Bonding ESF closer to Dragonball Z by doing this

[CLASSIFIED]

Hello there ESF community, I've been an ESF player since 1.1 and of course what attracted me to the game was nothing else but it's connection to my favorite Anime, Draginball Z.

Recently I have experienced with the fan addon, ECX and I couldn't agree more but this really got some very nice extra to the ESF engine (yeah, although based on goldsource, ESF is by definition an engine of itself. If you like to argue about that then you could say that goldsource or Half-Life is actually a Quake mod and in a way, it is). I mentioned my experience with ECX being even closer to what I was looking for when I got into ESF to point out or remind that no matter how the mod is going to end up, it's still important to keep up with the DBZ in core of it.

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Now to my idea:
1. Plain and simple, having an image box in different situations near the characters, describing their face expressions or clothes conditions in detail (cartoon style or "Half-Life" style. So let's say I'm playing as Vegeta and my oppent is Goku and we just swooped into each over and we are having a "Head-On" Struggle. Then you see next to the characters an image of their face as if they are struggling - although the game models are simple, in the images you can see clearly the details of their face expressions, as I said either from the original DBZ anime or other original ways . (Maybe using GIF formats?) having this feature enabled by default yet allow players to disable it is also a possibility (of course, you are the programmers already know that )

Edit: What I described here is also a thing that seem to happen often during DBZ battles in the actual serial.

Now such effect could be very.. very neat. It could really make resembles to moves from the original T.V show. Of course.. any great idea has to be put into afford, the final products are way more satisfying and of course they probably worth the trouble.

Just to get the idea into more depths, here are more examples. What if you basic melee someone and your character kicks your oppent away. Let's say you are playing as Goku and you just kicked Vegeta or Piccolo or whoever.. then just as you kick him *using basic melee*, an animated image shows near your character showing the other angel of Goku(your character) kicking while the other character is having an animated image near him showing HIM being thrown by the kick.

If you think the animation could be too much of trouble I would suggest you to take your time and look for animator or other people who are DBZ fans and know how to mess around with these kind things. I can almost assure you that there is no reason they would disagree. After all, this is a free project (as of now). Designers love it when their work is used.

This also can make up for people's other suggestions like "Damaged clothes or characters" as they can be shown as anime (although the actually characters just keep looking the same). Now to make another idea of this could be done.. have you ever played or known the game: XII ?

Here are some example (Just for the boxed image idea.)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=_yTNf3KYspE
and
http://youtube.com/watch?v=KcZUM0NT9iw

I hope you consider this, there is no doubt the closer the Dragon Ball Z experience is the better your name gets bigger and heck I would love ESF to be on its full potential .

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2. Another more simple suggestion is about your in-game mp3 player. I would like to suggest that you also allow it to play the Ogg Vorbis (Free, Open Source Codec, Famous and sounds better than mp3 especially on lower bitrates, which is where it's dramatically felt) and on top of it I would also suggest (if possible) to use OGGs instead of WAVs. This is just something to consider. Ogg is very legal and very good.. many famous games use it - many! (For those I remember: GTA, Hitman 2, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament, America's Army.. even World of Warcraft) it would be revolutionary to bring it to Half-Life. I don't think it's impossible especially when you are dealing with an open source thing.

Vorbis Site
OGG Vorbis on Wikipedia
Games that use Ogg Vorbis

P.S
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For encoders, the aoTuV ogg encoder is highly recommended!
You don't believe how low you can get with the bitrate and still "get away with it".

Good luck with the mod! I hope my suggestions won't be unnoticed,
-Yours, a big ESF fan
CLASSIFIED.

 

[Grega]

Half Life does not support any other sound format then a 22kHz wav files played on mono.

It will crash on any other files.

As for the MP3 player. I dont really see a difference betwean OGG and MP3 files. the ones in ESF sound good. Then again i dont have a fine ear for such things ^^


As for your first suggestion. Animated faces are allready part of the characters. But to be honest id probably find a feature where someones face pops up to see his expression really anoying during gameplay. Keep in mind that in ESF even when you are attacking someone you have to constantly be looking round for others who might still attack you ^^


Oh well thats just my 2 cents ^^

Dont really get what you ment with the Half Life or anime look though.

 

[Greenberet]

Half Life does not support any other sound format then a 22kHz wav files played on mono.

well it would be possible to add ogg support for the mp3 player.
it's just that someone must implement it

 

[harSens]

1. We're considering something like that in the HUD, but it should be optional, so that more hardcore players can disable it to have more viewing space.
2. The mp3player might actually be able to play ogg vorbis, never tried that and I don't have any ogg vorbis songs to test it with. As for ogg vorbis ingame, I'd rather not waste processing power decoding multiple sound streams. If we really want higher quality sounds, I'd just go for 44kHz wav.

 

[Tenzo]

1. We're considering something like that in the HUD, but it should be optional, so that more hardcore players can disable it to have more viewing space.

Since the radar shows informations about the targeted player outside the radar itself, could it be added there? or maybe somewhere in the left corner down (implemented in the hud)!

 

[Grega]

The target information is so small that you barely notice it. A face poping up would block your view quite a bit since it isnt transparent.

 

[Tenzo]

well...you're right there!

 

[CLASSIFIED]

1. We're considering something like that in the HUD, but it should be optional, so that more hardcore players can disable it to have more viewing space.
2. The mp3player might actually be able to play ogg vorbis, never tried that and I don't have any ogg vorbis songs to test it with. As for ogg vorbis ingame, I'd rather not waste processing power decoding multiple sound streams. If we really want higher quality sounds, I'd just go for 44kHz wav.

==== I Know it looks LONG but 3 paragraphs are my say and the rest is actually introducing you my test with the ogg over ESF sound in which I also UPLOADED for you so you can get your own opinions! ====

Please do consider the ogg possibilty at least for the mp3 player for the audiophiles of us, You won't believe how good it is.. the Doom 3 theme for example, was codeced over quality zero (o) (which is about 28 to 33 bitrates using the aoTuV) and 22.05 kHz over Mono channel, the theme song is about 600 to 800k (don't remember the exact amount) Heavy Metal song with the length of 3 and so minutes. (In fact all of their never ending sound collection is over ogg except for very few wav files). WAV are usually uncompressed, I can see the down side of decoding multiplies sound streams but you can't really know how it's going to end up working 'till you check this out.

Doom 3 (my favorite example as you may noticed but I could also involve Operation Flashpoint which is also using a wide audio collection of Oggs) is having a huge OGG collection, under heavy graphics and environments and their game has looooots of sound going on (well maybe except those moments when you walk somewhere quiet and and getting all worked out because you know something will soon pop up on you.. :laff: but that's Doom 3 what would you expect?)

Hey who knows, but one thing is for certain, if you could make this happen this could be very good news for both the size of the game installation, the good impression over the over growing ogg community (and other programmers).

But don't listen to me, listen to the OGG. I made you an example using the game's sound (and as I assume you may old the original untouched sound files, this may sound even better at lower bitrates if encoded from them)

So here is what I've got:
Using the very simple drag&drop small freeware called "oggdropxd" of aoTuV, I took 6 audio files from Goku's folder. As you already know they are 22.05 kHz of WAV.

Here is the report of the results following the samples themselves:
Files:
solarflare.wav
spiritbomb_charge.wav
trans.wav
scream.wav
kamehame.wav
ha.wav

Those are the original files, all together they are using: 996.9 kb of the hard drive
Compressing THESE files with aoTuV, 22.05.kHz(untouched), Mono (untouched)

*at quality -2 (the lowest) the files were using only: 81.5 kb of the hard drive
I wouldn't recommend the lowest, well not at least from the samples I used so I can encode (those of the game)

*at quality -1(one level above the lowest) the files were using: 127.9 kb of the hard drive
Now it sounds good enough but less than the original( usually when you play the game it's even harder to notice so if you really going to test OGG, you may wish to test even those levels and see if it really makes any difference during game play, but still I wouldn't recommend for this particular test the -1 quality because of the following report: )

*at quality 0(the one which is most likely used in most of Doom 3 sound files, even for theme music although in general this level is too low to codec your ripps ^^ but it worked just fine for Doom 3) the files were using... 120.2 kb of the hard drive. Yeah.. sound better than quality -1 and also take less space! Now it sounds good enough to replace the WAV of ESF IMO.. BUT! if your really don't mind:

*at quality 1(better than 0. by the way, the original scale is between -2 to 10) the files were using: 127.9 kb of the hard drive but sound WAY better! they actually sound very much like the WAV. Now I'm a person who notice those details so I guess most people could do with quality 0 (and even -1, but what's the point if you can just use +1. They use the same space)

Overall, all the samples together take as half less than the original files.. all of the different samples in a bunch that is just take about 457.4 kb(24 files) of your hard drive as of 996.9 kb(6 files). When you have a big project , in the final product you could feel dramatic different.

Now I'll give you the honor to make up your own conclusions(Winamp can naturally play OGG vorbis. For Media Player you need to install a very small (spyware free - this is open source ffs) codec pack (which also allow you to play FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec) and other open source stuff. You can get it here http://illiminable.com/ogg/

Samples (This includes the OGG samples insides):
http://files.mint-space.com/getfile,20080521181846,Original WAV22.05kHz.zip.html

I uploaded using my Linux Mint OS thus those files will be available for only 2 days.

P.S
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Encoding was as simple and fast as setting the quality I want and then dragging the file. Of course you have a lot more options but I used the defaults as they are meant to have a very good algorithm .

Looking forward to your opinions
-CLASSIFIED :yes:



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Edit: A small addition! I haven't noticed before but on the web page where it introduces you the games which used OGG vorbis, they have some interesting comments from developers:

"We're using a lot of spoken audio in this title (a first for us) and
your codec has allowed us to reduce more than 350MB of audio data to
about 40MB, a huge savings of memory and disk space! We are very
impressed." --Tom Faiano, Producer

"Incorprating Ogg Vorbis into our codebase was quite painless, and in the
end, even refreshing. No fuss no muss. Thank you for your efforts!"
--Bill Farquhar, Soundguy du jour

"The original multilanguage distro took three CDs, and went down to
only one after I converted all wavs to oggs. Nifty Sadly enough,
marketing decided to not have one language per CD anyway (probably to
annoy people who migrate) :/ Thanks for a very cool (and easy to use)
lib/format!"

--Vincent Penquerc'h

"We went with Ogg Vorbis due to its excellent playback and compression,
and we used it not only for music but also all of the in-game voice.
Without it, we never would have been able to fit on two CDs."

-- http://www.4unrealers.com/entrevistas/263/

That's all

 

[CLASSIFIED]

The target information is so small that you barely notice it. A face poping up would block your view quite a bit since it isnt transparent.

It doesn't have to be blocking the view if its position is well though. Maybe have it real small for basic melee and a little bigger for advance. And of course as suggested before, it could be there for a while as an option a user may choose to disable. (no first products were too much of gold :smile: over time it could get real catchy)

 

[Tenzo]

maybe it should be temporary... like(for example) when PS-ing! or when taking a hit...

 

[harSens]

The current esf sound set is only 166MB big, so it shouldn't be a problem for anyone to download or to have in memory. I won't be wasting processing power over memory size for that. As for the mp3player, it might already be able to support ogg, just try it by adding an ogg file to your playlist.

 

[underline]

i like the idea of having a face in the HUD... it will remember my days of BFP!
but, dont use modeled faces..use animated faces
just my opinion thought

 

[CLASSIFIED]

The current esf sound set is only 166MB big, so it shouldn't be a problem for anyone to download or to have in memory. I won't be wasting processing power over memory size for that. As for the mp3player, it might already be able to support ogg, just try it by adding an ogg file to your playlist.

This could actually make it 20 mb which makes the download way faster but if that can't convince you then let me suggest that your worries are incorrect. The file size and how much that it process (especially on bitrates so low) is taking even less to process, there are no "CPU excitements" there. The WAV contains unused bits space which is also eventually loading up to the buffer. I would like to suggest that if the process power was so terrible as you are worried about, this method would propebly wouldn't have been used by programmers so often (especially for the very big titles as you can find in the "Games that use ogg vorbis list").

I would still insist that you try messing with this.. you have nothing to loose. I'm sure you guys have your own ideas to work on so I wouldn't suggest just being worried about the schedules with trying the OGG vorbis. If you guys ever going to release a retail version or anything real big, it would be very cool if you came up someday with the announcement of having OGG.



If you go for it, I would suggest quality 0 over 22.05kHz and Mono channel using the aoTuV
encoder. It seem very balanced and seem to handle clipping very nice.

and as I said, I wouldn't Imagen id software (VALVe are also big fans of theirs . VALVe on the other hand are using MP3 for Half-Life 2) using OGG vorbis for their heavy game (Doom 3) if that could have made even more trouble. And as I mentioned before the game doesn't limit its use of sound.

Other than that.. if this doesn't convince you then I have nothing else to say or add.

-Good Luck with your projects! That's all,
CLASSIFIED

 

[Dzamija]

Hello there ESF community, I've been an ESF player since 1.1 and of course what attracted me to the game was nothing else but it's connection to my favorite Anime, Draginball Z.

Give up now, because that isn't what the team is aiming for. At all.

 

[Grega]

Give up now, because that isn't what the team is aiming for. At all.

Give what up?

The face probably will be part of the HUD. Itll be the modeled face so the face animations that are made actually get to be seen. But if we do put it in itll be disableable.

 

[KYnetiK]

Why not just use a cel graphic instead of a model shot? Just needs a few frames for certain moments. It would look crisper, would contrast with the field of vision, and would be easily customizable. Just need a few frames - an idle, attacked, battling/struggling/charging, a taunt or laugh. I think it would be a nifty feature this way.
Im not sure how the dev team feels about a taunt feature, but Ive always liked it, although a taunt animation that makes you vulnerable isnt something id imagine to be such a bad thing, but i digress.

The facial animations aren't inconspicuous :S To have to bluntly focus on them seems a tad pointless.

 

[Tenzo]

I'm beginning to like this idea!

 

[Grega]

Why not just use a cel graphic instead of a model shot? Just needs a few frames for certain moments. It would look crisper, would contrast with the field of vision, and would be easily customizable. Just need a few frames - an idle, attacked, battling/struggling/charging, a taunt or laugh. I think it would be a nifty feature this way.
Im not sure how the dev team feels about a taunt feature, but Ive always liked it, although a taunt animation that makes you vulnerable isnt something id imagine to be such a bad thing, but i digress.

The facial animations aren't inconspicuous :S To have to bluntly focus on them seems a tad pointless.

They are allready made if you didnt notice >.>

 

[KYnetiK]

They are allready made if you didnt notice >.>

They? How specific.

Im assuming you mean taunts...

A few classes have taunt wavs in their sound folders, but thats about it.
Not in the Keyboard list, nor does binding a key via console do anything. Nor do the mdls have a taunt sequence.
Looks pretty missing to me.

 

[Grega]

They? How specific.

Im assuming you mean taunts...

A few classes have taunt wavs in their sound folders, but thats about it.
Not in the Keyboard list, nor does binding a key via console do anything. Nor do the mdls have a taunt sequence.
Looks pretty missing to me.

No im talking about face animations.