New DCRPG Work-In-Progress Screenshots !

[ACID]

Looks nice

[BlueCrab]

Here's the actual log (edited grammatically) of the conversation I had last night on the subject....

Q - What in this game was most difficult to program?
A - There's been lots of stuff that has been difficult so far. Heck, Getting all of the network-related code I need in KOS was a bit of a pain, and debugging that code....

Q - Any areas that it seemed like it wasn't worth the time to add?
A - I dunno... there's really not that much done to have any thoughts like that yet. Most everything that's there now is absolutely essential to the game.

Q - The characters in the screenshots, are they the main characters of the game? Is there any help from any artists on the project? Is there a need for more artists?

A - They're old versions of characters. There is an artist that is working on sprites for the game right now. Also, I certainly wouldn't turn down any art-related help... but at the same time I don't want to accept any help right now. I'd rather get the bulk of the game engine written before I think about that. Afterall, DCRPG has been restarted from scratch several times in the past (including once under my watch), and all the art that was made for all of those earlier versions was wasted effort, I feel. I don't want to disappoint anyone anymore. I want to get the code written. I figure at that point, people will come to the project.

Q - Did you decide not to use the old characters because you didn't like them?
A - Its not that I didn't like the art (I really did), its that it didn't work. The characters were quite high-quality, and took up too much space to work on the Dreamcast. It simply was impossible to make things work with the code of DCRPG the way it was.

Q - Ah technical limitations, so what needed to be cut to fix these problems?
A - The sprite sheets were 1024x1024 pixels.... That takes up about 2MB for ONE sprite. And, on the Dreamcast, we only have 8MB of total video memory to work with... Take out the space needed by the PVR to do its rendering, and the framebuffer, and that leaves you about 4 MB. That would be enough for two sprites, and nothing else. No map graphics, no font, nothing else. It simply wouldn't work.

Q - Have you solved these technical limitations?
A - Right now, I'm using reduced versions of the sprite graphics, that only take up 256x256 pixels. I'm probably gonna use the built-in texture compression to save space as well. Also, I've been smarter with the programming, I'm not making unnecessary copies of data; I'm not being stupid, essentially. Finally, I'm not overestimating things anymore.

Q - These modified sprites, is it a possibility that in the Non-Dreamcast versions of this game that we may see these sprites?
A - As I said, the sprites I'm using now are temporary. They will not be in the final game.

Q - So they really are just provisional?
A - Exactly... They're a stop-gap measure so that I could release some work-in-progress screenshots of the game. I personally like the sprites a lot, as a side note.

Q - When will we see the final sprites?
A - I dunno. When they're ready, I'll put them into the game, and take some screenshots, as long as the artist doesn't mind that. If he wants to keep them under wraps until the release, then I will.

And that's all that was said, pretty much.



And to answer one question:

so uh you were giving me bad answers? i didn't know that

I didn't say I was giving bad answers, just not fully thought out ones....