Saturday 17th May 2003
I guess I've got time to write one of these things. Nothing else on the computer is bothering to work very well.
Which tells me a couple of things. First of all, all the backgrounds in this game are just jpegs. Which is what I'd assumed all along. Also, it's annoying as hell to deal with background jpegs in an animation. Particularly single jpegs like this.
Which is partly my fault. I've been adding games to this thing. American McGee's Alice, Resident Evil 3, and so on. Most of them defy reverse enginieering, of course. And, of those which do allow for it, only a couple give me anything of any real interest. So borrowing meshes from games isn't going to work out after all. Which is fine; I wasn't really relying on it.
I did manage to find the backgrounds from Res3 though. So, just because I could....
Obviously, it could be done. Set up CamOne at the right point and perspective to have the background make sense, and film for just long enough for any moving objects to get done with being in that 'scene'; then switch to CamTwo and replace the background. All of which could theoretically be set up in advance, before I ever started rendering anything. But it's more hassle than just building everything out of polygons and letting the camera move along with everything else.
Which is more normal anyway. HalfLife, Alice, Quake, et cetera all have flying cameras. Even Mario64 has a moving camera...although the little 'tard behind the camera [we refer to this idiot as Smedley] is blind, so he tends to give you a nice shot of a wall when you're trying to see what you're doing. It's almost an argument for FPS games. Almost.
So. I'm still building the city out of little triangles here. Which, in a way, takes less time than creating a couple thousand background images like the one above, just so a character can walk 'through' it for a couple of seconds. The better way to build a set is to have cubes and cyllindres and things with texturemaps on them. Which is actually how the SAS guy is done. It just takes a bit of time to do it either way. And, since I'm the only one doing this, it could be a while.
Also: I'm still not sure why this 'DeLorean' shows up in these games. It's not quite accurate; the windows are wrong. But it's pretty obvious what it's supposed to be. It's just not obvious why it keeps showing up in these games. Or why, in this case, it's got a Duhmerican flag on it.
The really upsetting thing about all this is that there's a game coming out next summer in which the goal is to make films. According to GameInformer, you can make these films [controlling roughly everything but the camera angles], and, um...win, I guess. And, since it's a Windoze game, the film you end up making can be saved as an mpeg when you're done. Naturally, the example in the magazine was a zombie film.
Which is just perfect, since I'll probably get done building all these sets out of noting at about the same time the game is released anyway. Maybe I should just take a year off and wait for that....
Or not.
Looking at Res3 here on the laptop, and then switching over to LightWave again...believe it or not, we're still too damned precise here. The characters in this game--short of the prerendered cutscenes--just suck. I haven't actually stopped to count, but I'd be surprised if Jill Valentine turned out to be over a hundred polygons. The random zombies are even worse. Which is sad, since I remember when this game came out, and everyone was really excited that all the zombies looked different now.
So my 800polygon SAS guy who renders in under a twentieth of a second is actually a lot more complex than the characters in this game. Which is almost upsetting. We might end up with more of a Code Veronica look to this, just because I'm not sure I can actually build a moving object with that little detail. I guess we'll find out.
Maybe I'll go work on that now. I'll let you know what I come up with.
More later....
--Gremlin