[daMann]

Mark., on 27 April 2018 - 10:52 AM, said:

I have always wanted to do an "urban decay" type city map. To do it right IMO you have to load it up with a ton of props for atmosphere. Also, its difficult to make a convincing broken down look with sectors. You'll have too many flat surfaces with squared corners and generic looking holes in the wall or blasted walls. It can be done with a boatload of custom assets but I'm not sure of the quality you can achieve without them.

On the other hand, some very enjoyable moody maps have been made with only original game assets. Not fancy enough for me because I love lots of details ( eye candy ) in a map but I recognize they can still be enjoyable to play.

Custom assets are pretty easy to add, especially with BME's tools, Artedit, Surfaceedit, etc. These are some shots from our Bloodlines project, since it takes place around the 90s we had to do some custom shots... I've also slipped in some easter egg DOS apps that map designers will recognize when they see the big chunky cpu monitors in offices and such

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[daMann]

Just some more screenshots from Bloodlines project, old and new

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•  Screenshot 2018-04-27 21.13.25.png (247.69K)
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•  Screenshot 2018-04-27 21.14.49.png (609.8K)
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[OpenMaw]

The problem with clutter of that sort is it
A. Can bog systems down, even newer ones.
B. Can cause confusion in terms of navigation (Nothing stands out as important because it's all "noise.)
C. Can become a hindrance and obstructive to the player.

[NightFright]

Bloodlines was and is an ingenious addon for Blood. I am quite excited since I learned the authors decided to resume this project. Many of the levels do things I have never seen in any Build game before.

[axl]

daMann, on 27 April 2018 - 06:16 PM, said:

Just some more screenshots from Bloodlines project, old and new

Great screenshots. So glad you're resuming the work on Bloodlines.

[Mark]

Commando Nukem, on 27 April 2018 - 10:18 PM, said:

The problem with clutter of that sort is it
A. Can bog systems down, even newer ones.
B. Can cause confusion in terms of navigation (Nothing stands out as important because it's all "noise.)
C. Can become a hindrance and obstructive to the player.

B and C would depend on the type of gameplay the map is designed for. If its a "speedrun shooter" than I would somewhat agree with you. But if its a slower paced explore map the clutter can fit right in. All my projects have been heavier on exploring and a slower player speed ( except for HHR with normal speed ) . Probably not to most player's liking but its popular with me.

[Sanek]

How do you make maps for Blood these days? Do you still use the old editor to do it? Or you have other options to do it?
Afaik you can't just start making maps in mapster because of the pal difference.

[Dzierzan]

You still have to use original tools, this hasn't changed.

[daMann]

Mapedit it is! Good times... I don't know what I will do with all this useless info when I'm done with Bloodlines

[Micky C]

Mark., on 27 April 2018 - 10:52 AM, said:

I have always wanted to do an "urban decay" type city map. To do it right IMO you have to load it up with a ton of props for atmosphere. Also, its difficult to make a convincing broken down look with sectors. You'll have too many flat surfaces with squared corners and generic looking holes in the wall or blasted walls. It can be done with a boatload of custom assets but I'm not sure of the quality you can achieve without them.

What about Merlijn's Shaky Grounds series? I think he does a great job of a crumbling city. Of course, only top tier veteran mappers like him have the ability to pull it off IMO.

[Mark]

I'll take a look at those.

[Mark]

I watched about 20 minutes of the Youtube videos on the first two Shakey Grounds maps. I have to say those are awesome. But those are a blown up city invasion style. Not really the urban decay look like Silent Hill or similar. The closest I have seen so far is the probably abandoned "Everything Dies" mod.

[fgsfds]

Does anyone know what sound card sounds like this?
https://youtu.be/KpelmcEP6zQ?t=2m14s

[NightFright]

Uhm, to me this sounds like AdLib. A Soundblaster 16 maybe?

[High Treason]

A poorly emulated OPL3 chip for sure, but then what do you expect from the hands of incompetent people on YouTube.
Either way, if you're playing the game in DOSBox, setting your music card to "AdLib" or "Sound Blaster" will yield pretty much the same sound, only with subtle differences versus the real thing - largely due to Creative's notoriousl crappy analog circuits - and it will be mono, ASS doesn't do stereo FM, which is a bitch but what are you gonna do.

[NightFright]

Well, if you use a proper soundfont, it makes CD audio kinda needless. The Blood CD tracks are nice but have weird stuff like choir or background sounds. Pure MIDI is much better (or at least recordings of the MIDI tracks like MusicallyInspired's SC-55 renderings). I hate when people use the shittiest MIDI synth just to demonstrate how much "better" digital recordings are.

[MusicallyInspired]

The thing is, standards for MIDI are all over the place because MIDI is entirely separate from "audio quality" because it's not audio. Most people don't understand this. Even Scott Miller and Fred called Ion Maiden's music "old MIDI" when it's not MIDI at all. It all depends on what you're using in conjunction with it. This is why the standard I choose would be the quality of whichever the best MIDI device that the game was originally composed for to sound best on is. This is also why I don't like soundfonts because a General MIDI patch in one soundfont may be wildly different from another and still yet different from the originally supported synth. It could be differences in timbre volume envelopes, mod wheel support, pitch wheel support, or even just the volume itself (this is the biggest one) and end up sounding nothing like it's supposed to. It's an interesting experiment to see what game soundtracks sound like on other synths/soundsets it wasn't necessarily designed for, but for me the results for authenticity and personal enjoyment (again, speaking for myself) are most likely wildly off base with what the composer intended to be heard. It's not always a simple matter of quality of a soundset. The quality could be fantastic and a song turn out with a completely different atmosphere and vibe because of the way certain soundsets were constructed; too low-key or too intense.

I also understand that some of the games themselves don't support the very devices they were composed for and probably didn't have much quality control when they were put into a game. I know the Heretic and Hexen OSTs were not composed with the SC-55 and I don't know if they had careful attention paid to them for proper SC-55 output or not. My instinct is no, because the output volume from Heretic in particular is quite loud and many instruments get cut off due to breaching the polyphony limit.

But as I said, the bar has gotta be set somewhere. A "proper" soundfont can hypothetically be impossible to find....for me personally. And I realize most people are not like me. My being a composer and wanting my own music to come across in a very particular and specific way probably has something to do with that.

[Hendricks266]

High Treason, on 08 May 2018 - 10:01 AM, said:

and it will be mono, ASS doesn't do stereo FM, which is a bitch but what are you gonna do.

I wonder how hard it would be to add stereo FM support to ASS.

[Newken]

Speaking of MusicallyInspired's Blood recordings, those tracks require zero-crossing edits to avoid "clicks" while looping.

[MusicallyInspired]

I want to rerecord Blood, Shadow Warrior, the Duke expansions, and Rise of the Triad with metadata loop tags actually. Descent 1 and 2 as well, actually, and hopefully DXX-Rebirth can support it. I don't like cutting tracks off abruptly for looping.

[leilei]

Hendricks266, on 08 May 2018 - 11:34 AM, said:

I wonder how hard it would be to add stereo FM support to ASS.

Probably not hard as it's had it in ROTT 1.0. IIRC it was removed for causing timing issues?

[High Treason]

The irony when people complain about MIDI, is that the non-MIDI soundtrack probably used it anyway, given it is nothing more than a control protocol.

Stereo support in ASS wouldn't be entirely useful in this case because there's no way to add it to the game due to lack of source code, it'd be nice to see in Duke though, if only to hear it with the PAS16¹ - so far as I can tell, ASS uses the exact same mono AdLib OPL2 driver for all FM cards. Wonder if PM.EXE wouldn't be an option if someone down the line wanted to put the time in. Although the MIDIs in Blood are kinda sucky anyway and I don't recall them actually having much in the way of panning. Me and a friend who have poked them around extensively are still utterly convinced that the Alpha had a different composer as, minus the colossal stylistic differences that could be attributed simply to the game taking a different direction, their construction is vastly different.
Still prefer them over the redbook.

There is a part of me which is still pondering recording a bunch of these songs with the CZ-1 at some stage, especially as there's now a functioning P2 around to control it properly. As usual, Yamaha DX and Roland D owners are encouraged to counter this to show their instruments supposed superiority, but none have done so as yet. Gotta do ALIENZ.MID at the very least, surely, but that's not Blood... maybe that track that plays in The Haunting is a good place to start.
Amazed nobody has done SoundScape recordings yet, not that the wavetable on it is particularly good and the drivers suck.

¹

Spoiler

In case anyone wonders, the PAS16 uses the same FM chip (YMF262) as the SB16, but Media Vision did a much better job with the supporting electronics, resulting in some audible differences. The PAS sounds more 'full' to my ears. SB16 / PAS16 example with some shitty module player that usually only works properly in emulators because the author is a poseur buffoon that claims to have tested it with real hardware, even provides pictures, yet doesn't seem to be aware of the problems his program has actually running on real hardware.
On that note, I'm sure I remember one of the waveforms being inverted between these two cards, they were definitely a noticeably different shape and the 'filter' type stuff looks vastly different when you look at them in any half decent application, certainly around the 1:20-1:30 marker. The SB16 sounds kinda weird for a moment there.
Short version ; The PAS16 was basically everything the SB16 should have been and as much as stereo could be a thing, in theory, you'll never get actual OPL3 support into ASS because nobody ever did that, everything stuck with OPL2 at that time for compatibility.

Rants always seem to happen when I'm barely awake.

[daMann]

The sloping ice and floors and stuff has been solved!

Alt+x will assign the slope, apply it to the floor or ceiling you want to use.

Two sectors.. one is a zmotion. The other you alt x ... The first wall can't be attached to the z motion, but any other is fine...

As the z motion sector rises, the surface will slope.

Thanks years of research and NoOne (FAITD designer) testing out some ideas, we spent hours last couple days troubleshooting this... He found in Shadow Warrior docs this command!

So... Make sloping floors now!

[DustFalcon85]

Straight from Nightdive Studios' Facebook post. Did Nightdive secured the rights to the Blood IP? I'll have to wait and find out.

[Zaxx]

There were some signs pointing towards a No One Lives Forever (another Monolith game) re-release by GOG / NightDive too lately. Here's hoping Blood's out of the legal jungle too!

[leilei]

I don't know. with a single trailing drip of blood, I think of Zombies Ate My Neighbors.

[axl]

Excellent news. The blood drop seems to be identical to the blood drop featured on the cover of the shareware version of Blood...

Let's hope No One Lives Forever and Powerslave will be next !

[Daedolon]

It's not identical, however. It's similar, but the actual shareware art has a sharp / angle in the glare.

[DustFalcon85]

Nightdive updated their cover on Facebook and now the blood drips even further. Something big tomorrow?

[Zaxx]

Damn, Nightdive is bleeding out, someone call a medic!

Halloween announcement? Would be fitting.