 years and haven't played with Weland (which I take to be the AO mapmaking program) at all. Should be a good chance to learn, though. I've been replaying a lot of levels, including many of my own old creations, with a critical eye for what could be improved (having played my old ones, there are really only about 10 out of around 50 or so that I'd still keep with few changes, and about 20 or 30 that I'd probably scrap entirely; plus, most of the writing was awful).

Should I just go to the github page and download whatever's there? If that's the case, I should probably be able to play through the revised scenario in a few days and start suggesting/working on changes after that.

ETA: New stuff looks fucking gorgeous, BTW.
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Meerjel01
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Is that fog? Actual fog? I would want to have that in a future art project if that's working out for me and everyone else.
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Pfhorrest
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The Man wrote:Should I just go to the github page and download whatever's there? If that's the case, I should probably be able to play through the revised scenario in a few days and start suggesting/working on changes after that.
Yep! That's what it's there for.
ETA: New stuff looks fucking gorgeous, BTW.
Thanks!

I think you're using a different username than before though, because I'm not sure who you are? Or maybe I've just forgotten. My memory is failing a lot lately, sorry about that.
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The Man
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You'll probably remember my real name better; I contributed to the Story page with it obsessively for a year or two (and probably also emailed you under it), and had far less presence with this screen name. (Looks like I only made 78 posts here before this year.) For the time being, you can find my real name in this post; I probably will scrub it in about a week, though.
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Pfhorrest
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Ah, I thought you were saying you were one of the people who had made some of the maps for Eternal before. My mistake. Glad to have you helping improve them now though. :-)
Screamernail wrote:Is that fog? Actual fog? I would want to have that in a future art project if that's working out for me and everyone else.
If you're talking about the puffs of fog in the first screenshot, that's part of the landscape texture, and was made in Photoshop (mostly just with the Render -> Clouds effect, and probably some other things to shake it up some), not rendered in Aleph One.
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The Man
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Oh, yeah; rereading my OP, I can see how that might've been ambiguous. I was referring to levels for a scenario I never released, because it never reached a state I felt was worth showing to a community with as many skilled designers as this one. The main reason was a typical story of reach exceeding grasp, I think. I don't think any of my work ever actually made it into any published scenarios. At some point I may attempt to retool some of my content into a state worth showing others, as about a third of it is quite good, but it'll require considerable revision (most prominently to the writing, which is frequently awful; I may have to completely rewrite the plot, and I'll definitely have to rewrite most of the terminals). I may make a thread about it at some point, at least, and I'll probably upload some gameplay/walkthrough videos of the levels that don't suck sooner or later, even if I haven't gotten the surrounding content into a state I consider worth releasing.

And no problem - I'm sure it'll be a lot of fun. I don't know why I didn't bother getting into a collaborative project like this sooner. Probably just bashfulness or something.
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The Man
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All right, so. Before I take a really deep dive into this, do I just play the map with the Eternal 1.1 sound/image/etc. files plus the HD shapes linked in the OP to get acquainted with the new changes, or are there in-development versions of 1.2 stuff available that I’m not seeing on the Github repository? And I presume I just use the latest version of Atque to generate a playable version from the .zip of the unmerged maps folder? Any special steps I should follow in merging? (I’ll literally be opening Weland and Atque for the first time shortly.)

Apologies if some of these are obvious or answered in the 250 posts above; if it’s the latter, I’d want to be sure the answer were current anyway.

ETA: I’ll start out with a very nitpicky note, though, which is the capitalisation of level titles. It’s kind of… all over the place, and it’s one of those things that makes me twitch slightly when it’s out of place. English title standards are unfortunately a mess and don’t really make much sense. Wikipedia’s article is borderline incomprehensible in places; MusicBrainz’ is slightly better when it comes to English (though its French one is incomprehensible, apparently even to native French speakers; not that this matters since the only French that appears in Eternal’s titles is a loan-phrase to English). It might actually be less time-consuming to list the changes that would look best to my eyes:
Spoiler:
00. The Far Side of Nowhere
06. Roots and Radicals
10. To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
12. A Friend in Need
15. May the Pfharce Be With You
18. My Kingdom Pfhor a Horse
19. Burning Down the Corporation
23. She Is the Dark One
25. Eat S’pht and Die
29. Flames of Icarus
30. The Land in the Sky
31. Pfhor får lamm
35. Bug-Eyed in Space
38. Once More Unto the Breach…
39. Genie in a Bottle
40. Floating in the Void
42. The Dead Live in the Catacombs
43. These Caves Can’t Be a Natural Formation
44. Deep Into the Grotto
45. Frog Blast the Vent Core
46. I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This
47. The Philosophy of Time Travel
51. The Near Side of Everywhere
(The big things that might trip people up are the Swedish title [all Nordic languages and, for that matter, most foreign languages only capitalise the first words and proper nouns in titles, and Nordic ones are no exception] and the conjugations of “to be” [verbs should always be capitalised in English titles, regardless of length]. Style guides disagree on the capitalisation of four-letter prepositions like “into”, “with”, etc.; I capitalised them this time, but ask me again tomorrow and I might not. I don’t think it matters unless you’re consistent, though.

Also, there was a missing comma in level 10’s title.

OK, hopefully onto less nitpicky stuff soon.)
Last edited by The Man on Apr 25th '18, 05:47, edited 6 times in total.
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