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Gee, When Did They Release This One? [2011] |
AKA :
Loading Screen That Never Was
Released At :
Rambo Revisited - GFX Compo
Achievements :
C64 Graphics Competition at Rambo Revisited - GFX Compo : #7
Credits :
Download :
Look for downloads on external sites:
Pokefinder.org
Production Info
Submitted by Romppainen on 29 August 2011
Whenever term "Rambo" pop up in any given instance people's first impression tend to be all about pumped up jungle commando causing havoc and shooting down just about everything in sight, while the first movie in the serie keeps constantly forgotten which is a shame as it's actually a great and definitely underrated gem. As this compo seemed not to show any exception to my opinion above I wanted to pay some respect to the original one as after all it is origin of the whole phenomenom. When thinking of suitable way how to do that I thought it would be cool to create a mocked up loading screen for the non-existing game based on the movie, so I started to make a bit of research about loaders from the era where game would have approximately been released to give mine some convincing retro look. Majority of the small selection of screens I checked out were consentrating to portrait main character leaving background rather uncrowded with just small amount of details so I chose to go that way aswell.
So I started working by booting up Timanthes and drawing some simple outline sketches with several different compositions of upcoming contents to see what to put in and where. At first my favourite approach was to have Stallone figure on the side but after tinkering with idea a bit further it seemed to leave me too large area to fill up with virtually nothing, so I decided to go for centerized character instead to give picture some balance and continued from there.
By knowing my limitations it was sure that if I'd had started creating Rambo from total zil it would've ended being long-haired stick figure of death so I went for searching some suitable material to use as a base for further editing, and to avoid falling for the stereotypical big gun pose I decided to concentrate on something related to unarmed combat which had big part in the movie and chose this to be my source:
After 6-8 hours of overpixeling, simplifying, smoothing and other tweaking, not speaking of making some additional detailing to make the result look more lively, there weren't much left of the original picture: It was needed mainly to help me getting all the proportions right. One thing that particularly made me struggle were the eyes, I just couldn't make them look intense enough within hires limitations so that's where sprite layer joined the game. I admit that overall characteristic combined to particular visual style used when making this picture make the outcome look a bit goon-ish but I'm happy with certain dramatic impression it haves in general.
As a side note head band was originally ment to be included in the picture but even after meddling with it for a while it just broke general smoothness so badly I ended up ditching it for good instead of spending hours to make it work.
Background was made by pixeling it from scratch. My goal was to keep it simple while still having something that can be easily associated to the movie so I decided to draw two buildings, clean bulk stuff on their own, and added them the needed recognibility with simple details - Police sign doesn't really need any description, neons on the gas station were checked out by googling some background information and screenshots to get the brand and logo correct. Making rooftop neon visible enough was another battle against hires windmills so the text went to sprite layer to keep company to those facial details. Finally I brought along some other general elements from the movie by creating couple of trees that had loose resemblance to pines and painted the mountain background using 4x4 freehand brush and smoothing out some clashes pixel by pixel afterwards.
Title text was heavily reworked from one in the original movie poster (which was also inspiration for general colour scheme), after importing as-is it required plenty of scaling, cleaning and positioning fixes before it came out good, about half of it was completely redone. Stallone text was completely impulsive last minute add-on and pixeled by hand. As a final tweak loading screen obviously needed a distributor logo, first I made my own fat font version but it looked too modern to blend in properly so I ended up taking the easy way by snatching nice hires one from loading screen of Kong Strikes Back and just recolored it.
Then came time for shit to hit the fan.
Picture was finished, all I needed was to make an executable, but when I tried exporting image from Timanthes the result was a failure with only the hires part visible. You can guess I almost shat my pants as compo deadline was already knocking on the shoulder. When I asked about the problem on the forums Twoflower stepped up to help but there wasn't anything wrong with the layer settings or such, I assume the problem was lying in standalone displayer code like he said but as there ain't single coder bone in my body fixing it by hand was out of question so my next option was to get picture converted by some other method - so .PNG it goes.
First I fed exported image to Mufflon but it didn't cope with format limitations resulting some errors, and when I gave a try for fixing .NUF file with NUFLI Editor I soon came to conclusion that I don't have enough time to start learning that. At the same time couple of sceners came up with couple of suggestions aboout how to solve the problem, but I got absolutely lost with Congo and vicpack failed to create executable ending up with error message. Finally I took the emergency exit and returned to Mufflon as it allowed me to make "convert-check errormap-make fixes straight to PNG" cycles on the fly until I was satisfied with the result (there is still couple of rogue pixels that are either missing or altered compared to the original image but I'm probably only one who can even spot them). After the long-awaited success everything there was still left to do was to make executable file using Exomizer - Phew!
I still don't know what was the primary reason behind all the trouble, but as I assume Mr. SID made his hires + sprite executable of my finished picture using vicpack with selfmade screenshot I guess the original pre-convert variant of image contained something that either still exceeded the limitations or broke the usual format standards while the one I edited and drove thru Mufflon got accidentally corrected during process. It doesn't really matter anymore, but I'd appreciate if someone could explain me the general guidelines and limitations of using sprite layer so I can use that feature safely in my future creations without need to possibly rush out another NUFLI overkill in panic. |
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