aquaMat wrote on 30.04.2012 at 07:46:47:In the meantime I have consulted that list of MM1 mansions which are HD-ready or HD-compatible and I was considerably shocked to find that there are really only 3 mansions of mine (out of what - 15 or 16 I had released) on that list (I'm counting the two Faces versions and the two Palace of Gore versions as only one mansion each).
I didn't know it was that few...... the whole affair seems to be more problematic than I thought.
I'm not sure it's as bad as you think. I could have sworn that there were some that didn't need as much work as others in terms of graphics conversion. I think it's also worth seeing if we can do something about those levers with graphics. Between new graphics and a script to do most of the lever moving, that wouldn't be too big a deal.
Quote:I find it especially sad that those designs which I consider to be my best efforts, namely THE FOUR TUBES, THE BIRDCAGE and THE COMPLEX, are not among them.
Ugh... you're right. I do remember some of those. When we were going through them, we went through them fast. I think the whole effort took 1-2 weeks. I didn't really stop and dwell on it too much.
Quote:Rob, one more question: what did you and the other designers use when preparing the all-new designs for the HD version ?? I certainly can't imagine you went thru all that trouble of designing in the old editor and than replacing all parts using your described Rezycle method ?!
So I reckon you must have built some sort of tool for yourselves to help you make those new designs?
No. We used the old editor, which was actually a pretty big hassle. All the mansions in the HD game get stored in the old way. That is the only way they can be edited - aside from some really experimental stuff I've been doing. Prior to shipping, the original formats have to be converted using rezycle. Generally, this is pretty easy. Occasionally, one or two custom graphics may have to be added after Rezycle has unpacked everything. Fortunately, there are not many custom graphics in the new game. Jacob redid *all* the graphics though.
What this meant is that if you worked on the mansion, you had to work on it as though you building a mansion for MM1, then to see what your changes looked like, you would then have to convert it, and open it as a mansion (or custom mansion) in the new game. As you can imagine, this was a little tedious. Because the mansion and the builder were working off of different files, I could bring up the game and the old builder at the same time and flip back and forth between the two windows.
I did end building out some tools, but they were command line based. I wrote a few Perl scripts to help me quickly identify potential or known issues. I didn't actually build any new mansions for the game. That was done by Toybox, Jacob, and Vern. I ended up scrubbing all the existing "included" mansions. Scrubbing included:
- Finding and correcting any odd Layer 6 issuesThese fixes were areas were for areas where the illusion was spoiled. For example, a short pillar in layer that "supported" the ceiling above it. There were many, many areas where Jack would be "behind" the pillar, jump, and then appear in front of the tiles the pillar was supporting. This sort of thing spoils the illusion and tends to look "weird" to the eye. There were lots of different cases here, that were dealt with in various ways. Some of this was easy, some was a bit more work.
- Removing *most* designer-painted shadowsI was sure that this would be the most controversial of the changes, yet I don't recall anything getting upset. Vern added game-generated shadows to MM HD. These shadows generally look better than the painted in shadows because they more closely resemble the item that casts the shadow, and there is a bit more consistency. I believe that tiles in layers 4 and 6 will cast shadows, initially only in rooms with a black background. Otherwise, Birds and other creatures could cast "shadows" on the sky background image, which looked strange. Game generated shadows can also be disabled in newer versions of the old Builder.
This probably should be disabled by default for all custom mansions, because I can tell you first-hand that removing most of the designer-added shadows was tedious in the extreme. If you don't remove them, then the game will add shadows on top of areas where the developer already painted them in. These areas will be darker than what the designer intended, slight ruining the effect. Areas that were shaded may become black outright.
- Correcting some block inconsistenciesThere are basically two kinds of Bricks most often used in Layer 4. You have the bricks that are smart enough to "assemble" themselves when you are painting them in. There are others for each color that have to be manually and painstakingly assembled. In the past, these two types were mixed together in some places. The problem with this is that Vern applies some sort of logic to the "smart" bricks while slightly and somewhat randomly alters their appearance to add some variety and keep things from looking too uniform. It's a very nice effect that I was skeptical about at first.
The problem is that if you mix and match the "smart" bricks with the others, then it noticeably throws off the effect. This was among my least favorite things to fix, because it was tough to detect i the MM1 Builder.
- Taking a first cut to see how the mansions appeared with the new graphics.kind of self-explanatory. By the end, I was getting pretty sick of looking at all the mansions. For some reason, it was a *lot* more work that I thought it was going to be. I hope some of this make sense. Feel free to ask if it's not clear.
Doing some of this low-level stuff, freed Vern up to do the bigger things that only he could do. It definitely gave me some motivation to play around with a new Builder. The old Builder has frustrated me for quite a while now. Shortly after doing the initial conversion on the custom mansions, my work load and responsibilities on my day job picked up in a big way - limited what I was able to do during my off time.
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