Eternal X 1.2

[Pfhorrest]

I'm sorry to say I'm not super keen on the idea. In another setting it's a good concept to explore, but it feels like it would be kind of tacked on if it was worked in to Eternal, and also subvert the intended vision of the Stage 1 Jjaro as the utopian height of galactic civilization, the fall of which made room for the rise of the Pfhor, whose defeat in turn makes room for a future humanity to reclaim the place of those ancient Jjaro (if only the ascended Stage 3 Jjaro's plans can be averted).

[General Tacticus]

I have been less productive over the last couple days due to a persistent (insert physics model joke) fever. Fortunately I've gotten back to feeling well enough to throw together a set of test frames for Hathor's idle state (both software and full color/glow). The rest of the animations have been keyed out, and are ready to be rendered. If changes need to be made, I will make them before doing the full set.

full animation list will include:
idle (1 or 5 frames per view, depending on whether you want the hair to move around or not, so 5 or 25 bitmaps)
firing (4 frames per view, 20 bitmaps)
shield flare (3 frames per view, 15 bitmaps)

The following contains the frames (software, hires, glow), a shape patch, and mml to insert into the monster plugin. There are also 223 and 256 color index tables that I didn't end up using, because bob clut 01 works just fine.

Hathor Sprites.zip

(1.16 MiB) Downloaded 208 times

Just add the Hathor folder to the same directory as the other creatures, splice in the mml, apply the shape patch, and set some monster to use bob animation 13 color table 01.

Also the pfhor landscape is coming along well, I've been going with a sorta impact scarred tundra with lots of haze in the sky.

[Pfhorrest]

Sorry to hear you haven't been feeling very well, but thanks for continuing work on this!

I haven't have time to put everything together into a working in-game sprite yet, but I have a few comments looking at just the PNGs. I hadn't really noticed the actual hair before in the earlier renders, but now with the face mask, it really stands out, and I kinda don't like it. I think she would look better with just some kind of like metal head plate/helmet thing with all those medusa-like cables sticking out of that, instead of a full head of hair.

Thanks again!

[General Tacticus]

Ok, It should make rendering a fair bit easier then. Hair and skin are pretty much the most costly thing to compute other than volumetric smoke, so those cycles can be put to good use elsewhere.

*edit*

how does this look, concept-wise?

[General-RADIX]

Saw that design and wanted to combine it with my own take on Hathor:

Spoiler:

Might also doodle her with the white hair she had in the previous version of those sprites.

[ravenshining]

creepy, tacticus!
nice, radix!

suggestion from today's stream: rebalance spawn rates on unlucky to avoid blinding players no playing on TC. maybe swap minor and major juggs (so majors respawn and minors don't), reduce friendly maximums in favour of higher spawn rates or minimums?

[Pfhorrest]

New render looks great, Tacticus! And your pic is cool too, Radix. :-)

I have no objections to your suggestions if you want to implement them, Lia. (And now I'm vaguely remembering some other suggestions that came up in previous streams that I'm worried will be lost to the mists of time. Something about Unwired, and that elevator near the end that's hard to spot, I think? Maybe someone suggested that it should stay down until players step on it, and then the switch can bring it back down again as needed for coop?)

[Pfhorrest]

I’ve started noting things like that on the Issues tab of the Eternal github page. It’d probably be beat if we all started using that to keep track of our to-dos.

[Lion O Cyborg]

Hey Forrest, quick question: How was the music added to the levels? Was it a script or the new Weland's M1 song index method? I ask as I was thinking of doing a little hack to restore Rushing as the track for Map 13. I still need to get back to my Mac for learning to use Weland more. (it loves to crash on Windows you see, and I have no compilers to implement plugins for it either. My Mac has mono for that)

[The Man]

It uses embedded MML. The easiest way to figure out how it works is to split the map with Atque. However, this won’t work for the Marathon 1 map, because the M1 map is a completely different format. I don’t know how it works, and in any case, I’m fairly sure you won’t be able to split it with Atque – I think Atque only works with M2/∞/A1 files. It’s possible that the only utilities to edit the Marathon 1 map will only run under SheepShaver or Basilisk II, but raven would probably know better than Pfhorrest or I would. I don’t know what you’re referring to with “Weland’s M1 song index method”, so it’s possible that’s a feature I've never used, but there won’t be any overlap with how Eternal implements songs, since they’re completely different file formats – Eternal is using A1’s very slightly modified M2 map format, whereas M1 is using, well, the M1 map format.

Regarding the “fall of the Jjaro” thing, I suppose that makes sense. I may have to think about remixing one of the Chapter 5 levels for Chronicles, because I do want to work in some of this somewhere into the continuity.

[General Tacticus]

Ok, I have rendered out the full set of frames and put all except the extra idle animation into a shape patch. I haven't defined all of the animation sequences, but those should be easy enough to put together.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1YkV5b ... p_LFkeMKeM

I have quite a bit of stuff on my plate at the moment, so I don't have time to do all the mml or formatting. I am still working on the pfhor landscape, so I'll try to get a preliminary version posted at some point in the near future.

[Pfhorrest]

Thanks so much! I especially like the look of her shields.

[The Man]

I neglected to say this above, but all your renders so far have looked great, Tacticus. Thanks for continuing to improve this game’s appearance long after a lot of people probably already would’ve been satisfied.

I should also mention the need to update the screenshots on the website – if you have a Reddit account and time to submit some screenshots of 1.2 gameplay, we’d appreciate it if you’d head over here.

[ravenshining]

Don't mean to be a downer, but it looks like you forgot to include a walking animation? Or is she supposed to hover everywhere?

If she's not supposed to be hovering, I might recommend bringing her front leg out more when she fires, so she's in a proper lunge. Then it won't look like she's about to fall flat on her face.

[General Tacticus]

She is supposed to hover like a spht. There are also frames for her hair flowing in case the 1-frame idle/float state is uncanny. I didn't import them into the .shpa file, but they are included with the rest.

[ravenshining]

My apologies, then. Great work!

[The Man]

Copying this thing from Discord so I don’t forget what I wanted to add to Unwired:

[16:26] Aaron: just wrote the video description, so I may have forgotten to mention one or two things I wanted to bring up, but hopefully I covered the important bits
[16:27] Aaron: mostly: want to add Lookers, probably going to add a few more rechargers to reduce the amount of backtracking, will try to make that platform in the southwest even less annoying (probably best to do by adding another switch closer to its actual location once it's been activated the first time), may add even more switches to trigger some other platforms
[16:27] Aaron: ...oh yeah, a couple other things
[16:28] Aaron: perhaps those platforms in the central area should just be activated by switches, since it's annoying to have to wait for them
[16:28] Aaron: the second and third platforms can just have light-dependent switches where the lights don't activate until you get to the appropriate part of the level
[16:29] Aaron: then i might also want to make it so the alarm sound effects don't actually activate until you've hit their respective switches, just to foreshadow even more heavily that the Player Should Not Be Doing This
[16:29] Aaron: I think the switches for the second and third central platforms are actually there already, so it's kind of strange that the original design didn't just use them to start with
[16:30] Aaron: i'll add all that to the description later, mostly so I don't forget it - i've got some other stuff i should get to for now, though
[16:32] Aaron: overall, it's a really good level again, just still on the long side and anything to reduce the amount of backtracking even further would probably help make it better

Mostly small changes. I’ll add this to Github once I figure out where. (I doubt it’ll take me very long to do that, so unless I edit this indicating that I’ve had trouble finding it, it’s probably not worth responding on this point)

ETA: wound up writing it as a comment to Pfhorrest’s open issue with the level

[HelviusRufus]

Dont know how to operate in github, so I'll post this here.

While playing My K Pfhor a H...
Got trapped in polygon 562 and couldn'e escape.
The red line in the picture is my path.
I was heading north and closely went around the building and bounced a little bit, as when you hit something you can't step over, then turned to the building then back the way I came but was unable to go in any direction. I grenaded the building but that dint work. On further trials, it doesn't seem to be an all the time but perhaps only when you pass in a certain direction or something. Maybe there's something on the ground that grabs you if'n you get too close.

[Pfhorrest]

Thanks for the report! I've added that to the buglist on Github, which BTW is here:

https://github.com/Pfhorrest/Eternal/issues

[General Tacticus]

I have the day version of the pfhor landscape rendered.

Link:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1aOOY0 ... t1msk4Uyt7

The big ships are based on what you see in m2's moon environment, plus the 2 page image from the manual. The small ones are from the pfhor dropship you see in "Ne Cede Malis", as I already had that one made for the jjarro scenery stuff.

[Pfhorrest]

Whoa, that looks awesome! Thanks again!

There aren't actually separate day/night versions of the Pfhorscape used in the scenario, just the ambiguously twilightish one and a pink-tinted version of it used for some force field effect that Goran invented for A Friend In Need, so I'm sure I can just add the pink tint to this myself to get the force-field version (unless someone else gets to that before I return to work on Eternal next year), and we shouldn't need an alternate version of it, unless someone else feels like going around retexturing the landscape on some levels to make some of them day and some of them night.

[ravenshining]

Today's stream gave me an idea that would help playability for 1.3: Having more than just one switch texture per collection, and then using each one consistently either for:

• light, platform, and tag switches
• momentary/latched switches
• thing nearby / thing elsewhere switches

so people aren't confused about what does what. After all, the trilogy certainly had a wealth of different switch designs to choose from.

In fact, if you have three different switch textures per collection, organised by light, platform, and tag, you won't even have to do any re-texturing in Vasara - you can set up the MML so that light, platform, and tag switches will automatically use unique textures.

Here's some ideas, using Goran's and Vogel's switch textures (alongside yours) from the trilogy simply pallete-swapped to fit Eternal, all organised into themes:

Obviously, some redesign would be necessary for adapting existing designs to forerunner switches

[ravenshining]

Messing around a bit further with the idea...

[Pfhorrest]

That is a neat idea, and I like the idea that no manual retexturing would be necessary (though I don't completely understand how that works), but I think if we were to implement it, I would want to create the variant switches myself for complete consistency between all the textures and so that they can have bump and glow maps, which I'd need those other textures in AI format to effectively create.

(And obviously, that's not something that I'm going to be getting around to for a long while).

[The Man]

I don't completely understand how that works

MML allows you to specify different textures in each collection for each of the following:

• Light Switch
• Platform Switch
• Tag Switch
• Tag Switch (Accepts Chip)
• Tag Switch (Destroyable)

All of which in turn have active_frame and inactive_frame states. The only reason scenarios have traditionally used the same pairs of textures for all five of these is because that's how the original games do it, but there’s nothing in the engine saying that the same texture has to be used for all five of them. From my understanding, you could easily have five pairs of textures, one for each type of switch.

Anyhow, I presume that redefining what textures are used in each set for a given switch behaviour would automatically retexture any switch that used it, though I haven’t verified this.

Additionally, some of the textures (specifically Goran’s water and lava sets) will already have bump maps, and several of them have glow maps, but I fully understand wanting to make them for the others. They wouldn’t be in 2048x2048 anyway; I think Eternal is the only scenario that’s gone above 1024x1024. I’m pretty sure Goran’s are 512x512. Freeverse made theirs 1024x1024 (though the versions that ship with M2 by default are 512x512 for whatever reason), and I think Tim also made 1024x1024 variants (though the standard A1 versions may also be 512x512; I haven’t checked).

However, if we’re going to have more than one set of switches for each collection, it might also be worth reconsidering how many textures are 2048x2048, given how many performance issues have resulted from their usage. The switches and media should probably stay 2048x2048, but maybe some of the wall textures should be reconsidered. (And as long as we’re considering reshuffling the textures for 1.3, it might be worth re-implementing the extra media textures in each collection to keep Windows from having to load multiple texture sets).

Anyway I like this idea and Lia’s prototypes and think it’s worth considering for 1.3.