Elysian Shadows

[Omnibot2000]

The dynamic lighting looks gorgeous. I would love to see some battles with light-effects like this. Thank you for sharing your progress, can't wait to play this on my DC.

[naiaru]

Y'know, I honestly have not looked into what is involved with anamorphic widescreen on the Dreamcast, but it has always been in the back of my mind as something ES will have before launch... I would imagine it's probably just a hardware thing that needs to be enabled.

You will definitely be able to use the thumbstick for movement.

And yeah, we have definitely planned to make extensive use of the VMU. We aren't quite sure what exactly it will display, but it will probably be something along the lines of HP and MP or a mini map. I am also a fan of what Skies of Arcadia (I believe) did, with using the VMU beep for an item locator.

I was also really looking forward to going balls deep into some assembly and making an actual VMU standalone minigame that tied back into ES. These are still things we're toying with at the moment, but we are definitely planning on having them before release.

Ohh right, where the VMU would beep when you were near upgrades for Fiona's pet blob or whatever its name was? That would make for some awesome secret stuff or puzzles.

Looking forward to more of these updates. It would be awesome if you guys could demo some more stuff on the Dreamcast next time.

[Lord*Hypnos]

Wow, so exciting! still haven't watched the whole live stream yet, but y'know, baby steps.
Anyway, it's kind of exciting to know that you're already certain you'll be supporting a-stick movement. Not too many indie / homebrew games have done that, not that it's necessary for an oldschool RPG or anything.
As far as the SoA beeping VMU, I have kind of mixed feelings on it. It's a really cool idea that allows you to include secrets, but it's also an annoying VMU beeping that hinders you if you want to switch it off, and doesn't have adjustable volume. Far from a deal breaker though. It didn't ruin SoA for me or anything, and it wouldn't ruin a new game either.

[naiaru]

Wow, so exciting! still haven't watched the whole live stream yet, but y'know, baby steps.
Anyway, it's kind of exciting to know that you're already certain you'll be supporting a-stick movement. Not too many indie / homebrew games have done that, not that it's necessary for an oldschool RPG or anything.
As far as the SoA beeping VMU, I have kind of mixed feelings on it. It's a really cool idea that allows you to include secrets, but it's also an annoying VMU beeping that hinders you if you want to switch it off, and doesn't have adjustable volume. Far from a deal breaker though. It didn't ruin SoA for me or anything, and it wouldn't ruin a new game either.

You could have some VMUs with the speaker wires snipped and some without. I usually play without the speakers (so it won't beep at me when I turn on my DC), but will use one that still has it attached for a game like Skies of Arcadia.

[Lord*Hypnos]

Wow, so exciting! still haven't watched the whole live stream yet, but y'know, baby steps.
Anyway, it's kind of exciting to know that you're already certain you'll be supporting a-stick movement. Not too many indie / homebrew games have done that, not that it's necessary for an oldschool RPG or anything.
As far as the SoA beeping VMU, I have kind of mixed feelings on it. It's a really cool idea that allows you to include secrets, but it's also an annoying VMU beeping that hinders you if you want to switch it off, and doesn't have adjustable volume. Far from a deal breaker though. It didn't ruin SoA for me or anything, and it wouldn't ruin a new game either.

You could have some VMUs with the speaker wires snipped and some without. I usually play without the speakers (so it won't beep at me when I turn on my DC), but will use one that still has it attached for a game like Skies of Arcadia.

Yeah, I've definately been considering doing that for a while. Still haven't gotten around to it though. A switch wouldn't be too difficult either (pretty minor splice and solder job)

[Falco Girgis]

Damn, I guess I just took for granted that any 2D RPG like ours would allow analog stick-based movement... I would never dream of forcing the player to use the dpad, because that would piss me off as a player!

As for the VMU beeping, maybe I won't go through with that idea then. It's good to get input from the Dreamcast community like this, because you guys are the ones who are completely familiar with the console's highs and lows. I'm sure I'll be polling you guys for opinions like this in the future... Also, you're making me want to mod my VMU too now.

As for the development itself, I'm wrapping up the last of the lighting and shadow engine functionality, and am exposing it to the level designers to start placing lights. Immediately after that, I'm going to be spending some serious time exclusively on the Dreamcast build.

It's an extremely capable little system, and almost all (if not all) of the lighting effects we have created are possible on the console... Now it's a question of how much is actually realistic with all of the engine logic happening in the background.

I have a good friend who is developing a very useful DC hardware texture compression tool (Tvspelsfreak), and I plan to integrate with ESTk, so that it generates Dreamcast-compressed sheets for all of our textures, effectively reducing our VRAM usage to a little over 1/8th... It comes at a slight cost of colors, but our artist is aware of this and will be minimizing this loss by keeping color usage in the originals low. This will allow us to have many many more unique combat animations, NPC types, and enemies in a single area than would have previously been realistic.

I am also very very interested in assessing the feasibility of implementing our tile-based lighting and bumpmapping on the Dreamcast... I have been inspired by this bumpmapping tech demo:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AcPs-dZfjE[/youtube]


...however no commercial games and only a few indie demos made use of this PVR feature. We really have no idea how plausible it is to use these kinds of features in a real game environment... I will keep you guys posted on my research and quest to make this engine everything it can be on the DC.

[Patryk Kowalik]

Hey there, ES artist here.

Dynamic lighting was a feature that I was heavily pushing for a long time - initially all I asked was just some sort of feature to generate simple vector shapes.

Why? It makes difference between something like this:
http://i.imgur.com/kP0RW0h.gif (note, stairs still have additional tiles on top of them - it's basically purple faded gradient, but that forces full support of transparency, not just on and off)
and this:
http://i.imgur.com/sHSHqq7.gif
Now it already looks epicly awesome, but seems like Falco's life goal is to continuously blow my mind, so he added dynamic shadows and bump mapping, which takes things to next level.

About the texture compression: Now, before lighting engine I had to bake-in object shadows into tiles themselves or make additional tiles to simulate it... it was basically a bitch and required transparency. Now I don't have to, and since I use from 3 to 5 shades per colour, it'll be easy to avoid any compression problems at all. There won't be any map that'll use more than 254 different colours in total anyway - it would just look ugly.

So yeah, I guess I just wanted to say that I won't be limiting myself in terms of colour usage because of compression anyway, because there's no way I'd hit a cap. Unless we're making fruit salad map.

[mazonemayu]

thx for explaining it buddy, that looks really good

[Lord*Hypnos]

@Falco: That would be pretty amazing to see some real in-game bump mapping being used on the DC. It's always interesting to me how many of the PVR2DC's hardware-supported graphical effects were never tried in game during the DC's actual lifespan.

As for the VMU, one thing that occured to me after posting that message earlier was that you could always have a setting that changes secret detection between VMU beep and something on screen (like in the GC version of Skies of Arcadia)

Out of curiosity, when you talk about a Dreamcast hardware texture compression tool, what do you mean? is it just a tool that makes implementing VQ compression easier or what?
I doubt a little bit of color loss would be too big of a problem. Look at how colorful a lot of SNES pixel art is, and that's with only 256 onscreen colors.

[naiaru]

@Lord*Hypnos Just my opinion, but I think the rumble pack might be an easier alternative to having a graphic on screen or at least be more similar to a VMU beep.