thomasmahler's Forum Posts

  • I'd love that - anything that helps making motion blur faster would be worth researching into, IMO.

    MoBlur is one of the things right now that give games a look that we haven't had before in games - most of the devs I showed Sein to loved the MoBlur in it, cause we haven't really seen a lot of 2d games using Post Processing techniques and stuff yet. Most 2d games are still sorta stuck with the 16bit look, cause nobody kept pushing into that area.

    But 720p with a lot of pixel shaders and moBlur will be a bit slower even on very powerful machines - Yet, the effect makes quite a bit of difference.

  • Samus Aran kicks Chun Lis butt, dude.

  • Glad you guys like it. I definitely had to fight with getting a look that's appealing, yet easy to produce, which was a real challenge. The silhouetted style has been used quite a few times now, but I think the style has its own uniqueness now that doesn't seem (too) cheap or copied.

    Going with silhouettes was really more of a compromise going in, cause I knew I'd never finish the game if I'd go with anything more detailed.

    Steven: The characters are relatively simple 3d characters, modeled, rigged, animated in Maya and rendered out with a simple lambert shader set to black - so that all that matters are the silhouettes. Then I take them into Photoshop, scale em down, add the bloom effect and save em as png's. The color correction and sharpen in Construct does the rest to achieve that look.

    The characters in those screenies are still placeholders, the style of the actual characters is a bit different to better match the environments and the story.

  • Teh tease!

  • That's... pretty much what I was getting at.

    The guy's art we are talking about was not made in 3D... I, for some weird reason, thought we were talking about painting 2D art, and making games that looked like said 2D art.

    Have you read my post before that? I was just thinking about how you could streamline a production in order to work out a project like that and I think it's very possible since todays next-gen projects are far, far more complex in terms of asset creation than anything he does anyway. Creating the character art in 3d would make a lot of sense in order to streamline character animation, but even if you'd decide otherwise...

    [quote:1udfhbjj]Of course 3D is far more common.... like I said, it is easier to animate and render images a 3D object, than to draw a 2D object from scratch for every single frame. And yes, if you did make a game that looked as good as those art-works, in 2D, painting them by hand... you WOULD need 200 people (perhaps an exaggeration, but you see the point I am trying to make?) to complete a large project.

    What the hey? We're still talking about making a game that looks like the screenshots that guy posted, right? So even if you'd do everything in 2d, even the character animation - for say, that Mario game he re-created, you'd _never_ need 200 people. I don't even know how you're calculating this. 200 people, dude? I think you're highly overestimating that artwork.

    Look at this:

    http://www.gametrailers.com/player/48398.html

    Here we go. I'd be surprised if their team is larger than 30 people at best.

  • Huh?

    I said it would probably take a day to design and paint a background like that. Not the character animation. We have a lot of good character animation and motion retargeting tools in 3d now - so why wouldn't you make use of that? A week to create an idle animation? What?

    Of course it'd take a lot more time to create everything in 2d, that's why I was saying that it'd make sense to create the characters in 3d and use the tools that are out there to make it feasible for production.

    Why would you need a 200 man group to create a 2d game like that? o_O Vanillaware is doing some pretty awesome stuff and they're pretty freaking small.

    Also, it's not like 3d is easier, but you usually find more people being trained in 3d than in 2d and for a loooong time now, everyone associated 2d with being 'outdated', so everyone jumped on that 3d train. Try to find artists now that are really good 2d artists that can design, paint and are good animators - good luck with that. The industry is always adapting to what's cool right now, to what's making money and 2d hasn't been hot for a long time now.

  • How does it work? I applied to the effect to the text and tried to change the font rendering in the project itself, but it doesn't seem to do anything at all. It's just as jaggy as it was before.

  • Yeah, Dave told me about the smart text shader and I have high hopes for it

    Are there any examples of the effect online? I'd love to see what it does exactly.

    The reason why the font rendering looking cool is so important to me is because the whole game is based on a narrative that runs along with you - imagine a game like 'Another World' and you constantly get hints on the story and what the player has to do when you reach certain points. And right now, everything looks fine, but the moment text pops up... it's so ugly.

    QuaZi: It's there It's not totally overdone, but if you look at the tree, for example, you should see it.

  • Windows 7 is pretty bitchin. Have been using it since Beta 1 on my workstation and never had any bigger trouble. Drivers work, applications are fast and responsive and the system just feels a lot better than Vista, which always felt sorta slow and laggy.

  • I dunno. A good digital painter should be able to paint one of those backgrounds per day, especially if the design decision is already clear. I'm not a digital painter at all and I paint my stuff in a pretty short amount of time and I've seen digital and matte painters doing amazing 'sketches' in half an hour. i think saying that it's not possible because that guy needed 50 hours to re-create an old game in terms of design using new digital tools is a cop-out.

    The problem is one of animation - animating high res character sprites is a ton of work and having high res sprites, but not more animation phases gives the whole thing an unfinished feel (like Street Fighter 2 HD). But I guess you could achieve very good results if you'd do it in 3d, turn off the shading and paint the textures just as you'd paint the character - and then use post processing on the rendered sprites. I'm pretty sure with a little effort it could look extremely close to what he does.

    I'm very sure that you could create games like that in todays day and age and that one could make it feasible for production - you'd just have to make the right design choices in terms of look and production.

    A lot of the next-gen stuff we see today is much more complicated to create in terms of pure production work. Having painted backgrounds (you could still animate the layers that make up the composition) is a very, very efficient technique and much less time-consuming than what level and environment artists are doing today for real time backgrounds, IMO.

  • Yeah, it looks exactly the same in Construct. Construct is using a lot of the same algorithms anyway - even the post processing, like the sharpen filter or the color correction is identical. That was the whole idea, to concept and storyboard the game in Photoshop and then bring over the assets to Construct. If you see the runtime and those screenshots side by side, you wouldn't be able to spot the difference. The runtime looks a lot better, IMO, mainly because you get that fake 3d effect through parallax scrolling and image offsetting.

    <img src="http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/construct/images/lake.jpg">

    And it still runs at smooth 60 fps. I love turning on motion blur, but things go crazy when you use motion blur - like, the transition effects stop working and sometimes you get severe slowdowns. Hope that's fixed with 0.99.

    But motion blur adds something to it that makes the whole thing look like a painting come to life. Motion Blur going grazy and costing quite a bit of performance and the fugly text rendering are the only things that keep giving me headaches now.

    The animation is still quite fake'ish with trees blowing in the wind through the use of sine waves and stuff, but it actually works better than I thought.

    I'll try to make a video of it soonish

    Edit: Cause someone just asked me - The bloom is actually baked into the sprites, so it's not being done in realtime. I've seen some examples of that (like the blur horizontal, blur vertical solution), but ddn't think it'd be efficient.

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  • Since Dave liked the graphics so much, I thought I should post these:

    <img src="http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/construct/images/Senseless.jpg">

    <img src="http://www.thomasmahler.com/files/construct/images/oppression.jpg">

    Thanks again to Shvil for making the Overlay Effect working beautifully now

  • We could just try it and see what happens. This could serve as motivation for the developers and third party devs.

    If somebody is dedicated to make Construct X360 compatible, I'd donate 50 bucks upfront and 50 bucks when the job is done and the Construct binaries run on an X360. 100 bucks isn't a lot of dough, but we can increase that amount when (third party) devs actually get a reputation on doing a good job.

    If 100 people do the same, a dev could make 10k USD on that feature. Not a lot of money, but it could be a motivational help.

    It'd be cool if we could create a pot where everyone can donate and the guy who actually delivers gets the money - is that model possible using chipin?

  • Have you set the canvas object to 'Grab Layout: Before drawing'?

  • Ash: I'll try to do that in the next couple of days. I'm a bit busy with the relocation right now, but I promise that I'll think of it

    Here's another one:

    53) It'd be cool if we could toggle layouts like we can toggle events. If I want to skip layout 2 and 3 right now, I have to skip em using my debug key and if I want to compile a version without layout 2 and 3, I actually have to delete those layouts just to get it compiled.

    So it'd be cool if we could just right click a layout and toggle it - if it's toggled, it won't be in the runtime and it won't be compiled if you export to the exe.

    That'd make things quite a bit easier