Author Topic: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind  (Read 17253 times)

Offline eRe4s3r

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #30 on: September 22, 2011, 07:38:43 pm »
AI war pre 1.000 did not look good, it looked horridly ugly and had many graphic related technical and execution problems. This was fixed later by the help of the community, which brings me to my point, AI War does *not* look ugly or stylistically broken (though the 3d-model/sprites should probably not have been made, i liked the "original" bases ;p)

x4000 has chosen an art-style and now hes gotta stick with it, as a free artist have the great freedom to say "ah frack it" and delete my project, or restart it even when its 90% done at the time (i guess i just move the 100% bar a bit further up ,p) but games and game development does not work like that. Assets are done and used and converted for the game, now you gotta run with them. Worse, the more assets you make the less changes you can apply later on.

Its an reality that using stock-models is the cheap way out of a dilemma that exists because employing modelers to make those models would cost tenfold, its the reality. And the quality difference is why modelers are well paid, while stock-models are usually cheap. Yeah you get a quick model to use, but it might not be the perfect fit for your project and well yeah.. you also pay for their expertise in rendering, light setup, texturing and post editing. / Look at Achron how it looks if you employ people who aren't even 3d modelers to begin with for maximum money savings....

But fact is that AVWW does not look "bad" - it just needs some polish to the effects (particularly that smoke effect needs fixing ASAP) and some stylistic choices for differentiating background and foreground better, but thats about it. In full resolution the game looks crisp and nice, thats what counts.

Just wondering where and when we can get into the beta so that more in-depth comments can be made on graphics and gameplay. Just from videos it just don't work right ;p
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Offline x4000

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #31 on: September 22, 2011, 07:40:32 pm »
Beta is coming Monday!  Not sure what smoke effect you're referring to.
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Offline eRe4s3r

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Offline x4000

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #33 on: September 22, 2011, 07:42:25 pm »
Oh -- the dust from the desert burrowers.  What is it you think should be done about it?
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Offline eRe4s3r

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #34 on: September 22, 2011, 07:54:18 pm »
Oi ;( Thats an evil question... without experimenting with the game i can't really tell ;p

Things that come to mind

1) The edges should be soft
2) The colors less opaque
3) There should be a "glow" effect (nothing to do with glow in the sense here, more like an "dust billow cloud" at the spawn location that kinda wobbles around at low opacity (but not additive blending!)

The Screenshot is really too low to see whats wrong too, it does look fairly out of place though, if its DUST then it needs to be less opaque.

Very dirty edit to a very badly resized screenshot

By the way, how in the nine heavens did RPS resize that screenshot, with paint? It looks terrible, even the colors are all wrong and malaligned... thats NOT how AVWW looks ;(
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Offline x4000

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #35 on: September 22, 2011, 07:57:07 pm »
Yeah, I have no idea why RPS keeps resizing the graphics in a really poor way; that's not the first time, nor the worst one.

For the dust... these are good points.  I'll look at that.
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Offline eRe4s3r

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #36 on: September 22, 2011, 08:05:43 pm »
Quick look at the source tells me everything i didn't want to know...

For web use photoshop advises JPG level 10 / Baseline (Optimized) , or even PNG-24 (lossless)

RPS uses jpg quality level 3 (3 of 12, that is) and it only goes down to 1 (if they use Baseline Default its even a 2)

And all that to save 30kb per screenshot (highest jpg optimized quality would be 92kb) png-24 would be 170kb

Maybe apply some time based opacity fade-out near the end so that the smoke increases in scale and gets less visible.. not sure how it'd look in-game... ;p
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Offline x4000

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #37 on: September 22, 2011, 08:14:12 pm »
From the middle of a sandstorm, so the picture looks grainy in a still shot, but here's the new version.
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Offline Nice Save

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #38 on: September 22, 2011, 08:14:58 pm »
Yeah, that dust looks more like distorted bubbles than smoke or dust to me. I have nothing bad to say about any of the other art assets though.

Edit -- New dust looks great.

The RPS screens struck me as terrible the second I came to the story, you should call them names or something. They seem blurry, and there's nothing going on in any of them, just background and no enemies or spells or anything. I reckon if they knew they had to scale down the screens so much they should have played in a lower resolution or something. And shown a screenshot of your character as a bat fighting a giant amoeba boss with skelebot dwarfs running around underneath, with 12 Tidal pulses, 2 circles of fire, some balls of light, and a few fireballs all on-screen at the same time.
« Last Edit: September 22, 2011, 08:16:44 pm by Nice Save »

Offline x4000

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #39 on: September 22, 2011, 08:16:30 pm »
Yeah... so it goes, I guess.  We'll have better screens to actually send the press, so hopefully they will use those instead of taking bad ones of their own. ;)
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Offline eRe4s3r

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #40 on: September 22, 2011, 08:53:34 pm »
New smoke dust is superb ;)

See, small things like this...

And wow, but that screenshot looks really cool, nearly like a painting. If it looks even HALF as good animated you got a winner ;p

And good thing you chose PNG for that ;P
« Last Edit: September 22, 2011, 08:56:18 pm by eRe4s3r »
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Offline x4000

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #41 on: September 22, 2011, 09:36:11 pm »
Thank you!  That's a great tip on the dust, I appreciate it a lot. :)

The screenshot is actually one of the worse ones for showing off what it really looks like, because it's the middle of a sandstorm.  It's a lot more clean and painterly when viewed not in the middle of weather like that, but the only desert at hand was away from my wind shelter network.  Anyway, thanks for the kind words. :)  I'll be happy to be seeing folks see this at fully resolution coming up.  It's been a hit with the alpha testers from what I can tell, even those who had been skeptical from the 1080p video.  So that's a good sign. :)
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Offline mrhanman

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #42 on: September 22, 2011, 09:45:09 pm »
That new screen shot is phenomenal!  The background is one of the best I've ever seen.  I'm more anxiously awaiting the beta for this than I am my copy of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus Collection. :D

Offline x4000

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #43 on: September 22, 2011, 09:50:30 pm »
If you guys like that one so well, here's some without the sand grit in the way (though it is snowing lightly in one of them). :)
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Offline mrhanman

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Re: RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind
« Reply #44 on: September 22, 2011, 11:15:50 pm »
You realize you're torturing us, right?  ;D

 

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