Friday, January 3, 2014

Dusk's applet fixed by Andy Weaver! & I've been addicted to DawnBringer's 32 colour palette!!

Merry Christmas and happy new year everybody!  I'm a little late saying that as I don't have internet access where I live, yet.  Unfortunately I was rather poor during the holidays and couldn't even pay my phone bill to call up the family.  So if any of my family is reading this here, I love you and miss being near you.  I just got paid so I'll call you guys soon!

Dusk applet fixed by Andy Weaver!

I helped my buddy get a motel room for the night because he was without his wallet and his ID.  So I decided to take advantage of the $2.99 motel internet service to merge the second contribution to my Dusk files on GitHub by Andy Weaver.

Andy Weaver fixed the problem which caused a large percentage of computers to fail loading the images from the applet online (showing -1 images loaded).  He fixed this and made a pull request over 2 weeks ago and I finally got around to merging it in.  The reason for the delay is because of my lack of access to the internet and my recent addiction to re-colourizing all of the art assests I've collected using DawnBringer's 32 colour palette.  More on that below.

It's awesome Andy fixed that problem because now every computer with Java installed (regardless of version) will be able to play the Dusk applet online with no problems.  If you encounter a problem with the Dusk applet not working at Andy's site here , I'd appreciate the bug report (you can also get to his site to play Dusk online by clicking on the "play Zabin's Dusk demo hosted by WeaveMN" button to the right -------->).  If you do log into Dusk online from Andy's site I should let you know that he hasn't cloned my latest script files on GitHub yet as he's waiting to do the convert when I have (wrapped up)/completed a decent first release.

In other words DUSK IS REVIVED!  Thanks to Andy Weaver and me :D  I should be busy wrapping up a decent amount of gameplay for everybody to run around and explore in Dusk BUT I've been busy working on pixel art instead!

I'm addicted to DB32 colour palette! :P 


All this art is still WIP!  I figured I'd update you on what I'm currently working on.  It's a pipe dream of mine that Dusk will be improved upon (code-wise) and be able to use this art in the future.  NotZed's work on DuskZ has motivated me to get better at making pixel art/animations.  Even though his fork of the Dusk server may be a dead-end project.  I just can't help but bring together this art just in-case his Dusk fork does reach a playable state.  I'm doing this for the dream of using it in Dusk, but also because I love open-source and would love to see some open-source games that look like this.  With the limited colour palette I'd say it looks a bit like Seiken Densetsu.

I've never limited myself to a colour palette before.   So just for the hell of it I figured I'd test out a limited colour palette to see the benefits of the limitation.  I became aware of DB's32 colour palette thanks to Surt on OpenGameArt.  I've got to admit that sticking with a set palette definitely help's to make the assets match globally.  Especially since I've been keeping the foliage and wood colours consistent.  I've tried my best to strictly stick to only the 32 colour palette but occasionally I'd get stuck and can't find a proper colour and had to add a few of my own colours to the palette.  I've added 8 colours so far- so it's a total of 40 currently and I think that it won't expand past that.  The colours I've added I think is a good extension to the palette that even DawnBringer may say is a good extension to the palette.

About 2 months ago I attempted to make all these assets to better match each-other by doing a automatic contrast bump on the assets.  Which is frowned upon in pixel art and messes it up.  When I compare that stuff to this new re-colourized stuff using these 40 colours, I'm trilled to see that it all matches and looks professionally done.

So I've basically taken my favourite art from OpenGameArt and made it all work together by re-colourizing using a limited palette.  I've been busy with this for the last 2 weeks and I'm getting close to saying that I've organized enough assets to do the outdoor terrain for a "Seiken Densetsu" or "Secret of Mana" type game.

If you want to look at the tilesets and see how far 40 colours could go check out my Dusk files on GitHub and look at the DBcolours folder. 

3 comments:

  1. Can you please contact me at jaytorrisi@gmail.com , you are my hero man I used to play dusk back in the day! I've been looking for the files for so long I might have maps from older dusks if you are interested!

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  2. Hey, sorry for the late response here and I haven't contacted you through email yet. I don't have internet where I live yet and my father is currently dieing so I'm trying to focus my energy into saving him. I think he'll make it but I'm not sure as he's stubborn on going to the hospital. I'm trying to drag him in today so a doctor can give us a diagnostics and maybe we'll know more about how bad it's got. He says it's a diabetic ulcer and there's a good chance he'll die from it unless he get's the right antibiotics to fight it. I believe him because he looks to be in a lot of pain and he's a pretty smart guy so he's probably right about the problem.

    I'll push the art I've been working on to my github so you can take a look at that art. I'll actually try and make a quick post here on my blog too if I can get the chance today.

    Thanks for saying I'm your hero :D ! It's nice to know that my work on this has been appreciated by fans of the old game.

    Yes please, I enjoy checking out old Dusk maps so once I've contacted you through email you can send it to me by attaching it through email.

    TTYL your Dusk pal _Zabin

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  3. This is awesome! Great stuff, Zabin!

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