Arcanum Arcanum Multiverse Edition

[Drog Black Tooth]

You have a victorian style room with a frame that contains a victorian style room with another frame and it looks really awkward.

Don't waste your time with such unimportant cosmetics.
Just the black background looks the best, or eventually the one below, all the others looks like too busy cheap photoshops they are.

Yeah, I know. In a perfect world one would create a new fitting scene in a 3D modelling suite, use that crude but charming late 90s/early 00s rendering technique, but while I'm already a p cool one man project, this is outside of my abilities.

At the moment there are two HD backgrounds available in the patch. Just black and fade-to-black.

 

[passerby]

I'm not criticizing your skill, just pointing out that fade to black, or this simple wood texture look nice enough.
Aesthetics of the main menu are really not important. How much time we are going to spent there ?
Better focus on stuff that matter and you can do well.

I am actually impressed by your efforts and going to try this game again after you finish with it.
First playthrough 15 years ago abandoned after Tarant out of boredom and I even paid full price back then. I feel like giving it another shot.

BTW, taking shitposting on the codex personally ? Relax, or you'll end up throwing a fit over mirrored sprites and start spamming alts again.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

I'm not criticizing your skill, just pointing out that fade to black, or this simple wood texture look nice enough.
Aesthetics of the main menu are really not important. How much time we are going to spent there ?

I was gifted PST:EE the other day, and fuck man, the HD backgrounds there look gorgeous, I'm kinda jealous okay.

As for that wood texture, well it still needs a proper frame around the original image, that one I made with emboss/shadowing effects is such an obvious shopping job.

BTW, taking shitposting on the codex personally ? Relax, or you'll end up throwing a fit over mirrored sprites and start spamming alts again.

It's just that I'm not really happy with that "Victorian wall" background. Here's the take #3 if you're interested (the new High Resolution Patch takes 4K images as source). Still think it looks a bit weird somehow.

Also fuck you, I was just giving a level headed response.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Finally found a good source of stock frames under Creative Commons. Whaddyathink?

 

[passerby]

Original render looks like a cabin of some rich adventurer from XIX century adventure novel, while the tapestry reminds of english saloons.
The wooden texture has a benefit of having roughly same color as the wood on the render, but when I look at it more, you are right it looks cheap too.

That simple gold frame looks too modern and stands out too much, the first one blends with the tapestry and the render much better, because it's darker and looks like it belongs in the same century.
I'd try to find a bit less ornament wooden frame without gold paint on it, like this one maybe. Or stick to fade to black.

 

[Morkar Left]

instead of te wood background I would choose a simple black background but keep one of the ornamented frames

 

[passerby]

Original render is kind of awesome and busy enough as it is, fade to black is the best. If it's not broken...

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Original render looks like a cabin of some rich adventurer from XIX century adventure novel, while the tapestry reminds of english saloons.

I always imagined it as some monocled gentleman's man cave study room.

Anyways, I guess I'll just do one ornamental frame on wood BG. Just one, completely optional, the default BG will be fade-to-black.

This lady here specializes in Victorian frame templates, and she offers them all for free, under the Creative Commons license, so we can use one without running into any issues. Pick one and I'll add it.

 

[Althorion]

This one.

 

[FeelTheRads]

In a perfect world one would create a new fitting scene in a 3D modelling suite, use that crude but charming late 90s/early 00s rendering technique, but while I'm already a p cool one man project, this is outside of my abilities.

So, in that case you could change it so the menu buttons are larger?

Seems like an interesting challenge to redo that background.

By the way, do I remember correctly that you find the font used for the menu buttons?

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

By the way, do I remember correctly that you found the font used for the menu buttons?

I managed to find all the fonts, but the main menu font is the easiest honestly, it's Morpheus, a very recognizable old ass free font, that's been used in many games, e.g. Clive Barker's Undying also used it.

The dialog font on the other hand is Flareserif 821 Bold BT. There's only size 12 and 14 versions of it in the game, I'll compile size 16 and 18 for the upcoming release of the high resolution patch.

Yes, the game uses BMP fonts, which is quite common for a lot of games, especially from that era.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Also, speaking of fonts, one might ask but is it possible to just render true type fonts and skip all the BMP conversion bullshit?

I'd normally say no, but yes, the Chinese didn't bother with converting at least 3000 of commonly used characters into a BMP font, so they wrote a quite clever wrapper that takes TTF fonts and converts them on fly replacing the BMP fonts in the game. But sadly it only takes 2 fonts and just replaces everything else in the game with them. Fuck, wish I had the source code for this thing.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Hey, here's something... there's that small intro movie with the guy with the pistol shooting the guy with the sword which burns out and reveals the main menu. That seems like it would be a problem with changing the menu since it looks like the image is part of the movie which then gets replaced with the actual menu.

Here:
https://youtu.be/dZa224nnMhs?t=33

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Hey, here's something... there's that small intro movie with the guy with the pistol shooting the guy with the sword which burns out and reveals the main menu. That seems like it would be a problem with changing the menu since it looks like the image is part of the movie which then gets replaced with the actual menu.

Here:
https://youtu.be/dZa224nnMhs?t=33

Yeah, there's that, and then the credits are also just slides of the main menu background with stuff written on it, 11 images in total.

But this isn't a problem as long as we keep the original 800x600 bit of the main menu background intact.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Ah, yeah, I meant in case of completely redoing the main menu scene.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Ah, yeah, I meant in case of completely redoing the main menu scene.

Well, in that case we could just cut that last bit of the intro movie and make new images for the credits.

Seems like you're itching to try building a new scene, no? Feel free to give it a go.

 

[agris]

Original render is kind of awesome and busy enough as it is, fade to black is the best. If it's not broken...

Drog Black Tooth don't waste your energy on solutions in need of problems.

btw, any chance you can center the inventory/char/journal/whatever screens, and not have it locked onto the top of the screen? Centered relative to the view port of the game-world, that is.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

btw, any chance you can center the inventory/char/journal/whatever screens, and not have it locked onto the top of the screen? Centered relative to the view port of the game-world, that is.

You mean like it is in the current public build? The upcoming version will let you choose the position yourself, top, bottom or center. I think top works the best, since these menu backgrounds usually have some shading on the top border which was supposed to be coming from the top panel. And the borders I added a few days back only go on sides and bottom. But... the option is there if you want it.

 

[agris]

Yeah exactly like that. Good to know.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

If you people want them dead center, I could make another bordering pack with the top shading removed and another border up there on the top. Could be a bit annoying to make, but I can make the effort if it's a popular request. I used to like them dead center myself, works best in 1080p or higher.

 

[agris]

If you people want them dead center, I could make another bordering pack with the top shading removed and another border up there on the top. Could be a bit annoying to make, but I can make the effort if it's a popular request. I used to like them dead center myself, works best in 1080p or higher.

With the top shading removed sounds good, but what do you mean by "and another border up there on the top"?

Coincidentally, this is why I asked about blacking out the world when in these screens, it simplifies it. If the inventory/char/whatever screens were dead-center (not relative to the game view port) and the world blacked out and the bottom-ui hidden, it would simplify all this, right? Similar to how Sfall (Fallout 1/2) lets you black out everything else when the dialogue or character stats screens are up.

 

[Tigranes]

Out of what's here, I'd honestly go for passerby's suggestions. The idea of Victorian frames are cool but without an actual artist doing work on it specifically it's currently way too jarring.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

If you people want them dead center, I could make another bordering pack with the top shading removed and another border up there on the top. Could be a bit annoying to make, but I can make the effort if it's a popular request. I used to like them dead center myself, works best in 1080p or higher.

With the top shading removed sounds good, but what do you mean by "and another border up there on the top"?

The current build has bordering added around these UI screens by popular demand. Here's how it looks with the menu position option set to 'center':

Coincidentally, this is why I asked about blacking out the world when in these screens, it simplifies it. If the inventory/char/whatever screens were dead-center (not relative to the game view port) and the world blacked out and the bottom-ui hidden, it would simplify all this, right? Similar to how Sfall (Fallout 1/2) lets you black out everything else when the dialogue or character stats screens are up.

The bottom UI is still needed so that you can see item/spell/stat etc descriptions.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Out of what's here, I'd honestly go for passerby's suggestions. The idea of Victorian frames are cool but without an actual artist doing work on it specifically it's currently way too jarring.

Well fuck it, I just decided to add a 2px accent to the wood background and about 10 px of faint-ish shading to the original main menu background to achieve a wood cut out effect and here's the result. Look at the skull and the bottom border, I think it looks p good and not too jarring/overly creative.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

This is the effect I'm using: