Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: Magitek - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

Vincent, on Oct 11 2008, 02:27 PM, said:

Cool. Thanks!

I know that open sourcing the code is a big decision to make, and although I am usually pro-open source, I have reservations against this methodology in a gaming context, and thus support the decision to keep access to the code out of access to the general public.

However, If I'm not mistaken, I thought that once the tech demo was going to be released that ability to contribute to the programming side of the project was going to open up, in so far as to say that there would be an opportunity for people to sign up and join the currently one-man exclusive programmers club with the obvious implications that code must not be shared outside of that group. If you don't need any additional programmers then I guess that's fine, but I think it should just be announced that no help is wanted to clear up any misconceptions that the programming was going to be also community driven as has been the art.

scubaSteve, on Oct 6 2008, 09:57 PM, said:

I listened to whatever was uploaded to the database as of Saturday. Right now that you pointed out that there's an updated version I looked through your post history and I only found an update back on July 16, and it sounds like the one from the database, but I feel that my note about the percussion still stands. According to FM Channel 6, all percussion instruments are present from the beginning, so yea, I mean, if you want to leave that in as artistic expression, then I guess we can discuss that, but I just wanted to point that missing drum on the first round in case you didn't notice.

Forgive my naivete, but I don't see what could possibly justify doing any sort of bump-mapping in-game. Bump mapping saves time in 3D games because you don't want to have to define the complex polygons needed to accurately portray the geometries of bumpy objects, so you only have the smooth polygon defined but then the GPU calculates how to shade the poly such that it looks as if light was striking off the various angular pretend polygons.

For a 2D game, since we have to draw each pixel no matter what, and making a pixel black vs white vs purple takes 0 additional resources, whereas drawing a flat wall versus a bumpy wall takes a magnitude of more time and resources to render, then all art should have its effects enacted on in the image itself. The only use of shaders I could possibly see would be for some interesting dynamic effects for instance a water shader to make the wavy effects one might see underwater. But for all static effects, please for the love of God bake them into the image prior.

(Note, if this post has a slight anti-shader bias, I apologize, I've been fighting with shaders all week. HLSL is definately an interesting beast, heh)

Tweaker, on Oct 5 2008, 03:00 PM, said:

I'd disagree with that, just because someone has done it already doesn't mean someone else shouldn't try it. Currently Steve's version isn't perfect and so I think if anyone thinks they can do a better job, go ahead and do it. For instance, on CPZ specifically, mario's version was coming along great and improved upon some of steve's version's shortcomings, and actually, I'd really like to know what happened to mario and his version.

For instance, mario's version had a better mix as far as the power of the bassline [F#][+F#][+E][+F#][F#]... (+ means one octave up relatively speaking), and Steve's version omits all of the percussion during the first few seconds of the song (yeah, I know he probably did that to give it a feeling of 'kicking in' ) plus not to mention the overall "technoization" of the song, of which the appropriateness of this style is still being discussed. The other thing that is a little weird with Steve's version is how it sounds like he is only playing the famous CPZ chord [F#][+A] twice per grouping instead of the 3 times that can be heard in the OST (e.g. FM Channel 1)

Here's a crappy ASCII notation of what I meant to say:

OST:     do-do-do .... dodo-dodo-dodoooo
Steve's: do-doooo .... dooo-dooo-doooooo

So anyway, just my $0.02...