New Kat Bar

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 10:25 pm

Not quite complete yet, work in progress...
http://www.geocities.com/hammerfall_pro ... se_Bar.png

Issues I know already:
The sign doesn't look bright enough, or quite straight.
The strangely shaped pieces of wall at fron need some lighting effect to
make them look closer.

To come: Picture of a Paradigm being blown up.
Menu items hanging from ceiling on top of the bar.

spiritplumber · Post by **spiritplumber** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 11:09 pm

Great job!!!

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 11:12 pm

Hey Spirit! I thought you were away for the weekend or some.
Thank you, but, you know?, there's something I don't like about it
in general, and I don't know what it is. A sort of 'blandness', lack
of contrasts perhaps?

spiritplumber · Post by **spiritplumber** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 11:14 pm

That would be good... If I recall correctly, the interiors of kat ships had lots of red in them.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Sun Apr 03, 2005 11:19 pm

I didn't know that, but maybe I had a gut feeling when I made the floor and ceiling red; but they aren't bright red, though...
Red walls would be too much, I think...
Red cushions? Hmmm...

Actually, the cushions are too light, I think...

I'll have to think about it hard.

Penta · Post by **Penta** » Mon Apr 04, 2005 12:29 am

The problem is that you're using white light, not red.

If you try to use red lighting, it'll come out better.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Mon Apr 04, 2005 1:13 am

Well, with red light... Blue and green surfaces don't reflect red light, or reflect it less; so what you get when you use red light (or green, or blue, for that matter) is a monochrome effect, except that, instead of black and WHITE, it's black and RED (or black and green, or black and blue, respectively. I could achieve that by applying a red filter, but it wouldn't look good, I don't think.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Mon Apr 04, 2005 1:25 am

Ah! But maybe LOCAL, red SPOTLIGHTS might look nice. Let me think about this...

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Mon Apr 04, 2005 1:27 am

That's it! It's not "contrasts" that are missing, but rather "color gradients".

In fact, the only color gradient there is, in the whole picture, is the bar counter; and it looks offly nice. If I make the spotlights on top of the front cushions red, I can colorize those two cushions redder, as well as a bit of the floor around them, with a very gradual fade. That'll fix this baby for sure!

spiritplumber · Post by **spiritplumber** » Mon Apr 04, 2005 3:38 am

Coolbeans!

Oh and thanks for the tip

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Mon Apr 04, 2005 5:20 am

Look what an incredible amount of difference gradients make!
http://www.geocities.com/hammerfall_pro ... at_Bar.png
The only difference is the hanging lights are purplish red, and the cushions under them, and the floor around them are slightly purple-ized. And the decorative shapes in front are yellow-ized by a hidden yellow light behind the viewer.
Gradients are God!

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Mon Apr 04, 2005 2:10 pm

Added light cone halos under the hanging lights, and a few other subtle fixes.
Same link http://www.geocities.com/hammerfall_pro ... at_Bar.png, I just updated the file. Not finished yet; a few more things to come.

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Mon Apr 04, 2005 4:03 pm

Can't you post a bigger screenshot?

Bar images in VS are 1024x1024 if I'm not mistaken. There's no reason WCU can't have the same size images, right?

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Mon Apr 04, 2005 6:37 pm

Maybe there isn't, but I started off from the mining base png, so it's the same size and format. You can see it in-game easily: Download it to privater/sprites/bases/bar, then rename MiningBase_Bar.png, and rename this to MiningBase_Bar.png. By the way, I just updated the file:
http://www.geocities.com/hammerfall_pro ... at_Bar.png
Now there's a picture on the wall.
Problem: bottom edge of picture doesn't line up with perspective, I'll fix it in no time.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Mon Apr 04, 2005 9:58 pm

Finished !!!
http://www.geocities.com/hammerfall_pro ... at_Bar.png
...unless proven wrong, that is...

spiritplumber · Post by **spiritplumber** » Tue Apr 05, 2005 6:18 am

w00t!

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Tue Apr 05, 2005 6:41 am

Something weird happened: The picture got dark. It was normal when I finished the work, and uploaded it. I checked the link; everything was fine. Then hours later when I was closing apps to reboot, the image on The Gimp was dark, and the one on the server too. I thought it was a Windows bug, so I rebooted but it's still dark...

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Tue Apr 05, 2005 6:45 am

Doh! Never mind, I had turned the brightness down in my monitor...

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Tue Apr 05, 2005 5:54 pm

Just for an experiment, I tried exporting the pic to 256 color, indexed mode, and of course it looks more "pixelated", but I like it better, in the sense that it has a dithered, retro look, more consistent with the original art. The file is also half the size. I'm putting it here as an alternative choice.
http://www.geocities.com/hammerfall_pro ... g/KBar.png

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Tue Apr 05, 2005 9:45 pm

Allright, one final problem I needed to fix, a white margin that was showing. Now the image works perfectly, and it's down to 19K size, from about 35K for a typical bar png in the current version. Here it is:
http://www.geocities.com/hammerfall_pro ... ewKBar.png
As I mentioned before, if you want to see it in the game, download the image to the folder sprites/bases/bar, rename, say MiningBase_Bar.png to originalMiningBase_Bar.png, then rename this file from newKBar.png to MiningBase_Bar.png. Then fly to any mining base and go to the bar.

spiritplumber · Post by **spiritplumber** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 12:24 am

Great work!

As for the retro-ness of the image, it may be a good thing

It fits very well with the original art.

Now I know a lot of people want to do a lot with the off-flight portion of the game (there was talk of sticking a Quake like engine in it), the best answer I have for that is "I don't know". I'm just the kitty who does the occasional coding ^^;

I like the Priv bases as they are honestly. So having more of the same so to speak is good ^-^

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 10:02 am

I love priv bases the way they are too. What happens is I carry around a bit of baggage of my own: Years ago I started working on a game engine, with a friend of mine who knew much more than me about coding, but who expected me to do all the work, and so that went nowhere; but I did a ton of work on paper about the general design of the engine. Some years later I started working on it again and got to the point of having actual 3D graphics; photorealistic in fact; but not much more than just graphics. Anyhow, inbetween that work, I dreamt a lot about the kinds of games I wanted to make. And having liked so much Privateer, MOO2 and Fallout, it should be no surprise I wanted to get to something that would combine them all: You might start llike in Privateer, running cargo between worlds, but the profits are very small. There would be missions to do on the ground, people you could meet in odd places, not just bars. Walking around you could find real bargains, rather than just have one commodities place to do trading at. Every planet might have a number of towns one can visit. You could own little businesses or shops, or better yet, invest on someone's business and become partners with them, as well as their suppliers and/or clients. As in Privateer 2, some of the missions would take you places on-planet. Like in a role playing game you'd have an inventory. As in fallout, buying a car would increase your inventory capacity. But unlike Privateer and Fallout, in the long term, the game would transition smoothly to a strategy-like game, where you might become a warlord of some faction, such as bounty hunters or pirates, and manage them to increase their finances, numbers, strength, skills and technology, and eventually lead them to battle against opposing forces, taking over the planets they control. Then you'd get to manage planets, like in MOO2.
This is just an example of what I used to dream about. I was also thinking about another game that would take place just in the solar system, where you begin on Earth waiting for the rocket to take you to your new job as a mine worker on an asteroid, beyond the orbit of Mars. Once there. you find that expenses and gambling eat most of your salary, and eventually get yourself transferred to work as courier between asteroids; --a risky job nobody wants and pays a lot. No space ship: rather precision catapults and catch nets, and your space-suit's jets as emergency backup. Often you get people paying extra for a courier mission, for the sake of your keeping it off the books, and you find a way to decrypt messages to find out what's going on, and begin to unravel a thick plot, involving corporate corruption, and mysterious disappearances.
Anyways, with the rise of Open Source, I thought the ideal game would be one that would continuously evolve. So, in a Priv like game, but where planets are 3D, groups of people could reserve planets they want to take charge of, and they can continue to add towns to them, and making detailed landscapes, writing local plots, and so on. Rather than all the data being put into one installer, data would be downloaded by players from their servers dynamically, on a needed basis. And then cache'd or dumped, after leaving the planet, depending on disk space and/or user parameters. Thus, the universe would be distributed, rather than monolithic.
Bah, just rambling...