[WIP] Arcade Academy

[Jad]

This is so fucked up in the greatest way imaginable.

I've gone around thinking about this kind of normal-mapped 2d-sprites and since I'm not a programmer at all, I've just been thinking about general solutions and here you have gone CREATING IT OH MY GOD.

MY DREAMS HAVE LITERALLY COME TRUE!!!

:] That is to say, i love this. <3

EDIT: Since the DS has a 3d-rendering mode (which works perfectly for rendering on just a 2d plane as well), would this work on the DS? I wonder :]~

EDIT2: And I guess you can apply this to background elements as well?

Delicious :3~

[baccaman21]

In theory there's no reason why the DS couldn't do it, but it's not built into it's SDK so unless someone was to write a VERY efficient piece of code then maybe it could... but I doubt it would have a practicle application.

Material mapping techniques use a lot of graphical information to get a result not to mention the calculating processing power required to output them... so there's two issues there, 1 - graphic memory, 2. - computational power...

There's more to 3d than 'just' polygons and texture maps... which is why these new fangled 'next gen' consoles are so bloomin' impressive - the shear amount of processing power under the hood is phenomenal... and all the new rendering methods that push the visual envelope beyond anything we've seen before... Especially for an old fogey like me...

I hate 3d, but respect it all the same for it's ability to acheive what it can these days... and I'm so pleased that these new methods are being applied laterally to the old skool techniques...

Hat's off to Robotacon - you're doing us proud.

[Jad]

Ah, dangit

This version of normal mapping looks so simple so it felt like the DS would be able to handle it.

But then, I guess this is a quite powerful technique that is color-reduced to fit inside made-up restrictions.

Oh well.

In theory there's no reason why the DS couldn't do it, but it's not built into it's SDK so unless someone was to write a VERY efficient piece of code then maybe it could... but I doubt it would have a practicle application.

VERY efficient piece of code...

DEMO MAKERS, LOOK HITHER :]

[Myran]

The DS does not support pixel shaders which means the same technique could not be used. It might be possible to precompute it (although only with one light source), but even that could be a problem if you want to do it on all the graphics and not just the main character, with only 512 kb of video ram it would be tough.

[baccaman21]

The DS does not support pixel shaders which means the same technique could not be used. It might be possible to precompute it (although only with one light source), but even that could be a problem if you want to do it on all the graphics and not just the main character, with only 512 kb of video ram it would be tough.

huh...? 

didn't I just say that?

[robotacon]

EDIT 3:
Removed the normal maps posted because they are all wrong as WhiteNoise pointed out. I'm taking the bump mapping discussion to TIGS Forum and will only post pixel art for critiquing from here on.

EDIT 4:
Actually my normal maps wasn't wrong. There are several ways of creating normal maps and I'm using the technique Valve uses among others. My biggest problem is that I'm creating the normal maps from height/bump maps and that there is too much information lost when approximating the surface normal. But as I said I'm moving this technical discussion to TIGS.

EDIT 5:
Ok,  WhiteNoise was right. The normal maps I posted were completely wrong. I feel really bad. Interesting enough they were fine internally, I just couldn't export them properly.

----

Here's the result of my latest bumpmapping experiment and it's obvious right now that the code I've got that translates depth maps to a normal maps is too crude.
This is perhaps most noticeable when looking at the blocks where you can see that there are stray pixels and the same is true for the characters.



If I'm going to do this I'll need full control so I'll have to pixel the normal maps by hand, or at least edit the normal maps.

ps. The guard was inspired by Camdogs henchmen.

[WhiteNoise]

That normalmap is not only crude, it's also completely wrong in terms of the sRGB channels relating to binormal/tangent space.
A normal vector facing towards you should be RGB-128,128,255 (XYZ-tangent space 0,0,1), not the dark blue colour you've got now

It should look something like this:



The original pixel art looks pretty sweet, and i only replied to this thread to try and help you out with the normalmaps - i'd rather not turn this into a pixelshader thread (like you said yourself)

[Darien]

bumpmapping aside, I think this has loads of charm.  I love the animations, and I'm really looking forward to this.

The bumpmapping looks great though... I wonder... something like that would be graet for a horror game

[eobet]

I've tried to improve on the ledge crawl.

This animation rubs me the wrong way, unfortunately. It has the same feeling as bad old 16-bit platformers, and I'll tell you why:

1) The action stops dead for a millisecond (when he catches the ledge, everything freezes or he gets stuck to it).
2) There is no elasticity (all of the action happens at roughly the same, close to linear speed).

The easy way I would fix this would be to simply make his feet quickly bounce out and in a pixel during the dead frames when he catches the ledge. I think just that would help to make it so much more alive (also think of all the elasticity the old Super Mario Games had, which not many other platformers were able to mimic).

PS. Love the idea btw (reminds me of Ramrod, somehow, which sadly never was released), and hope to see an OS X version too?

[DavidCarney]

1) The action stops dead for a millisecond (when he catches the ledge, everything freezes or he gets stuck to it).

This might be because it is waiting for input from the gamer on whether to hang, drop or climb?  Even if this is so, an idle hanging animation might be necessary.