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Wednesday, January 18, 2012

HDD failure

I suffered a click of death a few days ago, which as I understand it is a pretty sure sign my Hard Disc is gone. I lost a few files related to the project (mainly some older screenshots, savegames and MapZone texture files) but luckily the important stuff is backed up. The biggest problem this causes however (aside from all the stuff I lost not related to the project) is that it effectively cut my disc space in half. Folks, always back up your stuff.

On a lighter note, here's a screen of Rosa.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Vampire Ladies

I have already shown the female vampire from the crypt both in screenshots and in the boss battle video, but I never really talked about her design despite the fact that I spend a lot of time on her. So get ready for some lady bats!

Villa Crypt



The most obvious change I made to her face are her eyes. In her original N64 appearance the white eyes with no irides are pretty effective, but I feel there's no way I can do justice to that look if I keep them white in high resolution. I went with bloodshot eyes instead.

Other than that I simply added color to her face with some blue and purple highlights.



It is a large part of the storyline early on that villagers (especially children) have been kidnapped and/or killed. Therefore I thought it made more sense to have her look like an actual villager instead of a random maiden in a gown. I actually used the peasant girls from The Witcher as inspiration for her new outfit.

Castle Center

This one is semi-new though (as in, not yet in the currently available pack)

In the Castle Center the female crypt vampire returns as a regular enemy (although it seems to be random which vampires spawn). She is basically a palette swap of her previous iteration, so in exactly the same fashion I simply changed the hue of her crypt appearance.




I thought her original appearance looked way too bland. Compared to the other possible vampires that spawn there, she looks gray. I thought a dark red dress would look way better on her.

Also, she's a complete pain to screencap properly.

Face up he... wait what?




This one is the best I could manage.

Monday, January 2, 2012

Of New Year's and Skeletons

Despite me not having been here a whole lot during the last few months, it seems this blog has picked up a bit in popularity. So let me first say thank you for the support, and I am indeed still working on the project. It's just going slow because I'm also very busy in real life.

So let me start of 2012 with a few problems!

Skeletons
Because they move around so much, my work on skeletons is minimal. Since it is its most prominent feature, I only replaced the skull. The bones, I feel, are barely worth tinkering with since it would require a lot of work replacing them with proper high resolution bones which you won't even notice in-game.


Now there is one type of skeleton which seems to be a continuous source of problems: the exploding blue ones. Just having (an unaltered) one of those crawl from the ground causes framerate lag. A newly textured one actually crashes the game (especially when they explode), which is sad because I had actually made some adjustments to the original look.

I tried to make it look like their heads actually had bombs implanted in them. However, due to the problems this guy seems to cause I have opted to remove these textures for the time being.




Carrie Fernandez
I wasn't too happy with the way I made Carrie's eyes look (you can check out my previous attempt a few posts before this one). While I like this one a lot better, I might have overdone the eye shadow.


General problems
I have absolutely no idea about the settings of Rice's graphics plugin, furthermore I suspect my aging computer might be the cause of at least some problems, so these are probably my fault. However, I appreciate any help.

- Distance fog begins farther than it should (and therefore it doesn't hide distant terrain popping up)
- Aforementioned lag in certain places
- Some notes strangely don't seem to play during the intro screen

I'm currently using 'Mudlord's Rice Video Build CRC-Fix Update 10', which was advised to me on emutalk.net

In conclusion
That's all from me for now. Have a happy 2012!