Deeplake - Demo v 1.3 Released! 22/09/07

[Sapphire Dragon]

the mikey seal?
The first award ive ever got!
Maybe ill add it in the bottom corner of the loading up screens. well, tell the programmer to.

edit: pics above, had to add this one because I like the field. I really should stop posting them now though before I give everything away the demo will have.

[monele]

Awwww, I didn't mean to be mean... (um)... here, have this girl-with-glasses plushie ^__^...

[Jake]

But yes, the bottom one is just right . The stables picture should have the character (very slightly) bigger (closer to the camera).

I'm not sure about the nearer thing; how close people stand to each other is very much a function of cultural habits and the relative social situation of the people involved, so I'd wait to see the dialogue at least before commenting on that. I know I've had conversations with people who were standing or leaning on things several metres away before now.

The perspective, though - while the backgrounds look good on their own, with the guy in, the outdoor one conspires (as backgrounds often do) to make the viewpoint character seem quite short. The horizon is below the guy's shoulders in the outdoors picture, which suggests that's where the viewpoint's eye-level is, so the protagonist would be ~20cm shorter than the guy.
However, in the stables the old man's head is level with the top of the door! Stable doors I've seen have been pretty tall, which makes this look odd, but when compared to the outdoors view (horizon about halfway up - corroborated by the vanishing points) it seems that either the doors are actually really small in this stable, or the protagonist's quite tall and the old guy is a little bit taller!

But hey, for all I talk about them they're relatively minor things, and it's certainly a better example than a lot of the stuff I've seen. And the rendering's nice.

[Sapphire Dragon]

I never really intended the character to be like part of the scene. I mainly wanted a picture background for the place and characters are kind of seperete to that scene.
In a japanese style house ive done the perspective holds nothing at all to the characters that will be in it.
(because its less work for me that way)

[Jake]

I never really intended the character to be like part of the scene. I mainly wanted a picture background for the place and characters are kind of seperete to that scene.

In that case, my recommendation would be to make the characters more definitely discrete; put them in a frame or something, so that they don't appear to be actually part of the scene. If you composite them together like that then you can more or less guarantee people will assume that the character is supposed to be 'in' the scene...

Having said that, in my experience matching the character art to the BG art isn't really that much extra a problem unless you're using art from different sources. Mostly it's just a case of positioning and scaling the characters to match the furniture...

[monele]

I've been thinking about this and two possibilities are :

- Go with an original presentation don't show full bodies in front of the background (When I Rule the World and my MagBou2 portraits would fit the bill)
- Do something to the backgrounds or sprites to clearly separate them. Putting black bars to the top and bottom of the background and have the characters *above* these will immediately separate both... the background becomes only an illustration of "where we are" but is clearly not meant to be taken along with the characters.
A filter on the background might have the same effect... Or maybe some special outlining on the characters.

[PyTom]

Or don't overthink it. I mean, Kanon had these freaky-looking characters, and nobody cared. People will forgive a lot in a VN.

[Sapphire Dragon]

Ill have a think about it later on when I have all the pictures needed, I was thinking of having like pictures in a frame similar from a manga whenever theres a sequence that needs to be shown. If I put those in adding the characters in a frame might be a good effect but without them I think it would just look odd.

Most likely if I do something it would be cinema mode the backgrounds because I could just add the process on photoshops history brush, open them all and just click away.

[Sapphire Dragon]

Ok I tried a few boarders for the background, tell me what you think. Theres also the option of a tiny black boarder, but it should be easy to see what that looks like without a picture.

[musical74]

NO on the first one....it seems too...weird for me. I think I like the second choice of the three the best....but the third one is good as well. Granted, it's my preference, but the first one just seems too strange for me.

[monele]

I pretty much agree with musical74 ^.^...

[Sapphire Dragon]

ah ok. I was going to try something like this (shown below (picture quality will be much better, thats a mock up)) with like the frames showing you important parts, but I guess people arent going to like it that much. the wide screen is my second choice though. and itll probably still be able to have them without it mlooking too weird. With the widescreen i'd want it so you see the full picture, but before someone pops up it slides on the widescreen bits. One from the left and one from the right.

[monele]

The action frames are good... it's the skewed outline of the frame that isn't I think ^^.

[PrettySammy09]

I really like the widescreen format. It's different and yet really eye-appealing. :3

[Nafai]

I actually liked the skewed ones, but only if the scene would lend itself to such framing

I'm using widescreen/letterbox for the Elect so Im partial to that one as well...