Eternal X 1.2

[Pfhorrest]

The idea was that only the green and magenta colors shift, slightly toward either orange or azure, while the orange and azure stay the same. With fighters, that means that only melee fighters change, while ranged ones stay the same: the green ones become a yellower green (chartreuse) and the magenta ones become a redder magenta (rose) when they're on warm-colored Lh'owon, and the green ones become a cyaner green (spring) and the magenta ones become a bluer magenta (purple) when they're on the frozen Jjaro colony of chapter 4. Troopers are only green and magenta, so they undergo those same shifts.

Hunters and Enforcers can shift too, that sounds good to me. Hunters are orange and green, so maybe the green could become chartreuse on Lh'owon and spring in ch4, while the orange ones go unchanged on Lh'owon but maybe become blue in ch4? I'm not really sure about these since they don't have the usual Pfhor color symmetries, it's all kinda off balance. The Enforcers are all magenta, so maybe they can just be rose on Lh'owon and purple in ch4; or we could exaggerate their shifts more, and make them red on Lh'owon and blue in ch4.

[The Man]

That sounds good, and a lot less confusing; probably better just to go with that for the fighters. Also Enforcers and Hunters could maybe shift colours between all five time periods. They changed appearance radically between M1 and M2 anyway; colour shifts would be the least fridge logic-inducing aspect there.

BTW, Chronicles colours for reference:

Minor fighter/trooper: hex #99C300
Major fighter/trooper: hex #618961
Minor projectile fighter: hex #00B0C9
Major projectile fighter: hex #245FA3

Minor hunter: body hex #FBAF8B, blood hex #99C300, glow hex #00FF00
Major hunter: body hex #00B0C9, blood hex #A4ADEB, glow hex #B0005E
Minor super-hunter: body hex #99C300, blood hex #39E48B, glow hex #F65800
Major super-hunter: body hex #39E48B, blood hex #0C00FF, glow hex #00B0C9

Minor enforcer: outer coat #99C300, inner coat #618961
Major enforcer: outer coat #FF0000, inner coat #F65800

There are actually other colours that vary for some of these but i don’t actually have time figure out where they show up in the sprites right now; if important I can supply them later, but you can download Chronicles from the thread in my signature if you need to check more rapidly.

(Super-hunters aren’t Mothers of All Hunters; they’re more powerful than regular hunters but only about a third as powerful as Mothers of All Hunters.)

I varied a lot of other monster palettes too; let me know if you care about any. In particular I used the device that minor S’pht friendly to Durandal had the usual colour table 2, and major S’pht friendly to Durandal use this colour table: #00FF00 for third colour ramp; #00B0C9 for fourth colour ramp; #39E48B for fifth colour ramp; #00FF00 for sixth colour ramp.

[ravenshining]

While I'm providing new colours of armour, how about messing with their skin, too? There's that one M2 terminal pic from the Chapter 3 period with the green-skinned Pfhor interrogating a captured S'pht. In that illustration, their skin is 150° (instead of 50°), the two staff-carrying Pfhor have armour 60° and crystals 240°, and the gun-wielding Pfhor has armour 330°.

If I did it that way, I could blueshift all four fighters' and both troopers' armour 30° and give them green skin for ancient levels. There wouldn't be room for a futuristic Fighter variant, but there could be futuristic Troopers, Enforcers, & maybe hunters

EDIT

I tried matching the colours to that one terminal pic, and it turns out looking rather cartoonish in-game, and also has the effect of making the magenta fighter appear orange. I'm going to try giving them the hue-shifted skin but with the same saturation balance as normal and see how that looks.

[ravenshining]

Strange. This guy's armour is glowing when it is not supposed to:

And this guy's skin keeps showing up as grey:

...even though in the shapes file, these two Pfhor are set to have the same colour armour (330°, but it's showing up as 300°), and the same colour skin (150°), right down to the exact RBG values.

[The Man]

If you're using the same shades that are specified as glowing in colour table 0, they will glow regardless of what you've got specified as glowing in any other colour table. I never figured out a workaround for this, and it actually resulted in my swapping the projectile Fighters with the regular Fighters in Chronicles' colour tables, but I was restricting myself to the original game's palette, because I simply didn't think of abandoning it. If you alter the shade of the Fighters' vest slightly, it may stop glowing.

[ravenshining]

I'm not though. Colour table 0 has crystals glowing at 300° hue, ~33% sat, colour table 5 (shown) has a hue of 330°, 75% sat. Somehow A1 is deciding it doesn't like 330 and changing it to 300 - but *not* to the desaturated 300 that colour table 0 uses? Also, this doesn't affect colour table 1, which has fighters with armour hue 300°.

Tried shoving the shapes file through Anvil 1.0.3 to see if it would "correct" anything. Still same HSV values, no difference in the trooper, fighter is still glowing, but now showing up as a lighter shade?

Also, it turns out I wasn't just perceiving the armour as red when I had the skin fully saturated, A1 was taking my 330° and changing it to 350°:

WTF.

[The Man]

WTF indeed. Do you know if 330° is showing up as 330° in your first image? I also wonder whether this glitch is in Aleph One or in ShapeFusion. What build of ShapeFusion are you using? I know the binary on the SourceForge page isn’t the most recent, but you’re on Linux so… is there even a binary for Linux? I’m at a loss for what the cause of this is.

[ravenshining]

No, 330 is showing up as 300 in that first image.

It's not ShapeFusion, because Anvil is producing the same results. Same thing happens in software mode with acceleration disabled, so not my graphics card. It's gotta be Aleph One or a holdover bug from M2.

Maybe it doesn't like it if the total number of unique colours per collection is greater than 256? I don't think that jives with what I'm seeing above, but I'll test that theory momentarily.

EDIT: Yup, that seems to be the problem. I was trying to customise too many things at once, cutting back on the number of differences did the trick. The fighter below is 330° and not glowing!

[ravenshining]

Okay, this is extremely tedious and frustrating. I wish I had made a copy at that point above, because now I can't get that to show up again, the slightest difference in a colour can throw the whole thing off.

Are the CLUTs 2 and 3 ever used for the trooper? If I can delete those, it might free up some colour slots to work with.

To really get the sort of fine adjustment we're looking for, however, we'd have to build a whole HD monster plugin. Which, if you don't mind using the M1 Pfhor sprites, could be done quickly if we use Flippant Sol's XBR monsters.

[The Man]

Glad that worked. There are some very strange glitches left in the engine.

[ravenshining]

Okay, I'm starting to get it ironed out. I had to open it in Anvil and make every. single. colour. "Marathon-safe." Now, I'm going back and, one colour ramp at a time, adjusting it to where it needs to be, and saving a new copy with each edit. It's still got some problems, but I'm at a point where it's better? I'll see how far I can get before A1 hateses it.

[Pfhorrest]

too afk to respond fully to everything going on here but I'm pretty sure Eternal never uses any Troopers that aren't green or magenta, which I assume are CLUTs 0 and 1, so 2 and 3 are probably fine to get rid of/replace if necessary.

[The Man]

That’s strange. I wonder why some collections work fine if there aren’t Marathon-safe colours, but others act strangely. Might make sense just to make all the new colour tables in Anvil to avoid having to repeat that bit of tediousness.

(Note that when I made my previous post, I hadn’t noticed raven’s ninja post directly above mine.)

[The Man]

So a few things noticed when we tested out network play today:

• The HUD plugin doesn’t work. At all. Something must conflict with network play. You have to disable it or else it gives a long litany of error messages and no HUD.
  
  
• The chapter 3 failure dream is really, really stupid in cooperative mode. We should probably reduce the respawn rate of Banshees on the level.
  
  
• The Banshees might’ve also gotten their attacks overpowered again. It seems like three of them kill players with 1x health on TC now. It should require five.
  
  
• If you don’t have the same map the host does, the Lua for the scenario doesn’t work. Might be worth, for the final version of the map, copying & pasting it into each level rather than embedding it, just in case someone has the wrong version for whatever reason.

[ravenshining]

Chapter 3 fighters, troopers have redshifted armour
Chapter 4 troopers have blueshifted armour
Lo-res walls cleaned up, Pfhor set replaced entirely
Skitters replace Mothrids
Skitters get alpha and glowmaps DDS'ed
Clutter skimmed from shapesfile
MML updated to match
Physics updated and distrubuted

Physics PR here
Shapesfile, HD sprites, MML here

[Pfhorrest]

Thanks a ton Lia! PR merged, will have to check out the whole thing with shapes etc in action tomorrow.

[The Man]

Thanks for all this stuff, Lia. Going to test some of it out in a moment.

Since co-op games need everyone to have the same map, I’ve made a standard version of the most recent map. Get it here.

[ravenshining]

Finally managed to snap some "photos" of the new skitter. Little buggers are fast, it's hard to get a good shot, and that's even with their now-reduced speed. At 120, they'd constantly run into you and not fire. I dialed it back slightly to 112, so they're still crazy fast but don't tend to get in their own way as much.

I went with blue eyes to balance out the pure green eyes of the nightmare and the red eyes of the phantasms. If you turn the HD Monsters off they become purple (but still glow) due to CLUT limitations. You can see a dying skitter behind the ones in front.

The blobs they spit at you are set to positive vertical error (necessary given their low stature, otherwise they constantly hit the floor) and affected by gravity, making them an intermediate range weapon between the Nightmares and Phantasms.

Bitmaps. I created all the 3/4 and rear views, the non-frontal attack and flinch sprites, and the "melting corpse" animation. Hopefully no one spends much time looking at them too closely from the rear - their legs in 3/4 should not move like that, and the rear view of the rear leg is hand-drawn - but I think it's still a lot better than the Mothrids.

Fighter and trooper CLUTs. You wouldn't believe how insanely tedious and time consuming it was to get these to work properly! ShapesFusion was incapable of dealing with this many colours, it all had to be done in Anvil and specifically Anvil 1.03.

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troopercluts.png (1.77 KiB) Viewed 393 times

Other minor physics tweaks in the PR and shapes:
•Phantasms set to 0 external velocity to avoid skating bug
•Phantasm visibiliy is more consistent
•Phantasm and Nightmare hitboxes corrected.
•Phantasms hover slightly and Nightmares hover slightly higher than before
•Nightmare (and Skitter) use Marine blood spot to prevent unnecessary loading of the BoB collection

I took some liberties with the low-res walls in order to reduce ugly dithering, unreadable text, and in the case of the Human set, blank solid colours. In many cases I combined bits of old textures with the new ones to arrive at a functional 8-bit result. A few examples:

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8.gif (6.39 KiB) Viewed 354 times

Humbly I request release of Eternal Beta 1.2b6 for completion of Beta Testing project as outlined in proposal.185593

[$lave]

1. Skitters look really cool, I like them.

2. Minor complaint but that texture used in the ceiling of the first screenshot you posted; the vertical lines with a bunch of circles? It looks really bad on surfaces that blatantly interrupt its tiling (such as that curved ceiling). If anyone cares about touching up the texturing I think that would be worthwhile.

[Pfhorrest]

Humbly I request release of Eternal Beta 1.2b6 for completion of Beta Testing project as outlined in proposal.185593

Maybe instead of the actual release at the end of the year, I will issue a Final Candidate instead, that can be more thoroughly playtested for however long you guys want to test it and whenever you all tell me everything is good with it, I'll call that the final. I just won't have any time to do anything for it myself after the year is up.

I had kind of thought that it might be nice to have more time to really play each level on its own slowly instead of this rushed playtesting I'm doing this month, like maybe focus on one level a week. I might be able to fit that into my other schedule for next year

and maybe base a long Final Candidate schedule around that. so like FC1 at the end of this year, FC2 about 11 weeks later, FC3 about 10 weeks later, FC4 10 weeks after that, and FC5 11 weeks before the end of 2019. and then the actual actual final at the end of 2019

you all have come together and made a whole lot more changes than I expected during this "final testing" of beta 5

if i did that schedule that would put FC2 in the second week of march, FC3 in the fourth week of may, FC4 in the last week of july, FC5 in the second week of october, and the final final release in the last week of next december.

[The Man]

I think doing release candidates is probably a good idea for everyone’s sake. There are a lot of levels I would like to work more on, and I’ll have a good deal of free time over the next couple of weeks, but I kind of suspect that I’m not going to have time to get to everything. Even if I spend most of my free time working on Eternal, and even if I spend about a day per level, there are several levels that I still plan massive overhauls to. And I’m going to be working at least some of that time, so I won’t have all day every day to work on things.

I suspect “Babylon X” and “The Incredible Hulk” from that list will take probably two days each: one to redo the geometry and texturing, another to redo the items (that’s going to be very tedious). And that might actually be a bit optimistic, because texturing is time-consuming; they might each be three-day projects.

I’ve already done about half the work for “Third Rock” on that list, but I suspect the other half will take another day.

“Run, Coward!” is basically done; I think it’s to a point where no one’s perfectly happy with it but no one hates it.

“Killing the Giants as They Sleep” might be a quick fix, but if the scripting doesn’t work, it could be another all-day project.

The failure dreams hopefully won’t take as long, though I noticed the third one was far more difficult on TC now than it was when I last played it. I think we might’ve increased the Banshee spawn rate somewhere along the line, so we should probably set that back a bit, and the Banshees themselves seemed to have more powerful attacks.

“Burning Down the Corporation” is another one that will probably take at least a day and maybe two; that’s a lot of monsters to replace.

“Second to Last…” could be another project that takes a day or two, depending upon how much we decide to change it.

I’m not sure how much work is left for “S’pht’ia”; I honestly haven’t even had time to look at it. Might do that tonight.

Since then we’ve also decided to revamp the northwestern secret from “Deep into the Grotto”. That could also take awhile.

I’m also going to be honest: there are a lot of levels in chapter 4 that I’ve barely looked at. I’ve played them enough to ensure they can be vidded, but I haven’t really looked at aspects like platforms and ambient sounds at all.

I’d honestly like to be able to devote a decent amount of time to each level, making sure monster & item impassable polygons are placed where they need to be; making sure bouncy walls are fixed where possible; making sure all the ambient sounds work elegantly; things like that. I kind of doubt there’ll be time to do that for every level before the end of the year.

I did some of the ambient sound/platform stuff (though not all of it) for most of the first three chapters and chapter 5, but there are several levels in chapter 4 where I haven’t done any of it. The main reason for this is, of course, that everyone agreed that chapter 5 was the worst when we started work on Eternal, so I’ve poured by far the most time into it. But as a result, I’ve done very little work on anything from “The Incredible Hulk” to “Genie in a Bottle”.

And there are some other weird bugs. I noted above a weird motion glitch that traps the player in “Deja Vu All Over Again”. I just discovered that last week. And the Compiler in that area still doesn’t activate. Who knows how many weird glitches like that are still undiscovered?

And there’s also the matter of multiplayer, which has barely been tested at all. We discovered in testing that the HUD plugin is completely broken in multiplayer games. That’s major, and we only noticed it a few days ago.

It’s also extremely difficult to get games to sync up correctly. If people don’t have the exact same map file, games go out of sync. This is due to the implementation of Lua scripts in TEXT resource 128. If people don’t have the map file, they don’t get the Lua script for each level. As a result, they don’t have the extra starting weapons, and they can’t use ammo picked up from enemies. A few other things such as music also don’t work, though music is critical. According to the A1 documentation, this could be fixed by moving the Lua script into each individual map’s directory. So “00 The Far Side of Nowhere” should contain “The Far Side of Nowhere.lua”, “01 Deja Vu All Over Again” should contain “Deja Vu All Over Again.lua”, and so on. The downside here is of course that there will need to be 52 Lua files, each of which will need to be updated each time there is a change to the script, though I understand there are programs that can distribute those changes directly. I don’t know why the A1 developers decided to implement Lua this way; it’s dumb.

An additional possible culprit in addition to the Lua (which was definitely causing at least some of the problems) is the new shapes and plug-ins. I haven’t had time to look at how big the changes were in some of those cases, but if people don’t have those installed correctly, that might also lead to other desync issues. (Another reason I favour a beta 6 release.)

And of course, there’s also the possibility of game-breaking bugs like the one I found in “My Kingdom Pfhor a Horse” earlier this year that, just because we haven’t had time to adequately test cooperative games yet, haven’t been discovered yet. Who knows what other issues this severe are present in multiplayer games? This is basically an entire branch of gameplay that hasn’t been tested at all.

There are really only three weeks left until the end of the year. That’s not a lot of time. In addition to implementing all these changes, we’ll have to do more testing to make sure everything functions properly. There are a lot of things that we simply won’t have time to test.

I think delaying the final release until sometime next year is probably going to be the best idea. It might not necessarily need to be the end of the year, but it would be good to have at least a few days to test each level properly. This will also give me more time to figure out scripting issues like the HUD thing and the media fog for levels that have more than one media type.

The other thing is that by letting everything sit back a bit more, I can take a breather and have more time to sit back and really evaluate things. Sometimes I find it’s more difficult to have an objective opinion of things when I’ve recently worked on them. Part of what’s helped me with Chronicles is that most of those levels are more than ten years old, so I’m less emotionally attached to my old gameplay decisions; if something doesn’t work, I’m more willing to go back and change it.

I also suspect that this may also have been a partial cause of that argument a couple weeks ago over “Run, Coward” – I suspect we were all too attached to various changes we’d made to let go of them. Of course, the impending end of the semester for some of us probably didn’t help either. I suspect I probably overreacted, and I kind of doubt I was the only one.

Anyway I think moving the final release back will help on several different fronts. Being able to thoroughly test one level each week might probably make the game a lot better, particularly if we devote most of that testing to multiplayer mode. We can play normally; we can try to break the game; we can disobey the AIs’ orders; we can do things that only a player who hadn’t read the terminal would try; we can try to do things no rational player would think to do; we can try to complete the levels as quickly as possible; we can try to take as much time as possible. There are a lot of different ways to test gameplay, and it’s probably not possible to get to all of them over a shorter schedule.

Great job on the updates, BTW, Lia. The new lo-res textures actually look good! It’s the first time I thought those Human textures looked at all decent. The Skitters seem really fun, though I’ve really only played a few speedruns of a few of those levels since they were implemented. But they don’t seem overpowered or anything, and they look really cool.

But yeah, I also vote for putting out a beta 6 release as soon as possible. There have been so many changes since beta 5 that it’s probably worth going ahead and publishing one last beta before we go to RCs.

[Pfhorrest]

I'm not putting out another beta until I'm done with what I was going to do for the beta 5 phase, but I see you put our your own informal "beta 6" and that's fine with me

[ravenshining]

you all have come together and made a whole lot more changes than I expected during this "final testing" of beta 5

For me, at least, that has been entirely because we had a deadline to shoot for. If we stretch things out over a whole other year, we might not have this level of participation until next December. Personally, I've been trying to push out as much work on Eternal as I can, knowing that there's a deadline approaching, with the idea that I'll resume focus on developing M1R after that.

If we move from beta territory into release candidate territory, we ought to have a freeze on new features, major changes to geometry & physics, etc., and restrict work to bugfixes only. Otherwise, we may be introducing new bugs (like I may just have done for all I know) and development may grow perpetually, without ever producing a stable release for would-be netgamers, lets-players, etc.

Even then, I'd prefer to have the release candidate period a lot shorter than a year! I'm really wanting to show this to people and say, "look, we did it! and it's done so you can play without worrying about updates"

[The Man]

I agree with most of the above, but at the same time I think it might be OK to simply restrict work on one individual chapter after each release candidate. In other words, RC1 should be the final version for chapter 1 apart from bugfixes, etc. A year is very long, but if it ensures that everything will be thoroughly tested, that might not be the worst thing. I’d still prefer if we could have it done by, say, March or June.

The other thing is that the Banshees no longer seem to be showing up translucent in my informal beta, except for their death animations, so IDK what’s up with that. I might’ve screwed something up, or else one of the script changes altered their translucency.

Here’s my informal beta 6, BTW, for people who aren’t in the Discord.

[Pfhorrest]

i too would really prefer to actually release 1.2 proper at the end of the year and not stretch everything out even longer still. i think maybe aaron's unofficial "b6" will be enough for this last phase of testing for the coop testing that hes doing with people on the discord. there's nothing to say there can't be another version some other time. i was already thinking that maybe once a year i'd put together a 0.0.1 release with any bug fixes that came up that year or something.

i dont know anything anymore i feel really overwhelmed by everything i just want to be done and i have piles of other stuff i'm going to have to start on january 1st and i wont have any time for eternal after that except a little tiny trickle that i could drag out over the whole fucking year sso i really really really just want to know that it's done at the end of the year and im having a fucking anxiety attack now a the prospect of that not happening

final release is either the end of this year or the end of next year

i hate hate hate cramming everythign in at the very end thats the story of my fucking life thats what my job is likeevery fucking day and i cant i cant deal with that in this too its all shit huge fucking rush i have no fucking idea if its good enough its going to be just done just done and it is whatever it is or else im adding a fucking year ot the schedule so that i can actually take the time to look at it all slowly and be sure that its all correct.

1.2 at the end of this year and anythign that cant be fit in then goes in at the end of next year

by which i mean slowly over the course of next year

call it 1.2 final now and five more 0.0.1 releases of the course of next year or 1.2FC1 now and four more FCs before the final final at the end of next yeare it's teh same thing