Lemma Soft Forums

feels good
Yup, they look good - with people-free photos this can be a good type of graphics. Would go well with b/w characters (I think)

Actually, they'd go better with greyed out colour pastel-watercoloured characters.

A la Symphonic Rain.

Yang Sei Fu : does this look better?



I know it needs a lot more work, but is there any improvement from before? Or should I just stick to outdoor backgrounds. Those seem to work better...

Thanks!

Edit : I added two more outdoor shots to the first post as well.

Thumbnails:

That's a good start. Next you can focus on reflections if any. Leaves usually DO have reflections, so note that.

The sky looks a little too XP-ish...maybe some clouds would help?
As well, accentuate features. Things like markings on the tree, even far away, help. Don't bother with lining the edges or the creases on the trees. Do it by differentiating the colours to accentuate the texture. The images I've attached should help you.
(Attached: Sample images from Sorairo no Organ)

Finally, I highly advise you to practice on indoor BGs, as they are high in demand, and are necessary. Do NOT avoid just because they are difficult.

Re Yang Sei Fu & 141.jpg>> That is a pretty big file size. Are all images that big in ren'ai games, do you know? And how big are the ren'ai games overall, normally? 300MB? More? Less?

Normally, the art aren't even stored as JPGs. Either as PNG or some other high quality, lossless format that I don't even dare of conceiving...

And since Sorairo no Organ has parts that magnify (as in having a trasition to ZOOM into a part of) the BG or CG, the size is actually even bigger than what you see here. If the game window is 800x600, I'd say that for any graphic that does that, it usually is stored as a MUCH bigger image (I dunno, say 2000x1500?), then resized to FIT the game screen, having it in extreme detail.

If you've ever seen the CARNELIAN scans, they're huge...
Because of the advent in HD space and DVDs, a non-video-only PC visual novel takes nearly a gig to 1.5GB because of music and graphics...

And I hope that because of quality concerns, PJ would use this same technique. I'll try to keep the file size within 1CD.

I'll comment that most of the newer commercial games released in the US seem to be 2 cds in size, and usually over a gig installed on disk.

Poking through one of these games, I'm guessing (from the filenames) that it has 228 of mb of graphics, 563mb of music, 318mb of voice, 43 mb of opening video, and trivial amounts of script data.

It's tough to think of a format for images that is superior in quality to non-palettized PNG. That format has 8 bits each for red, green, blue, and optionally alpha. While it is compressed, the compression is lossless, and so won't affect (or effect? I always get those confused) final quality.

While there are formats that can represent more information about a picture, your monitor can't display them, and so they are basically useless for our purposes. Other formats (like TGA or PPM) are uncompressed, but that will just slow down loading from disk with no improvement in quality.

A zoom like the one YSF mentioned is probably done by having two images... one at a low resolution, zoomed out, and one (covering the entire same area) zoomed in. You probably don't want to rely on software scaling for an image that will be shown to the user for any amount of time. (Say, longer than a frame in a transition.)

There are several other reasons for having images bigger then the screen. For example, the initial pan in MW is through an image ~3 times the height of the screen, although not all of that height is shown to the user.

Just to put in in perspective, Narcissu is about 100mb, and has been downloaded about a 1000 times since release. (Reading the tracker... although those numbers are weird, since the linux versions seems to have as many d/ls as the windows one.) So people would be willing to download a reasonably sized game.

From what I gather, a lot of the games today feature BGs that are slightly bigger than the screen for either panning or zooming (YES! I mean it! They actually zoom it up from the whole BG into a small part and YET it has no loss to quality from pixelization! Of course, SoraOrgan is the only game I have seen that has done so).

No matter how. Having a BG larger than the screen is beneficial, as height (of characters, looking at them; ex. SNOW) and focus (of stage; ex. too many to note) changes.

Yes, yet another one, this time using a different technique:



How does this compare with the previous photos?

Edit : An indoor bg I attempted.

The trees look black...I suggest you accentuate them.

But yes, very nice late-afternoon scene.

Actually, I forgot to brighten up the image. Is it better now? I just edited it. What you saw might have been the darker version.

re Yang Sei Fu>> :whistles: Wow, with those kinds of numbers, it makes sense why you're offering your game in CD format and not as a downloadable.

re PyTom>> Thanks for the breakdown. Hmm, so I guess I can go up to 100 MB then...

Anyways, the image looks much better now bardsmanship.

The indoor pic is a little too smooth for my liking, but that can be perceived as a style of your own.

"Three words: professional."

Can you email me? There are a few things I want to ask of you.

Can I use your diner picture? The one with the pretty blue chairs? Might use Photoshop to clean it up a little, add gradients, some airbrushing, just to fool the eye a little more ... .

^
an idiot is me