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Forum » Concerning the possibility of a Hi-Q package

Concerning the possibility of a Hi-Q package

Anonymous1157 15 years ago
As we all should know by now, Notrium development has been abandoned in favor of its spiritual successor, Driftmoon. While this saddened the community at first, it does make a possible sequel to Notrium a viable option for continued development by way of Driftmoon modding. I propose re-releasing the media to Notrium at a higher resolution than it is; in particular, the first thing I noticed when I replayed Notrium just yesterday are how badly the music and SFX are encoded. Perhaps a rerelease of at least the music in MP3@320 (or maybe even whatever original format it was in) is called for? How about going back and polishing the graphics? (Most of the alien graphics have artifacts that make them look like they were hand-drawn but never cleaned up.) It could be a sort of goodbye present to add just one last bit of replayability just before Driftmoon's final release, as well as keeping everyone who will have some reason not to be able to buy it happy. (Actually, that's probably just me.)

I'm not sure what kind of reaction I'll get from the community for having suggested this, so... *Ducks for cover*
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Venom31 15 years ago
OK... Why just before Driftmoon's final release? I personally still tweak out Notrium v1.341 and it goes on and on. The restrictions of "no changing Notrium itself" is a limitation quite right. But making it better is a long process, I don't think it'll stop after Driftmoon release . Posted some problems about it in some modding thread. As for me, the graphics and sound thing is not all that grim, although the Driftmoon's innovations can give it quite a punch. Tail animation, improved pathfinding indoors, distance-driven sound volume approach and all and all...

Oh yeah, it enables to set weapons to numeric keys! That's the thing so needed in Notrium - 18 weapons not counting melee, alien's attacks and psionic spells, sheesh!
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ville 15 years ago
It's not a bad idea, but to use the Driftmoon engine for that would mean a lot of initial work - that's why I would suggest doing it after initial Driftmoon release. If someone is eager to remake Notrium 1 at least in spirit, I'm probably willing to lend a hand with tooling the engine to suit Notrium.

My own plan is to do Notrium 2 with the engine in the future. It will take a long time to complete I'm afraid, so doing a remake of Notrium 1 might be a good idea.
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Anonymous1157 15 years ago
No, it seems you've misunderstood me somehow. I didn't necessarily mean we should all start working towards Notrium under the Driftmoon engine right now, although that is the long-term goal. Actually, the short-term goal I was aiming at is better SFX and GFX in the existing Notrium game, which may/not help with rewriting the game as a mod for Driftmoon later.

If you still don't quite get what I mean, take a look at the Half-Life HD pack, which accomplished exactly what I'm trying to say for Goldsource games.
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E_net4 15 years ago
It's not too soon for doing Notrium on the Driftmoon engine, IMO. We can build maps and other stuff as we speak.
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MageKing17 15 years ago
"ville" said:
If someone is eager to remake Notrium 1 at least in spirit, I'm probably willing to lend a hand with tooling the engine to suit Notrium.
I think you'll find many people eager to remake Notrium in Driftmoon's engine.

"ville" said:
My own plan is to do Notrium 2 with the engine in the future. It will take a long time to complete I'm afraid, so doing a remake of Notrium 1 might be a good idea.
Actually, that sounds perfect. If you make sure the Driftmoon engine is capable of a Notrium remake, making Notrium 2 with it will be that much easier (since all the same features will already be in it).
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Venom31 15 years ago
"Anonymous1157" said:
Actually, the short-term goal I was aiming at is better SFX and GFX in the existing Notrium game...
I see... You wanna mod Notrium's "flesh", not "bone", that could be used even in its latest version perhaps. Sad I'm not much of a drawer. I see more of the story and balance changes, than the need in graphics and sound. Mentioning that, however
1) graphics:
a) alien. I can see some discrepancy in how the alien (hero) looks in menu (kinda those "Aliens 1,2,3,4...") and in the game (what the...?). It brings me to a thought that I don't imagine what all aliens in Notrium look like, actually;
b) guns. There's no difference in hero (or marines) holding a pistol and a warp gun . Well, you know the drill...
2) sound. All is good for me. OK, OK, I had some sound bugs due to don't-know-what driver problems, that went away. Yeah, the number of background music tracks is not very vast . Going to menu (e.g. save) and back to game interrupts the current track and starts the next one (that's not even sound, it's engine thing I guess).
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Anonymous1157 15 years ago
"Venom31" said:
I see... You wanna mod Notrium's "flesh", not "bone", that could be used even in its latest version perhaps.
Yes, exactly!

You make some interesting points about what probably needs fixing:

1a ) I've misunderstood you.

1b ) Personally, I never noticed that there aren't that many custom weapon animations. However, the only other animation I would dare add is one for weapons held to the side, like the shotty or the warp gun. I would want to keep it simple.

2 ) What I meant about audio is that it wasn't compressed very well, and someone who is paying attention or is very accustomed to their headphones would immediately notice some of the quality loss from MP3 compression. I've had these headphones for three years, so maybe I'm the only one who will ever notice, but it's there. Take a good listen to menu.mp3, which makes it very obvious; specifically the cymbal-type-thingies sound like "shh" instead of "tss". Only ingame1.mp3 particularly sounds better thanks to compression, IMO, and ingame2.mp3 isn't compressed nearly as far.

... Oh, and maybe I'm crazy, but does Notrium support MIDI?! Opposing Force has a MIDI soundtrack!
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ville 15 years ago
I have no idea whether it supports midi or not. I haven't made it support it, but it could due to some strange twist of fate.
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Venom31 15 years ago
2 Anonymous1157
Alright, I listened to the menu.mp3... again . I can see (hear? :/) what you're talking about, but personally I never thought it wrong, hehe. I just listen to what it is, and if it sounds more or less harmonic, I don't care about how bad cymbals became due to compression. One should have a really nice ear to see (hear!) such high matters, so since I got none, you may be quite right .

As to 1a)... You see, if you look at the runt alien's picture to the right when you start the game, she has 2 legs, 2 arms ending with claws, a head and a tail. Judging by what we see, we proceed into the game, thinking or her as a look of a blue alien. However, she's got a brown alien's model, painted green. So we may think she's kind of a brown one... But they should have tails then! (Again the tails theme pops up, am I some kind of a pervert? )
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Venom31 15 years ago
Absolutely forgot to talk about animations, but not that how creatures move, the animation.dat file. I personally like that comics-style things, so I want to talk about the contents themselves.
1) Death screen depicts only human.
2) Same goes for "Master of Notrium" and "Call for help" endings.
3) Not animations itself but concerning endings - Psionic can't do the Pod escape, Call for help, and Mysterious scroll endings. Its Eden-master walkthrough is very easy and fast, but it's very pissy, apparently too far from what logically should be made of it. I've seen Werivar mod made changes to these Psionic capabilities, but how does one complete it with all that psi bugs?
4) Talks about beer and family . That text is the easiest part to change, different races should have different endings description. Talking much, something like this (further on I don't talk about human, he's all fine ):
A) Master of VC
- Android - animation OK, text OK (the animation doesn't show character, so...)
- Alien - oh my, does she care for those money? maybe she'll just devour marines and try to hatch new forms of aliens; and using their ships conquer the world
- Psionic - animation OK, text OK (well, not the best shot, but let it be ATM)
B) Master of Notrium
- Android - animation: insert android instead human? whatever, text OK
- Alien - all change totally (perhaps for our queen sitting on enemies' skulls, surrounded by her elite brood guardians)
- Psionic - animation: insert psionic instead human? whatever, text OK
C) Eden plant-chief
- Android - whatever if it has anything biological in it, then it's OK
- Alien - animation OK, text OK
- Psionic - a total story change? Maybe exerpt from Werivar, I'll look at that "code" later
D) Pod escape
- Android - animation OK, text OK
- Alien - well, we may suppose such ending with comments like spawning large offspring and loading the pod with the siblings, long way in hibernation to Dorian Prime; and give that all back to that mocking bastards of your homeland! Like that :/
- Psionic - animation OK, text OK (just a small change in items.dat to make the Pod usable)
E) Call for help
- Android - animation OK, just change description (what exactly, any ideas?)
- Alien - I think she can't talk or what? If so, the transport's cap'n just won't understand her!
- Psionic - animation OK, need a small change in items.dat to make the Working Subspace Radio usable, and the comments to be changed
F) Mysterious scroll
- Android - animation OK, just change description (what exactly, any ideas?)
- Alien - animation OK, just change description (oh, she won't be happy to just return to her home planet!)
- Psionic - animation OK, need some "spell" to break up crates in Mining Fields to get necessary parts, usable Security Box, and... what the heck? Notrium just seems to be psionic's home planet. Don't know, maybe this ending should stay forbidden to it (him? her?)

P.S. Looks like this thread belongs to Notrium modding in the first place.
P.P.S. Sorry for extra long posts ops:
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Anonymous1157 15 years ago
Long posts are good.

Honestly, if you WANT to go through the trouble of quintupling (Werivar) every single message in the game to make them race-specific, go ahead. It's a nice idea, but the way the game works would make it a lot of work.
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Venom31 15 years ago
Not every single message, I'm just curious what was made of Psionic (and I can't test it in honest way, arrrg Lifeforce Doppleganger and the bugs). And I still think some of endings should be race-specific. The oh me is that I'm not good at drawing stuff, so I can't accomplish my own graphics "to do"s
The way the game works it easily allows to change "animations". That's good. Alas, my research on how-this-was-done in Werivar may, however, take quite some time; I didn't even manage to learn what's wrong in Psi Blast to fix it. BTW, am I right that condition 0 does not check for item absence quite right? It seemed bugged in Werivar when captain started to earn Specials: Lower Hunger into infinity, while the conditions were all correct
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Forum » Concerning the possibility of a Hi-Q package

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