[32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

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Alberth
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by Alberth »

The palm tree looks out of place to me, all the other vegetation has many small details, the palm tree on the other hand is a very basic and simple shape.

The hanging purple flower has that somewhat too, but to a lesser extent as the flower is still detailed. Maybe adding some leaves like your yellow flower, but somewhat larger, could work?

The desert cacti don't feel like cacti to me, I expected them to be much bigger (higher). That would perhaps also make the other flowers look smaller, although that only works if they are both in the same picture :p


All the other flowers just look lovely, Nice shape, nice coloured hot-spots. Nothing overly dominant.
Like the green/purple cacti in particular, it just looks so right, perhaps it's the colour combination.

Edit: Too bad we don't have vegetation in the sea, you'd expect flowers in the dark area as well.
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Bob_Mackenzie
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by Bob_Mackenzie »

I can't comment on the techie stuff but I think all the plants are excellent

The palms may need to be taller though. I know this is an "abstract" set but they don't look right as big as the other plants

The flytraps are genius but the fly sitting absolutely flat inside looks too horizontal, I think it maybe better at an angle

The sea colour needs work IMO - I didn't realise it was water until the poster above said so

Really looking forward to the next instalment

Cheers

Bob
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by V453000 :) »

Alright, did a few changes to the tropic trees, here is current state.

I also tried to rewrite the rendering system and it's now 5 times faster! :D This will be especially useful once I do stuff like trains which have even more objects, even more polygons, and even more everything.

I'm wondering how should toyland trees look like, and meanwhile I am improving the colours of arctic trees.
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by Bob_Mackenzie »

I agree very cool!
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by V453000 :) »

Stuff slowly happening:

- Toyland trees are not going very well, constantly redoing, can't decide on how they should look.

Meanwhile I am addressing other smaller issues...
- snow is bluey, desert is orangey to give the ambience of each climate
- snow on trees is more blue (too blue right now, will tweak the shader further)
- water is still black, I'll see about that tomorrow but I'm pretty convinced with black ... maybe a very slight dark blue tint
- tracks are getting more and more hacks so that the recolouring of snow/desert works out on them ... this is extremely complicated and when I fix one thing, other stuff breaks so it needs many exceptions and stuff.
- bulldozed tiles (the big holes) are replaced with just brown flat tiles. Mainly because with the large holes you couldn't really tell where is which slope, which was super annoying when building.

- I still need to do some rocks/rough land to make it a bit nicer

Current idea of toyland is that trees would look like earthy spikes and some like crystals, giving a kind of hostile environment with something valuable in there. I still have some ideas but they are generally very inconsistent and don't fit together well... will hopefully have that finished soon.
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Bob_Mackenzie
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by Bob_Mackenzie »

You have been busy :)

There is an interesting contrast between the desert plants and the other climates. The desert plants look fairly natural but the trees in other climates look blocky. FWIW I prefer the desert "look" but both are good
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by V453000 :) »

Dear Diary (and humenz),

today I have been investingating why in the hell is my rendering not taking the environment into account.

I was quite certain everything on my side is correct so I even visited blender's IRC channel, I started opening a blender stackexchange question, and I was ready to post it.

In one of these last seconds before pressing the 'publish question' button and making a fool of myself, I have realized that it's all broken just because of my ultra-smart-mega-awesome rendering script which makes my rendering go about 5 times faster, however uses a specific hack through a temporary render-only scene which did not have the environment.

And since I just launch the script with one doubleclick and it does it's thing automatically, I simply totally forgot about the other temporary scene. :D

What do I learn from this? That scripting can sometimes be not so efficient and without downsides?

I learn Nothing. Automation is always king, the user (me) just needs to be less dumb. Also slug world domination is confirmed for year 2100.

This an early test of toyland "trees" for the people who thinking they don't have enough money in OpenTTD ...
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Alberth
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by Alberth »

Ha, that will be interesting sawmills!

You could add a 'top' with a few coins standing on their edge, possibly leaning against each other.

For proper TTD spirit, coins would need to be Pounds of course.
On the other hand, while the British seem to take all the needed steps to keep the coin in use, you could of course also prepare for the upcoming slug domination, and use slug coins/money, as that will make all other coins obsolete in less than 100 years.


And as for silly mistakes, I have the same experience, automation gives ample opportunity to make lots of new and sometimes hilarious mistakes. However, fixing them can be done very quickly too, so not all is bad.
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by V453000 :) »

Alberth wrote: ...
For proper TTD spirit, coins would need to be Pounds of course.
...
Except the logo has a $ sign :P I think it's just because it's the general icon for money nowadays, not always meaning a n american dollar.

Bags of money in cartoons are also often labeled with $ and not only in american cartoons. :)
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by V453000 :) »

Can't say I like the idea of using any logo
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by V453000 :) »

Dear Diary, please note else you will be reduced to ash:

Toyland trees are getting more ideas, there will be more variety, just coins is boring. That coming soon.

When going through "stuff needs doing for next version", one of the cards I had on my BRIX trello board was "fix snow/desert". I didn't understand what's there to fix at first - I opened the game, seen snow, working nice. The actual issue was snowy/deserty tunnels...

The problem arose when I started recolouring the land tiles - tunnels are the only thing currently which render with their own land, everything else has land added in postproduction. What this means is that it's necessary to make the recolouring methods consistent between tunnel land, and normal land. When tunnels add their own mayhem of masking they already do, the whole thing becomes insanely complicated, and the ancient poor decisions I made with this system back when I was making RAWR aren't helping at all.

Typical problems were:
* tunnel tile being totally inconsistent, or
* tunnel tile being absolutely consistent by overriding it's ground by land, but losing any kind of shading
* general problems with shading the terrain - it's just an optical illusion, the tunnel is much taller than the tile is in 3D space, so the shading has to be hacked in one way or another. Hand painting is the best way to do this, just like original 8bpp graphics showed.
* recolouring not being precise enough due to vector masks
* vector masking being a MAJOR pain in the ass due to After Effects limitation (I create 12800px wide spritesheets as the first step in the workflow, which prevents more than 200% zooming because AE can only have 30 000px compositions. Apparently this technical limitation also applies for being able to zoom because the zooming is just making the composition artificially bigger.)
* the overlay part of the tunnel not being precise - trains glitching through it

I'm trying to add an attachment to demonstrate some of these issues but the things you see there is really just the tip of the iceberg.

After attempting to make some fixes, I just decided to concede this battle and migrate it all to Photoshop, and just do whatever necessary there. Not to mention that during the futile efforts to fix all of it, I did some more reutilization and relinking of terrain sprites internally in the workflow so it's apparently processing them multiple times and it managed to make the project freeze whenever I press the Render button for more than 1 hour, so outputting anything from After Effects is a gigantic pain.

In Photoshop it took "just" about 3-4 evenings and now I have tunnels which work flawlessly. I do need to make some improvements to some of the painting, but functionally they work fine.

I will be doing some more minor tweaking as some of the painting didn't come out right as intended, but overall I'm quite satisfied with the results ... especially when I remember how horribly broken it was.

I tried to make a comparison to BRIX 0.0.1 and I was kind of surprised that it wasn't broken there ... obviously because it didn't use the recolouring + noise adding hacks that BRIX 0.0.2 uses. Note that the rendered pictures from 3D haven't changed since version 0.0.1 ... everything is just postproduction work in Photoshop and After effects. Only the trees are new 3D models. Still I attach the 0.0.1 screenshot just for comparison.

I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, although I am not sure if it's not just some version of some mental episode, because you can clearly observe that there is not light at the end of OpenTTD's tunnels.

V
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by arikover »

This is really amazing work!
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by V453000 :) »

x ... please someone delete this if you can :D
Last edited by V453000 :) on 23 Oct 2017 20:57, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by V453000 :) »

Good day!

I am extremely happy to announce that BRIX 0.0.2 is now on BaNaNaS!

If you would like to read more about it:

https://blog.openttdcoop.org/2017/10/23 ... 2-is-here/
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by ufiby »

The landscape to be green, and then gray. Would add setting the select color green/grey who likes people
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Zephyris
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by Zephyris »

I'm loving this :)

Your release notes are really interesting. It's the first time I've got some serious feedback on OpenGFX and zBase... I was never quite happy with either (especially zBase). In comparison it's really interesting to see how you are pushing colour and vibrancy to make your graphics clearer, easier to use and prettier. You've highlighted a lot of fundamental ways to make sprites 'pop'. Time to step up my game and compete!
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by V453000 :) »

That's amazing to hear Zephyris, I value that massively. The blog article and BRIX has done more than it's job right now. : ) Thank you <3
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Re: [32bpp/EZ]BRIX!!!

Post by SyberSycho »

Wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas and hope you are enjoying the holidays.

PS: I'm loving the design path BRIX has evolved into and can't wait to see the next release.
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