Clavius rEVisited

Yes, a great deal of it was understandable, but a great deal of it also read like the intro to Zero Wing. I'm trying to make this better than it was, like rEVisited has done with the EV classic port for Nova.

If you get a chance, Josh, could you post some of the overhead and shipyard images for some of the ships? Particularly the Atomos and Korg, which were my favorite ships in the plug, as I recall. If nothing else, I'd like to remember what they looked like.

As for the writing, one other thing to keep in mind was that the original EV had drastically truncated descs and misns; you simply couldn't fit much text into them. I remember a Babylon 5 plug that resorted to having missions terminate on landing, give another mission on landing, and then have that mission terminate at the bar, all so they could just fit more text in. These days we have gasp scrolling dialogue boxes, so we're not so limited.

Actually, the images of the original ships are the next thing. Anyone who wants to do reworking to rEVisited standards would need them as reference material. I'm thinking I don't want to change the Shiruvan Sentinels at all. Anyone getting this mod for the first time and seeing them, I want them to think, "What could those little things do to my ship?" right up until they get close and open fire with those huge lasers so that the player hates the evil little balls of DEATH.

This post has been edited by CaptJosh : 13 February 2007 - 01:36 AM

If I recall correctly, the Sentinels were basically just untextured spheres, yes? You could probably make that a bit more detailed, add some kind of "engine glow" to indicate the ones that are accelerating, without making them look less inoffensive.

I can't do a damn thing. I don't do graphics. I can't draw worth a damn, and 3D modeling? Yeah right. I don't even have any software for it, much less any skill. That's why the earlier images were posted. I need people who can do graphics to re-imagine these ships from Clavius and Beyond and give me rEVisited quality versions. I'm going to need glows and running lights as well, except for the Neutronic Kestrel. I'll just point its shan at the glows and lights for the regular one in rEVisited. The idea is that Clavius rEVisited MUST be used with rEVisited.

This post has been edited by CaptJosh : 13 February 2007 - 02:03 AM

Well I contacted Graphic Converter's developer and he fixed the Color Matrix for me :). So here's what I got:

This was considerably more tricky than the sprites (I mean I'm hardly very good with graphics) but I don't think it looks too bad :).

(edit) Hey have you tried contacting KMQ? Perhaps he'd be willing to do the Clavius sprites himself.

This post has been edited by Guy : 28 March 2008 - 08:30 PM

It looks fantastic! I love it. Thank you Guy. I'm going to save this imgage and drop it in to Clavius rEVisited right now.

As for trying to contact KMQ, no. I hadn't because he had said he was all burned out. Mayb I should try, though.

@guy, on Feb 13 2007, 05:16 PM, said in Clavius rEVisited:

Well I contacted Graphic Converter's developer and he fixed the Color Matrix for me :). So here's what I got:

Yeah, Thorsten is amazingly responsive, isn't he?

A little more news. I remembered that the NPPK fighter is just a REALLY dark version of the confed gunboat, so I took that sprite from rEVisited, really darkened it and imported it into my Clavius rEVisited project file. No play testing yet because I haven't yet rearranged the resources to work with rEVisited. I'll be getting to that pretty soon.

What it look like if you used the normal gunboat sprites but with high transparency?

@dr--trowel, on Feb 15 2007, 03:51 AM, said in Clavius rEVisited:

Yeah, Thorsten is amazingly responsive, isn't he?

Yup. If your Color Matrix isn't working then look for v5.9.5 which he said would be available sometime today.

I don't know. I'm using gimp to edit the images and I'm not as proficient as I'd like to be. But the thing is, they weren't transparent per se. THey were just REALLY dark. And if I wanted to do it that way, could have just moved the pict sprite and mask of the original to an rlëD. But I'm trying to update this. I don't want the original images, I want better ones. Though the Shiruvan sentinel really doesn't need that much work, if any. I may just take the first frame of the NPPK Stalker and make a better sprite grid. Hard to improve on something that's nearly impossible to see anyway.

I'd like to reiterate my request for the Atomos and Korg images (in-flight and shipyard, and heck, comms if you like) to be posted to this thread. I'd kinda like to dink around in Blender some more, and while I don't think I'm up to the ReV quality levels, I can probably exceed what they originally looked like. Unfortunately, I'm running on an Intel mac running the latest OS X version, with the net result that EVN is dog-slow and I thus can't get the images myself.

This post has been edited by Derakon : 14 February 2007 - 11:37 PM

Your request was already acknowledged. I'll get images out in due time. I'm working on this while I have other irons in the fire too. Please be patient.
And why on earth do you think you need to run the game to get the images. If you're chomping at the bit so, go get mission computer or EVONE, get the Clavius plugin from the Nova Add-ons page, and pull the images right out of the data file.

This post has been edited by CaptJosh : 14 February 2007 - 11:49 PM

D'oh, completely forgot about that option. It's been years since I even touched the resource files for any EV game. Sorry if I sounded impatient or lazy. To make up for it, here's some images!

Atomos:

Korg:

Archon:

Yep, those are the classic sprites and ship images. As I'm sure everyone here can see, they're only 256 colors. The only one that's a suitable size for its role is the atomos. It's a heavy fighter. I notice now from the sprite something I never really paid attention to before. The Atomos is a modified Y-Wing. That ought to give some inspiration for reworking it. Also, in this post I'm including the sprite grid and shipyard pic of the NPPK Destroyer, and the Star Trek vessels it resembles, the Klingon B'rel or K'vort class Bird of Prey, so that you can see how close they are.

These are the NPPK Destroyer

These are of a Bird of Prey.

As you can see, the likeness is striking, and given that the NPPK ship is a Destroyer, rather than a scoutship, I'd go with the larger 330 meter K'vort class ship from TNG as a basis for comparison rather than the 110 meter scoutship from Star Trek III, especially considering the fact that the NPPK Destroyer has space for a fighter bay and two NPPK Fighters. I would note that the nose of the NPPK Destroyer shows what could be considered Romulan influence, but is more likely just a limitation of the skill and software of creator of the original Clavius and Beyond plug.

This post has been edited by CaptJosh : 15 February 2007 - 06:18 AM

Couple things.

First off, the NPPK have two different fighter ships. The weaker version's a really darker version of the Confed Fighter, and the stronger one's based on the Gunboat. This is easiest to figure out when you finally get to buy them.

Secondly, MissionComputer doesn't handle ships correctly, and I can't find a place to download EVONE from (and ResEdit won't run on a computer without Classic installed). How many turrets does the Atomos get?

Thirdly, I've been working on the Atomos. This image will be my current WIP, wherever that happens to be:

MC handles ship resources fine, just not as nicely as most of the other resources. EVONE is defunct but you can try Rezilla Custom, check the Important Links topic.

Really? This is what I get when I open up the Clavius plugin:

I don't see any ships there. Maybe I'm missing something?

Rezilla works, though - 4 guns and 2 turrets. That's one heck of a heavy fighter!

Er, what version of MC is that?? :huh:

2.0.0. It's what I could find.