What elements of R.P.G.s do you like? / post a wish list of R.P.G. features
What I like about vanilla World of Warcraft:
- Large interconnected / near-seamless world that feels larger than the player to explore and the world feels bursting with content and adventures to journey upon.
- Deep progression of player character via item tiers and different difficulty levels where a player can choose to skip content in areas to progress other areas deeply.
- Player choice of gameplay and (general) support of player made specialization builds (to a point); like taking a niche build all the way to the very end of end game.
- Multiplayer epic scale battles / raids (good luck since Flare is single player XD).
- Good enough sound design; cool trailer music.
- Colour coded item and creature rarities are cool.
- Children, Women and Old People play these games, yet it does not feel too childish nor pandering to a wider audience, yet contrived lack of mature themes.
What I like about the original Baldur's Gate (+ pieces of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons):
- A more realistic art style and approach of storytelling, a grounded world initially based upon real life and mythology; less is more story telling and world building.
- Multi-character player party (perhaps something like this could done in spirit like having Flare use better mercenaries like Diablo II?)
- A huge world with most all areas of the world functioning like historical medieval areas with bits of magic and adventure added in; a mostly non-contrived world.
- An whole ecosystem of player choice and outcomes on the world and game play; some elements are interactive story telling tools but still choices can be impactful.
- The item descriptions and small details and grounded nature of the content and nuance of world building really benefits the medieval fantasy experience.
- Cool sound effects and voice acting, battle music is cool and the small audio 'juice' is very cool and not seen in most games; also the atmospheric sounds are cool.
What I like about the original Old School RuneScape:
- The big expansive world
- The deep progression system
- The wide array of player progression skills and adventure grinds
- How every skill can be progressed by every player for there are no strict classes; open character builds
- Interlinked relevant skill progression content tied to wide fields of world adventuring content; every item is relevant to help usually help progress somewhere.
- Standardized item material quality tiers, Bronze, Iron, Steel etc. to make a world feel connected to player progression to world history / resource availability.
- Less is more to content; wide arrays of relevant context spread all around the world; almost everywhere in the world is useful for something for progression.
- 1,000 and 1 ways to play the game; no strictly 'wrong way' to play. Thousands of combinations of relevant world content for a player to choose to progress.
- Relaxed gameplay as default and high skill opportunities for voracious players demanding more depth in player progression / ability. Opportunity for skill wins.
- Nice quirky music.
- Children, Women and Old People play these games, yet it does not feel too childish nor pandering to a wider audience, yet contrived lack of mature themes.
What I like about Classic Everquest (Project 1999):
- The world fights against the player, yet the player is made stronger and is rewarded with a path for major player power and fulfillment if they survive the grind.
- Want a map? Get wrecked go make one, want a dungeon that does not actively try to kill you with traps? Go play a different game, the world is alive.
- The wide array of cultures, fantasy races, warring factions, bands / groups of entities with plots and intrigues that populate a world more mature than most.
- The game is hard, slow and makes the thin butter spread of content go A lonnnng way, you get some player power you really feel like you earned it.
- Multiplayer epic scale battles / raids (good luck since Flare is single player XD).
- Realistic-ish art style and grounded nature of the content and world building; more close to most medieval fantasy expectations and stays on theme usually.
- The music is kind of cool.
What I like about Diablo I and Diablo II:
- The action combat is great, you fight a bunch of monsters and can feel like a beast
- Wide array of player choice in build, all player choices can be at least end game viable with no 'wrong choices'; this makes the game more free to tinker with.
- The theme of the demons, undead and monsters in very cool, the dark gothic themes are very good at giving a sense of danger and mystery; fear of the dark.
- The mature / dark and gritty / 'cursed' world makes it feel like hell thematically as well. Nothing is quite 'right' and it feels like the player is needed in world.
- The cathedral, catacombs, crypt, moors, desert, tombs, caves, jungle, hell, snow and temples are just really cool; they give a real sense of horror and mystery.
- Gore, blood and guts, full tilt horror and liberty to tell a really dark and twisted story in a grim dark part of the world in need of sword and sorcery.
- Colour coded item and creature rarities are cool.
- Cool 12 string guitar and haunting atmospheric music and sound effects, cool voice acting and effect taken to give small elements audio 'juice'.
What I like about the classic Legend of Zelda games (1980's - 1990's):
- The music and sound design are really cool if a bit 'exotic' at times, very polished sound work went into these games, original and iconic sounds
- Puzzles and some minor mysteries to solve, a darker world underneath or quite literally a 'dark world' just out of sight verses the 'light world' is kind of cool.
- Most all the items are relevant or very useful somewhere, albeit only like 5-7 are really used frequently; still the focus to make items open up the world is cool.
- The boss fights can be pretty cool; especially with the cool music blaring and battle to properly manage limited resources.
- Cool area themed dungeons and most all areas have many layers of content like caves, hidden puzzles, options content, backtracking content and area polish.
- The combat can be pretty banging in some games with real time button press attacks and action combat system blaring away for the player to make skill win.
- Mostly optional ways to progress and the player can pick and choose where they explore and usually has more than one path to take in most parts of the game.
- The world theme is constant and unique, an original and charming feeling is made when playing these games.
- Children, Women and Old People play these games, yet it does not feel too childish nor pandering to a wider audience, yet contrived lack of mature themes.
What I like about the original Path of Exile:
- It is a bigger scaled Diablo II.
- All items can be converted into trading items that can be recycled / remade into new potentially useful items.
- Colour coded item and creature rarities are cool. Maybe a bit much and or contrived in some parts of the game but over all it is cool too see deep progression.
- Wide array of player choice in building characters for the early and mid game and still most builds can beat end game. Yet max health > anything is dumb.
- Tons of items and lots of ways to play the game; almost like RuneScape in terms how many different ways a player can progress yet near end game it is linear.
- Cool monsters.
- A huge array of world biomes and themes of zones to explore and play in; a bit contrived in parts but still big and expansive in some parts. A bit samey kinda.
- Cool sound design and some voice acting, effort can be seen in sound design which is cool.
- You get a ~house to customize. Yet it is in a ~bubble so it feels a bit weird but still cool.
What I like about Mount and Blade Warband and Bannerlord:
- The combat is the best I have ever played in an R.P.G.
- The world is actively contested and the player can fight in medieval themed wars in a low fantasy setting that is almost like a medieval war simulator.
- Sieges are cool, take over a castle, make your own faction, take over other peoples stuff, raise an actual army, use real life battle tactics, mongol war wins.
- The art style is great, real life practical designs, not perfect but 9.5/10 for myself. It looks the way a medieval war should probably look minus the ~'boring bits'.
- Lots of items to upgrade and fuel player progression. Most all of the typical medieval weapons are supported and they operate pretty close to real life; great.
- The sound design is pretty good, I like the battle shouts and the barbarian primal roars; I find them funny and realistic XD.
What I like about Minecraft + Terraria:
- You get to shape the world with voxels. A true sandbox, you can change the world you are in, every block (all of them if you are a nerd). Voxels are king.
- Chill cool music, theme, game play and it is just relaxing to wander around and do what ever you think is cool, there are almost no wrong ways to play.
- The Minecraft world is ~7 times larger than earth, you can make your own realm and think you are king / queen but the AI is too stupid but still fun.
- The caves and Underworld and super cool. The game is basically never ending but once you have seen all of the major gameplay progression loop; its samey.
- Technically all items are relevant and very few pieces of game play are almost irrelevant. Almost infinite ways to play the game minus the main progression.
- Action combat is cool.
- Day / night cycle is kinda cool.
- Farming and and non-combat and just living life are main pillars of gameplay and thus a person can play without even fighting, just like real life; lots of choice.
- Multiplayer epic scale battles / raids (good luck since Flare is single player XD).
- Children, Women and Old People play these games, yet it does not feel too childish nor pandering to a wider audience, yet contrived lack of mature themes.
What I like about Oblivion:
- A big world that kinda makes some sense in story telling themes. Lots of exploration is offered to the player; it may feel a bit thin at times but still cool.
- Lots of items.
- Action combat.
- Lots of player progression skills
- Different area ~biomes can be pretty cool; like the oblivion gates, the town are pretty neat as well.
- Good sound design, 7/10 voice acting
- The Player makes there own 'class' and is very much a sandbox with even the main quest feeling like it is optional.
- Mysterious little Easter eggs and small fine details and funny Easter eggs dotted around the world.
- The world tries to make sense with it self.
- Pretty close to the typical realistic art style of classic medieval fantasy but with some oddities and fails sprinkled in for the memes.
- You get to buy and customize player housing.
What I like about Age of Empires I and II:
- You get to take control of a sizable region of the world and build up an army in hopes to counter and conquer your foes on the other side.
- Player decisions and time management are huge, it captures the idea in real war history of a good enough solution now is better than a perfect one late.
- Many different cultures and interesting differences of a variety of different strengths and weaknesses and seeing how that plays out is very cool.
- Geo-strategic resources being extremely important and faction territory control are taught to the player naturally and it reflects real life history and politics.
- Player planned, built and captured infrastructure is relevant.
- Cool sound track and some neat sound effects.
Harvest Moon + Stardew Valley (and other ~Farm R.P.G.s)
- Vast array of player progression, farm, mine, fish, trade, develop land, make friends, gossip, explore, plan, make mistakes, learn, build a farming empire.
- Seasons matter, the world has cycles of content and reflects aspects of real life world realities like winter is hard to live in / make money in.
- The player develops the land around them to advance further in the game.
- The player gets a house they can customize and upgrade.
- Get to nurture cute things and doing so makes the world go round.
- Farming is hard wired into the human brain and it is not a slaughterfest like most R.P.G.s (Women player base is quite substantial; that is rare in most R.P.G.s)
- Play at your own pace, make friends, have a family, chill, do what you want and make your own fun. Very close to a typical real life play through but less boring.
- Children, Women and Old People play these games, yet it does not feel too childish nor pandering to a wider audience, yet contrived lack of mature themes.
- Pretty good sound tracks and good sound effects.
What I like about the Civilization series:
- You run an empire and see how large scale world building takes place
- If you run on slow speeds it you can see large scale non-modern wars and practicalities take place with geopolitics.
- It is really fun fighting over a map and using strategy to win wars.
- Tech tree for ages and having resources and upgrade opportunities be tied to the world map makes different factions prioritize different technologies over others.
- Different cultures fighting and using different asymmetric fighting to win or lose make the world feel more large and diverse.
- Geo-strategic resources being extremely important and faction territory control are taught to the player naturally and it reflects real life history and politics.
- Player planned, built and captured infrastructure is relevant.
- Cool sound track, voice acting and audio 'juice'.
What I like about J.R.R. Tolkien's and G.R.R. Martin's works:
- A written dream of grand worlds that run by themselves with each creature a small piece of a larger picture.
- Lots of depth and world building that takes many aspect of real life and show some examples what a creative mind can turn from real life into medieval fantasy.
- An exploration of abstract ideas and large colossal world building themes being played out in a mundane and reasonable way that brings magic to history.
What elements of R.P.G.s do you like and why?
Rigth now I´m giving my mod a total overhaul in the way things are done. For example, i split the icons file into dedicated pngs for each item type (armor, runes, potions...) which allow to increase it´s numbers quite easily (instead of having to modify a 1000+ icon png), i didn´t know of this until I accidentally ran into the alchemy ingredients. This in turn broke all the items definitions, which are to be remade using my random item generator. I also simplified the base .txt of items to only a few (light and heavy versions), it was insane to have one for each item, that worked for the handful vainilla Flare uses, not for lots of new items.
I´m also adding quality of life features that i was asked for like a Respec potion, quest markers, revised maps... others like alchemy, item lottery or improving pets will come on 2nd act.
The random item generator is a huge game improvement imo, it allows me to quantify overall stats of players at a given lv, which makes balancing enemies easier (plus some sweet item names like "Hearty shortbow of the miasma"), so now every enemy needs rebalancing. I also want for players to level easier, so instead of ending the first act at overall lv7 it will be higher now, allowing to use points into passive skills.
Lots of changes under the hood, but they will be hardly noticeable to players. I also want to add two new sets of armor before re-releasing Act1.
My goals are first to release a polished act1 which i can use as base for all the coming acts, after that to continue the story until it´s end. It migth take me years (2 years passed since i started) but i´ll get there eventually.
By the way, you can use any of the new weapons/armors i added, just grab them from my mod folders.
I am working on 128 x 128 pixel scale icons and I am wondering how to have each icon be its own .png image? For if I have (like you say) thousands of icons, it would be a nightmare to have to change the whole giant icons.png image to make a small change. Also keeping track of say icon 1528, is like uhh so where is that again? XD. vanilla World of Warcraft has over 2,000+ unique icons and if anyone were to match that scale of content than there needs to be compartmentalized / modular / each icon is its' own separate .png image to battle the complexity with simplified icon image management.
How are you trying to get the random item generator to work? Is it like Diablo / Path of Exile? I was thinking that such a system would be hard to make. So I just kind of left it in the back of my mind; but that is really cool to hear that you are going for it.
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How does a respect option work? Is it an NPC or event and or an item? How does that work? I know with console commands that there are a respect options. Although I wonder how to 'gamify' / put that in game? Is it a case of an NPC dialog triggering an event or something like a quest? How does one go about making a respec option for a game in Flare?
I also am overhauling everything on my side of things. For I want to get the core gameplay hammered out and I am trying to get 'Flare x 4' working so that I can add longevity / 'Flare HD' down the road. To hopefully go from 2000's player presentation / graphics to 2020's / on par with Diablo II Resurrected player presentation / graphics. I figured that if it takes myself into the late 2020's to get all of the maps and areas ('game world ecosystems' / large content areas) built out / long term support of the game. Then I better make a game that can stand up to the test of time. So I hope that right now pushing as hard as I can for a working 'Flare x 4' can eventually lead to 'Flare HD'; of which I hope can be played well into the 2030's and beyond. This will hopefully avoid the original Baldur's Gate / Diablo 'dated graphics' / low resolution textures / art assets and be more like Pillars of Eternity / Path of Exile / Diablo II Resurrected eventually. Although that all starts with getting the framework / 'skeleton' of the 'Flare x 4' prototyped and working and bit by bit, piece by piece swap out the low resolution art assets with high resolution art assets (hopefully making a realistic work load and path towards 'Flare HD').
I hope that I / we / the community can succeed at 'Flare x 4' and the community can get access to basically the working 'version 1.0' / prototype of 'Flare HD'. Given that all of the art is open source / forever free to use that means if one of us rises to a greater feat of gameplay features / quality of experience then everyone else is also empowered. I really like this open source / forever free approach to game development for it enables everyone rich or poor to have a fair chance at making great games decade after decade. I remember playing Baldur's Gate, 2000's WoW, Diablo, Runescape, Zelda, Mount and Blade etc. and being so frustrated that I could not make a great game of my own legally with the same game engine. I did not have millions of dollars to ~'face tank' a whole studio of expenses to produce a great game. So I had to venture out and self-teach myself how to create content for old games that I enjoyed. I had to learn from nothing and figure out first how to 'mod' for a community in the ~'digital wilderness'; hopping around tinkering and modding games from community to community. I just keep the momentum up year after year and I just keep failing upwards until I get better and better. I become more and more creatively powerful with each cycle of success and failure; with each time getting closer and closer to realizing my life long dreams.
I eventually ended up here trying to combine my favourite parts of other great games in a tool set / game engine that can support / create great games and that is finally forever free / open source for everyone. I hope that by making a great game series / realize a medieval fantasy setting in some kick ass video games, that it will inspire more people keep making better and better video games. What ever assets I make I hope that they can be free for everyone to use for if I 'make it' (able to reliable produce commercially viable video games that can stand the test of time and be enjoyed by the community); I would like to bring more than just myself up. So as to kind of make right the old wrongs / problems of my past frustrations of being a creative person with no powerful tools to realize my creative visions / dreams. Thus to empower the world and have creative people of all kinds be empowered with open and powerful video game creating tools and a kick ass game engine forever free :-).
Also I have this castle I want to make into a tileset but I want to get Flare x 4 stress tested and working properly and start making 'Flare HD' quality of tilesets with 256 x 128 pixel scale tiles . I am wondering how to get this model rigged up in a standard (hopefully blender) render rig so I can make Flare compatible tileset and use them. I hope to make Flare standard tilesets (with same style as the base game art assets) and then have my own unique version to match my own artistic styles for my game. So that when I go to make new arts assets (like a castle tileset) I can share my work with the community to be opensource / forever free to use and I also get to make my own game better. Although I need to better understand how to turn this: https://www.deviantart.com/withinamnesia/art/Balduran-s-Sea-Tower-Redesi... into this: https://github.com/flareteam/flare-game/blob/master/art_src/tilesets/gra...
let´s see:
Item distribution: you need a software for graphics edition (i use an ancient photoshop version) to copy and split the single file, after that go into /engine/icons.txt and include the new files "icon_set=1000,images/icons/icons_runes.png" 1000 is the icon starter number, you can change it. Remember to change the items icon number on their .txt definitons on /items/base or they will be missing.
Item generator: almost finished it, i still need to decide which items get certain bonuses and which don´t. I made it in php with BZT´s help(coder user from FreeGameDev). Basically, i randomize the bonus and the first two ones give the items a name "Hearty" (bonus hp) shortbow "of the" "miasma" (dark protection).
Respec: a very expensive potion that scales price with player level, needs a script to function like alchemy (doesn´t work like normal potions). Resets all stats and return points.
Improving graphics would be nice, but believe me it´s a HUMONGOUS undertaking. You will be making graphics from here to two years just to reach current content. I recomend you just keep current style, it has a lot of charm on it´s own and it´s relatively easy to make.
Making new tilesets is one of my biggest blind points, I have no idea how, I´m stalling that until I really need it. In your case you can just cut that castle into big chunks and rejoin them inside Tiled, just ask Dorkster which is the max size an object can have into Flare and use it for the cuts.
Danimal, Y U no have link to mod folder!? This sounds like great content. Is it private?
--Medicine StormWhile I shared all the monsters I never considered sharing the weapons since they were my own or adapted 3d models from OGA or Blendswap (properly credited and licensed) and not that many new ones, same for the icons created from/for them. But I guess they are useful just because they are ready-to-use for Flare. I will upload them, if you wannna check them they are inside my mod; but without the heavy .blend sources.
As far as I remember I added:
Pot helmet, laddle and lid (joke items), reinforced chest and pants, spiked club, chitin plate, miner helmet, and missing animations for drooping items (leather and plate sets). + icons
and recovered from unused Flare objects:
Hammer, maces, club, axes, short boots and potions.
My mod and links:
https://opengameart.org/forumtopic/heresy-a-flare-mod-first-act-released
Oh, I'm sorry; you had shared the mod links before. I missed the dropbox link in your heresy thread. Yay! thanks.
--Medicine StormWhere can one find the heavy .blend sources? I use the .blend files to make new dual wield animations. Also I will most likely have to battle out new Flare x 4 scale animations / art assets which will require .blend source files.
What can be done with the Item Generator? Can it have 3 affixes and 3 suffixes applied to the base item (and still work)? What are the possibilities and the restrictions with the current iteration of the item generator? Can specific chosen fixed ranged item (not random) affixes and suffixes be applied to items? Such as 'Blessed Fine Pure Steel Cuirass of Major Vitality and Lesser Might and Minor Gloam [Frost/Ice] Resistance'? A bit of a long possible item names but still lots of pixels can lead to long item names.
Has anyone tried to make an 'enchanting' system, like where items get new arbitrary attributes and or item effects (e.g. Crusader). Likewise has any tried to make an item system with sockets with gems / jewels / runes items for Flare? I think all that Flare is missing from Diablo II item depth is affixes and suffixes (random item generator), sockets and gems / jewels / runes (minus runewords). Is a gem / socket system out of realistic reach or is it one of those things that can be done but needs lots of work to implemented?
- Two sources, for the original files:
https://github.com/flareteam/flare-game/tree/master/art_src
The modded ones are in my pc :P , I´ll upload eventually.
- To protect my sanity I´m using a simple naming system: adjective + item + "of the" + name, if the item is epic (5 bonuses or more) it gets one more adjective before all, "Legendary murder sword of the killer". It can add as many bonuses as needed (fixed ones included) but will only take the first two ones for the naming. What you want could be done but I would murder whoever asked me to; getting so many adjectives and names is harder and more infuriating than expected. Just a bit of code of one of the most simple ones, then, with over 20 types of bonuses, multiply by as many new ones adjectives you want to add:
Overkill is overkill, so no, thanks.
- I would like to see one, but given the way Flare handles items i don´t think it possible atm. You will need to raise this suggestion to Dorkster. Flare items need to be created beforehand, the main reason for my item generator is to spit them in the hundreds to create the ilussion they are generated on the fly. That means if you want to create a way to improve items you would need to create the upgraded item stats by hand for each of them and use something like "alchemy" that takes items and outputs new ones, while declaring all of that in some txt.
I would love something like socketed gems, but i think for that the whole item system would have to be rewritten, Dorkster is the autority in here so i can´t really answer.
- Are you really going to render again all assests? in that case you could also had a 2-handed attack animation, improve animations with double or more frames and you would need to increase texture quality so they look better with your new resolution.
Wow big thanks to Justin Jacobs a.k.a Dorkster for this feature:
Layered animations for non-player entities. What a legend XD.
@Danimal Now you can make super crazy areas with tons of different kinds of humanoid monsters, creatures and N.P.C.s! Man this is such massive feature. For now Flare can have content depth like an M.M.O.R.P.G. with even thousands of creature customizations and ways to make places and populations feel unique and diverse and really build character to the world. Tons and tons of world building:-D!
Shorthand: Could a 2 affix and 2 suffix item generator system work?
Also new high definition art assets and animations for Flare are important to myself yet getting the core gameplay mechanics tested and working comes first.
Also can crafting be used to take away item affixes and suffixes effectively to return 'magical' items into 'base items'?
Longhand: Okay so 3 affixes and 3 suffixes is a bit much in terms of complexity (also it gets a bit crazy in name length / player expectations and borders on meme territory like the classic example of the longest German word: Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitan (Danube steamship company captain). So your system has 2 affixes and 1 suffix within realistic (non-insanity) work flow? Could 2 affixes and 2 suffixes be used? I even struggle to get 3 affixes and 3 suffixes and a lot can be merged like vanilla WoW's random stat items. Also doe this random item generator work with a bunch of custom item rarity text colours (it should?). Also I guess item 'enchanting' could just be a form of crafting even to add affixes and suffixes (if there is space / room [how would a check be done then?])? I suppose base items could be (with a crafting system) 'salvaged' and have new item bases made and have the crafting add more stats to them later to give deep crafting depth hopefully / wide level ranges of item relevance / 'up-trading' item ~crafting economy kind of like in Path of Exile.
Animations. When I can flesh out / test to see if the the Flare x 4 prototype can work sufficiency / good enough / reliably. Then once the major / game play critical features are fleshed-out and working I can shift gears and battle with the art and animations properly. Right now I would super ecstatic if the rough ~'placeholder' Flare x 4 art can work (even with low resolution player presentation). Although once the long battle for major gameplay features is majorly conquered / very close to complete / ~'done'. Then the big battle of 'going wide' / pushing out the visual diversity begins. Right now I am kind of wedged in to a corner trying to find what works and what creative tools / assets I can work with to build a (hopefully) a game worth playing. For in short I want to get the blender animations in a place where all of the main player expectations of character play-styles can be viable / enjoyed in the game (sword and shield/offhand, dual wielding, two-handed with armours being cloth, leather, mail, plate [possibly heavy / full plate]. I do have the animations / high definition renders for the graphics for turning Flare x 4 into ~'Flare HD' on my priorities; although after all of the major gameplay features / mechanics are fleshed out and prototyped / working and the main creative game 'tool set' is established / properly tested. If I have to get professional help for new art assets so be it. I am sure that with there being so many wonderous blender artist that someone can help make art assets if it come down to paying for commissions for making Flare HD art assets. So either way I hope to make good on the Flare HD art assets and animations, but only after the gameplay and game world building features and toolset(s) are properly hammered out.
Gems are cool although I guess with a crafting system they could (hopefully) be used in away to upgrade item bases and or even possibly add affixes / suffixes to items (if possible) kind of like a jewelcrafting version of enchanting (using added affixes and suffixes). How can an item be 'wiped' / converted back to item base item (like how Path of Exile can remove affixes and suffixes from items and return the base item)?
I wonder if anyone is open to HD flare art commissions? I could in theory do both game mechanic testing work and have 'Flare HD' art assets being made if I had to commission them anyway. Although my main concern is work load complexity / asking for too much too fast. Although I wonder if anyone in the community is interested as a hobby? The 2H attack animations could work in theory for original and ~'Flare HD'. Has anyone outside of Clint Bellanger created animations for Flare? Perhaps the 2H attack animations would be a good / reasonable starter art project for it enables a gameplay play-style as well.
Does anyone have any interest / experience with Upscaling Art?
I am wondering about the process / general overview for a potential art campaign to Upscale Flare Art. As in the potential result of such a project could have a significant graphical quality upgrade for the Flare related games in the near future. Such Upscaled Flare Art could hopefully act as a useful interim / in-between art asset collection starting point / stepping stone for a potential future 'Flare HD'.
This potential Upscale of the original Flare Art could be a big upgrade from the pixelated but technically 4K resolution of the current enlarged x 4 graphical high resolution ~'4K' working prototype I call 'Flare x 4'. These Upscale Flare Art assets could lead a reasonable path forward towards hopefully a potential future 'Flare HD'; created with new rendered 4K Flare Art assets. High resolution 4K+ graphics running at high frame rates (e.g. 60 F.P.S.) are now possible with the powerful Flare Engine version 1.13+ with the 64-bit executable; that is available across all Major PC platforms. I have more details here if anyone is interested: https://github.com/flareteam/flare-game/discussions/895
I have experience upscaling art, but I'm not at all interested in Flare.
However I did take the time to do some upscaling with different algorithms to give you an idea of what type of results would be possible.
AI upscaling takes time. You either do it on your own computer (which takes time) or you do it in the cloud (which costs money)
Bicubic and similar types of upscaling is super simple but looks like turd.
This is from https://opengameart.org/content/flare-skeleton-mod-skeletal-knight
original size:
various types of upscaling:
oh i forgot to add links
https://github.com/AaronFeng753/Waifu2x-Extension-GUI
(can be decent and is easy to use)
https://github.com/n00mkrad/cupscale
(works very nice if you can get python to cooperate.
https://nmkd.de/?esrgan
these are models are natively compatiable with cupscale, above. if you can get cupscale to recognize your python 3. it still often tells me i dont have the require dependencies, even though i do. 8x sphax and 8x yanderepixelart models look nice.)
https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN
(sucks for just about everything but photos)
AI upscaling in the cloud:
(i don't know what ai models these use, you can probably find that info if dig around their tos) results are different for each site
https://www.aiseesoft.com/image-upscaler/
free and good looking. can be super super slow.
https://www.imgupscaler.com/
limited to 10 upscales a week unless you pay. results can look nice, but output is jpeg.
https://vance.ai/
slow, free, some stuff looks great, but color interpolation can be REALLY crappy looking for some input images.
sometimes ai upscaling will preserve tranparencies. for the best results you would need to edit all upscaled sprites by hand. upscaling entire flare art library and making them look good is a big big big big big big big big big big job. which is why i don't wanna do it :p but i hope the provided info helps you to fiddle with it yourself.
there is also the world of google colabs, of which there are about 100 million.
"I am wondering about the process / general overview for a potential art campaign to Upscale Flare Art."
Why would you want to do that? As a FOSS game, Flare provides you with the original .blend files, which are scalable in the first place (vector, not-pixel based format). This means you can re-generate the Flare sprites and tiles at whatever resolution you like with the highest quality possible. There's no need for upscaling at all. You can find more info here, but I believe there's a Blender script somewhere in the repo to do this.
"Use the source Luke" :-) :-) :-)
As for the still images which are not included in the art_src folder (like the portraits), I recommend to vectorize them first (just google "PNG to SVG" for example, but InkScape works pretty well), then you can generate a pixel version at whatever resolution with a much much better quality than what any upscaling AI can offer. It is also much faster and cheaper (with InkScape it will cost you nothing).
@Ragnar Random: I've noticed that you are depending on cloud services too much. Have you ever wondered what happens to your workflow if one of those service goes down? IMHO there's nothing wrong with cloud services as long as you also have an off-line backup method.
Cheers,
bzt
i linked to 3 offline image upscaling softwares, and 3 cloud image upscaling services, as well as mentioning google colab notebooks which are on the cloud. not sure if i rely on the cloud "too much".
i rely more on opengameart.org continuing to exist. the vast majority of what i do is offline, other than gathering resources online. i make music offline with acoustica mixcraft 9 pro studio and various virtual instruments. i do pixel art with libresprite, paint.net, krita, piskel. i make games with gdevelop. all offline.
i do use online ai art algorithms in conjunction with offline tools for modifying background images and title screens for projects, but the bulk of what i do i could do without the internet. except that without the internet i couldn't use opengameart.org.
if nightcafe.studio and artbreeder.com cloud ai art went away, then my games wouldn't have weird title screens anymore, my webpages wouldn't have weird background images anymore, and my youtube channel wouldn't have weird music videos anymore. that's about it.
running ai algorithms on my laptop is both resource-intensive and difficult for me as a coding novice to get working. but it's not really that important a part of my workflow that i couldn't do without it. ai stuff is more like a hobby that i am fascinated by, so i try to incorporate in other stuff that i do.
my experience with image and video upscaling came from digitizing old family photos and my mom's vhs home video tapes. and i did that offline with videoproc converter and flowframes.
cheers
@bzt I kind of [used to] suck at using blender and the animation script for rendering bigger animation frame images is a bit confusing for myself to understand. I wish I knew how it worked. If I could figure out how to re-render all of the source blender files I would gladly do that work. I am just lacking the blender script skills to do so without breaking things XD.
Also Justin Jacobs / Dorkster pointed out these Flare HDcore renders with more detail (rendered at x 2 the scale of the regular Flare image render frames.): https://github.com/flareteam/flare-game/issues/209 + https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-hdcore . So if all else fails perhaps I could use those to upscale to better help the AI with more detail.
Hold on! I just did a bunch of successful experiments! Check this out: https://github.com/flareteam/flare-game/discussions/895#discussioncommen... ! I made successful Flare 4K animations for dual wielding arming sword and I also made Flare 4K grassland tilesets with new renders! XD. I looked very close at the screen shots that Clint Bellanger has with the link from @bzt here https://clintbellanger.net/articles/isometric_tiles/ and used my Blender 2.79 and the art source files and it turns out the original files were in specification to render at 4 times the size of the regular Flare assets. in fact the regular Flare assets were shrunk down with 25% / 0.25 render scale and by making that render scale go to 100% / 1.00 it produces Flare 4K freaking graphics wow! I might suck with Blender but my detective work was on point and I lucked out lol XD. AAAH I am so relieved to find this HUGE surge of creative power and having the realistic power to do so XD. So far it looks like Flare 4K is coming! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JElrEbAcwY&ab_channel=Sam%26Dave-Topic
What do I like about Diablo 2 - LoD what Flare doesn't have? For example:
- you can play the game together with other people
- randomly generated maps
- a wider range of skills, items and monsters
- nightmare and hell difficulties
- special items can be found everywhere, not just at boss monsters
- summoning of various support units (not just 1 zombie), health regeneration of support units
- mercenery support units
- you cant simply shoot monsters 1 by 1 if you are walking around. Instead, if you walk around, huge bulks of monsters will spot you from afar and rush to attack you. That's more challenging and less lame
- minor boss monsters whith special abilities
@FlarePlayer Here is what could be done with Flare currently / in the near future in regards to your points / thoughts:
"What do I like about Diablo 2 - LoD what Flare doesn't have? For example:
- you can play the game together with other people [The Flare Engine is single player, yet it might be able to support a local / split screen co-op mode of some sort / local multiplayer ~minigames. Although this has not been worked on to my knowledge and is speculation based on my Unity experience of prototyping multiplayer and LAN multiplayer compatibility and general multiplayer modes without a dedicated server support hosted by the game developer. Currently all public builds of the Flare Engine are single player only to my knowledge.]
- randomly generated maps [I am not sure if this can be done in the Flare Engine yet I am thinking there has been some experimentation yet I am unsure as to where I am thinking this from. It is not impossible, yet I am not sure how this could currently be supported in the Flare Engine.]
- a wider range of skills, items and monsters [This can be improved with community assets even from Open Game Art even today: https://opengameart.org/content/orc-flare-3d ]
- nightmare and hell difficulties [This might be a thing in the near future: https://github.com/flareteam/flare-engine/issues/1806 ]
- special items can be found everywhere, not just at boss monsters [This can be made in Flare by having deep loot tables for all enemies that follows a 'pre-baked' creature level verses item level range drop table with different chances to drop different items. Kind of like dungeon and dragons loot tables but more extensive.]
- summoning of various support units (not just 1 zombie), health regeneration of support units [This could possibly be currently solved currently with friendly combat NPC abilities and creature ability use scripting.]
- mercenery support units [This by Dorkster can help but could use upgrades / expanded capability: https://opengameart.org/forumtopic/112-npcs-able-to-join-players-party-h... ]
- you cant simply shoot monsters 1 by 1 if you are walking around. Instead, if you walk around, huge bulks of monsters will spot you from afar and rush to attack you. That's more challenging and less lame [This can currently be solved with tweaking / expanding monster 'spotting' radius and also possibly by fog of war where a monster with line of sight could attack the player well away from the edges of the fog of war / even beyond the edges of the game screen.]
- minor boss monsters whith special abilities" [A person can add more bosses to a game and make more creature abilities and possibly make more creature ability scripts and test it all to get closer to your vision / possible player expectations for depth of content.]
Except for multiplayer support all else can be added, but it needs work; and currently not too many people are working on mods. This is a common thing on niche Foss software with no money involved, things get done, but at a snails pace.
Multiplayer would be ultra cool (be it MMO or 2 players on 1 PC or 5 people over network) but I understand that that would need a heavy rewrite of the engine.
If I would write a Flare mod I would do the gfx Zelda style. Fortunately Flare can do that, as the "Polymorphable" mod proves.
Edit: Danimal, you are right about the slow pace in open source projects.
I don´t know about that mod, search is not useful. Can you give a bit more info on it?
https://flarerpg.org/mods/polymorphable/
Has anyone tried to tinker / experiment with local multiplayer (e.g split screen) in Flare? I have no real clear memory of Flare LAN tinkering / experiments either. Although I wonder if anyone has thought of / tinkered with LAN support for Flare or any other more '~simple' multiplayer support for Flare (e.g. multiplayer without using a dedicated developer multiplayer online server)?
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