Prince of Persia Forum :: View topic

ecco · Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 1:47 pm Post subject:

Note: The following is a background on my modded graphics. After writing all that is below, if anyone is interested in how I made them, or they want to know what's involved I suggest you read on...

Actually this is something I already researched way back when I developed my high detail vdungeon02 graphics. See below. The two pics with the grey border are my vdungeon02 graphics which as you can see have a more interesting background than just plain black. And in the left image for example,. I purposely designed those pillars and effects that way, so I could have a pillar (or buttress would be a more suitable word in my case)- either side of a big black void, which is kind of like an area or corridor of the dungeon in the background which appears quite ominous due to the lack of light, the unknown,

I did that for the reason of wanting more than just black backgrounds. I went through every single bitmap of the dungeon, or at least the interesting ones, and increased their sizes bit by bit until they no longer worked (the gme crashed). I found that some bitmaps you could increase massively, such as the level door bmps. For example, one notable difference is that I discovered you only need one half of the level door bmp in the game. I first wondered about this beacuse of the RoomShaker help which said the open panel must be linked to the left half of the door for it to open. So I experimented and found that you could increase the left size bmp to twice that, to in fact make the whole door from only the one half. I was now left with an unused bmp, itself which could be increased in size (26 X 62 up to 126 X 127)- a big increase. Some of the size increases in the palace graphics are remarkable.

I went through this process as mentioned for a long time. One only has to extract the bmps of my vdungeon to see all the differences. There's still a lot of careful editing and thoughtful work to be done to make the graphics seamless. And then of course the levels need to be custom made to make use of the graphics. If you use any other graphic set with the heavily modified graphics, or vice versa, using normal graphics with a level set designed to work like above, you get bizarre results, and the level in both cases looks a mess. See below.

For this reason on the princed.org site you will see a note recommending that those two files should be used together. Here is where I have a dilemna. Should I make use of the expandable graphics to provide for far more interesting graphics? Or only modify the 'normal' ones, like the walls and floor panels. Personally I would prefer to do the former, as for me at least, i like interesting background and graphics which add depth and closer resemble the snes version. Why I don't do it all the time is that the average person might not realise what I've done and not like the fact that they get jumbled graphics when they put my vdungeon in their own levels. As such, the lifespan of these graphics will be reduced a lot, rendering a lot of effort I put in to little use. The third option would be two make a variant which would require more work. This will involve just removing all the fancy backgrounds, and having big columns where people would put big columns, returning the redundant level door graphic to being the level door. So people will get out what they expect when they make a door in RoomShaker.

This I have to consider as people like to make the sorts of levels that they like to play, perhaps not the types that are made by other people such as myself. I can't expect everyone to be bothered or want to learn how to use highly customised graphics, nor to want to only play the levels that I make which I have designed for use with these graphics. So maybe I should provide the latter option I just spoke about. You would still have fancy walls and different floor types, but the background would not exist. However the bonus would be a new large column graphic for example, something which I used differently. I would of course still have my version. I could also ask if people want to make their own grpahics like mine, as if they do, I would provide more guidelines and tips or things to think about, for cutting up the bmps and also how the levels need to be designed a bit differently.
I think I will put a poll to ask. What do you think?

To Jalal: An idea: in the future, if we have a filepost area or something, could a counter be made to see how many people download particular files? I know it won't be completely accurate, as people may download things more than once, or not even play them at all, but it might give a rough estimate. In another fourm I frequent (not pop related), it tells you sometimes. 'This file has been downloaded/ viewed XX times'. If I can do this for my own website I may, and then have all my stuff available there, but on the prince site would be better.

Although I did all this a couple of years ago, there never seemed to be much of big following, and I had no idea if the only people using my graphics were Poirot and myself Wink

But now I know this community exists (hence me joining as soon as I found it), I want to share all this info and hope that other people start to make some cool stuff. Smile

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