#exposit

Tightype’s Exposit is really, really special:

Ed.Note: I am not going to lie to you. I recently started a Twitter account and it has been taking up a lot of my time and it is easier to maintain than Tumblr, and I became entirely sidetracked with it. I had actually written this post in December of last year, then saved it as a draft intending to get more images ready for it. 

I forgot and only remembered now, so here they are! Again, sorry for the long delay. u_u;

So I have spent the past few months working alternatingly on a project for/with one of my fantastic girlfriends, making art slides for her project called "Skeleton Planet." These slides have been fun to do, with the mixed challenge/handicap of a four-colour monochrome palette and fixed image size. Here are some of them:

Admittedly, these art pieces have not taken up too much of my time in contrast to the length of time it has been since my last update. The other work I have been alternating back and forth with have been my original project (derailed months ago by the stupid jaywalking game; both still incomplete), a grid maker tool that should help me lay out doodles for landscapes (finished!) and pixel dailies submissions that tend to take a day or two to make (I will show you those later~).

The work I have done on the original project has centered mainly around a complex set piece in an even larger tile-based map for Opark Forest. The set piece has involved a great deal of animation for a number of materials I have never had to animate (properly) before, namely a canvas tent (in a breezy spot) and leaves on large trees (also in that windy location), and while it has required no new elements in terms of my engine (though a few have required revision), the map editor has so far been updated several times to correct flaws and improve its useability. The creation of the animated elements has been painstaking, though rewarding and I will reveal those later.

Matan kids on an incomplete fort!

Besides that, much of my time has gone to laying tiles and trying to make them look good next to one another. I have made a quick time-lapse thing using ASEprite to show the evolution of a part of this current map, although it is not particularly impressive.

Mazarre Ridge: Work-In-Progress. There are some colour palette issues in this .gif related to ASEprite’s palette quantizing that I could not avoid and sorry. :s

Now that you have seen it, maybe you would like to know a little about it? This is the 'Mazarre Ridge' area of Opark Forest. It is a rather unstable formation at the edge of Omalla continent's central plains that did not collapse (as the rest of the plains did) during the initial tectonic conditioning of the planet hundreds of years ago. The ridge is rocky and covered in a thin layer of soil created by the leaves and needles of the shrubs and large conifers the grow on top of it. The soil is quite good once you move away from the ridge where the wind prevents it from accumulating for long. There is a large lake not too far away, separating the ridge from the Matan Terraforming Platform. The terrain below the ridge is riddled with narrow caves and swallowholes that join and link together in Nigran Cavern beneath, and these holes are the primary reason why the road connecting Matan to the platform take the much longer route to the east of the lake, and why the area has only a narrow and seldom-used hiking trail connecting it to the town. The wind and steepness do not recommend it, either. Six years ago, Gustek Radomr constructed a small shack on one of the few stable outcroppings on the edge of the ridge for Celia Roscoe to play in; since then, Celia has expanded it slightly and maintains it to this day. It is quite difficult to reach.

Seedbird, in the woods on Mazarre Ridge.

Anyway, that is all for this update. I will try and be more diligent about adding more to this weblog but realistically, who knows-- I am not good at publicity. u_u;

I have made some new visual effects in the past couple of days. I hope to have a post ready soon, because I realize that it has been entirely too long. Here is a preview for you: a sort of shattered-funhouse-mirror effect for uneven reflective things!

Garbling a reflection was both harder and easier than I thought it would be.

Incidentally, if you were looking forward to more stupid-jaywalking-game updates, they will slow somewhat, but I would like to continue that project in the future. I just did not want to leave my main project on the back burner for any longer, so I picked it up again. The most recent thing I worked on for SJG was a code module that allowed me to make road layouts more easily from sets of locations and road-width data, rather than having to work out the carriageways on paper. The next element is other pedestrians, I think!

022 // Loose Images No.6: “The Hand of Jeremiah” and Celia Roscoe.

Welp, I did not get as much ready as I had hoped to. I spent a lot of this week smashing my head against a mountain of old code from years ago that I meant to update and never did, or that I did not know needed updating until I actually dusted it off again and subsequently felt compelled to update it. Arduous stuff!

Celia is actually animated to climb the tree, and she does quite elegantly! But! She is not yet animated to sit down properly, and my myriad neuroses will not permit me to send a screencapture out with missing frames. No, no, no.

Therefore, in the interim, you get this: Celia goofin’ off in the branches (she’ll actually do more next time, I swear!) and a somewhat colourful expository moment about the tree in the graphic, below.

Enjoy! :y

This big tree is a member of the species Corymbia terminalis-III salite; a hardwood that likes salty, rocky soil and which has been growing on that spot since before the Erusa Skyfall disaster. The girl sitting in it is Celia Roscoe, who you know. This tree is named "The Hand of Jeremiah." Celia named it that. Celia has only told her mother who 'Jeremiah' is and it's a secret.

C. terminalis-3 salite trees absorb salts in the soil and minerals they grow through and inter it in their thick, scab-like bark. The trees regularly shed their bark to eliminate excess salt, and, normally, the wind and rain will carry the discarded salt-laden wood off before it crumbles and re-salinizes the soil. 'Jeremiah’ is in the shelter of the Matan Escarpment, though, and the bark does not travel very far before it decomposes, and that is why this particular tree has such a broad space around it for it to thrive in. Others like it can be found growing in oceanfront groves and scattered across salty alluvial plains. The species of tree is now fairly rare on Luan-II, as non-seaside plants tend to die out as the salt in the soil is depleted-- a task they were specifically bred and engineered to perform in biocycle-terraforming situations.

A thick pseudolignotuberous root crown can support several trunks and stems per plant, sending thick, woody runners out from an original trunk and growing thick, appendage-like roots that may eventually branch into new, connected trees. The result is a plant with a thick, central trunk and several heavy, insect-like 'legs' splaying out in all directions, sprouting smaller trees of their own. These legs are where the species gets its nickname: Roga's "Walking" Corymbia.

015 // Screen Capture No.3: Nigran Cavern Depths

Here are some more images from Nigran Cavern, this time a bit farther in. This is not the final version of the lighting, but the way the tileset and props and effects have worked out pleases me and that counts for something for sure!

The first video is from the edge of an immense underground trench created when an ancient underground magma dome drained during the bulk continental adjustments during Luan II's initial terraforming phase. How will you cross this bottomless(ish) abyss?

Large rock towers remain where huge fountains of magma vented back into the emptying dome as it drained, slowly hardening as the flow calmed, then breaking and eroding as water ebbed and flowed from the chamber after seasonal rainfalls became the new reality for the once-barren planet. Is there any way for a visitor to see one up close? (Watch me draw one in fast motion in post 002!)

Seedbird waits next to a small underground lake in an upper chamber of the cavern in this gif-format recording. Lakes like these accumulate runoff entering through swallowholes and seepage through cracks in sturdier layers of rock above, which then drains through pores and cracks in the lakebed or spills over into shallow streams that escape through holes in the walls. Sometimes, water cannot easily escape and it fills entire chambers with clear, slightly acidic water running hundreds of meters deep!

Be wary, as the rock around lakes can crack and weaken as the weight of the water places stress on it or etches more soluble veins of material away, weakening the floor.

There are plenty of hazards in this cavern and probably you should not be in there at all, but know at least that you would not be the first person to fall in and get stuck. Explore the caves and see what you can find!

014 // Screen Capture No.2: "Welcome to Nigran Cavern!”

Better late than never! As promised, here are a few screen captures from the "Nigran Cavern” region of maps. They even have motion for you! Hot damn! :y

The first MP4-format video shows a pair of rock arches weaving between waterfalls, pouring in from the Opark countryside above. (Sorry for the graininess; I have yet to get video compression worked out in an elegant way...)

The second gif-format animation shows the vista from the mouth of Nigran Cavern as it connects to the scarp running through Opark Forest. I am not completely sold on the colouring in this view just yet, so please expect it to change at least once or twice...

In both maps, all of the sprites and static artwork you see was made in ASEprite. Animated effects like the sunbeams and waterfalls are generated on-the-spot, in code, using NumPy, which I regard for various reasons as the best mistake I probably could have made here. (I will explain why in a future post! <3)

The Nigran underground region will probably consist of six or eight maps when it is complete. I plan on putting some good stuff down there for you, too!

I have really enjoyed working on Nigran Cavern so far; I learned a lot of different ways to use a tileset (more on this in future posts), found some new ways to use old effects, and created some new effects with applications in other regions.

I will very probably get into the details of these effects later, and how they have been used, but I will save this for a follow-up post actually showing off the material itself. For now, please enjoy this completely optional and technically-questionable expository moment: