Screenshot dump! Lots of updates on Himeko Sutori

[Nathaniel3W]

First, some screenshots showing off new sprites and settings:

Snowy landscape material (with sparkles), falling snow particles, and a material that puts snow on every upward-facing surface of those rocks and buildings:

Sample male character portraits:

And female character portraits:

The men's hair mostly has higher saturation. I'm trying to decide which color I like more.

New sprite WIP:

I think I've come a long way since my first sprite upload here.

And there's still lots more going on at http://himekosutori.com/

 

[ZenVirZan]

The portraits are looking much, much better than before, good work! The outline in the 3D environments seems out of place when used outside of cell shaded graphics, though.

 

[Juan J. Sánchez]

Wow, I really like how it's looking.

 

[Xhukari]

I am really liking those screens! I disagree with Zen though; I feel the outlines work. My issues with them is that they are too harsh in some places (the snowy ground of the last pic before the portraits) or that they're not present on all the scenery; same snowy image I can see that it is not hitting the further away rocks or hills, or the clouds; it just feels jarring.

A bigger issue I have is the shadows of the characters; they make them feel even more 2D (at least with the green haired guy in the top image) which is another jarring issue for me.

But beside those, I think it is great!

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I really appreciate it.

It seems that most games that use outlines also have cel shading. And I tried a little cel shading early in development. I don't have any of that stuff still around, but maybe I should try it out again. I think I decided against it because everything just looked so uniform, so flat (nevermind for now that I'm using 2D characters). Maybe it would look different now that I've learned something about lighting. But it would be a little bit difficult to go in and change all of my materials now... The toon lines are a post-processing effect that I set up once, and it gets applied to everything. Cel shading that I've done before was just for one material. I should try to find out if there's a way to make it a post-processing effect so that I only have to make it once, and then see how it looks.

But for sure the Sobel edge detection is too strong in the snow picture. There are some things I can do about that, and some things I can't... The edge detection works by calculating the depth of one pixel, and then seeing whether its neighbors are of considerably closer or farther depth. That means that if you're looking at a flat surface, parallel to your line of sight, the pixels farther away will start drawing an outline, even though there isn't actually an edge there. The usual solution is to put a maximum draw distance on the outline, and that's why you don't see an outline on the distant rocks. In trying to work out a more elegant solution, I wanted to include the normal in the calculation, so that if the pixel's normal is the same as its neighbors, then it won't draw an outline, but as far as I can tell, there's no way for UDK to access an offset pixel's normal... Am I getting too technical here?

What I think I can do is just keep my in-game camera angles where we won't see big black patches on the ground... But seriously, just now, I thought of a solution that I'm going to try out later... I can draw an outline, not based on absolute distance between a pixel and its neighbors, but on distance relative to the depth of the pixel (or maybe relative to the depth squared or something)... I'll get back to you on that.

And the portraits, although I really like them too, I can't take full credit for them... I hired an artist to do a lot of the artwork, portraits included. I just recolored them. :/

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Oh, and about the shadows, there's something I'm thinking of trying...

The sprites themselves are not casting those shadows. You see, the sprites stretch and tilt, getting taller and tilted inward as they get closer to the bottom of the screen. It's my solution to simulating the old-school RPG look without using a true isometric camera. You don't really notice the sprites doing anything funny, but the shadows look really wrong when the sprites themselves are casting the shadows, and they're constantly stretching and tilting. So instead, I have an invisible sprite that casts the shadow and it doesn't stretch or tilt. What I probably need to do is make it detect where the strongest light source is, and then always turn perpendicular to that direction.

Oh, and ding! I'm no longer a level one slime. I'm now a sewer rat. And now that I'm derailing my own post here, I may as well mention how much I hated fighting rats in Ultima X. I hated a lot of things about that game, but played through it anyway out of loyalty to the series. I think the rats were much, much more powerful than intended because your sword swing didn't actually reach the rats' collision boxes.