finally back to lerd,
another of the very old 2003 monsters, redrawn at ten times the size with slightly more competent animation.
marginal progress, major reminder of how stupid my life is, which I do not need, because I do not forget.
the movements of the tail appendage do not match on each angle, but they do not have to, merely not look terrible, and only the back facing one does, along with the arms, that look more like a low-impact exercise than a motion to pull the body along a floor but it looks better than the old version, to me, and inside that game the old one looked fine so I will be impressed to see how this ends up being worse.
the mid-section is a different color now but I can palette-swap it to green in-game. And I can also NOT palette swap it to green, in case you were wondering why I’d bother to discolor it at all. the colors only need to be distinct, not specific.
keeping the color zones distinct and mapped to indices on the game’s 256 color “palette” means they can be changed separately from each other, to colors which are not necessarily on the palette but for the purpose of preparing this example quickly they are.
There was never a reason for lerd having four breast orbs before, as it only had two arms. maybe it looks unique but I don’t want people to think I have a fetish for bare cartoon breasts considering how much other fetishy junk I have attached to my name in the intervening years. ALTHOUGH if, as today’s commenter suggests, having just two makes the problem worse, I can change them back or try something else entirely.
i will start the next non-snake comic strip page next. probably. you might think i have spent some of the long period since posting the most recent page figuring out what is going to appear on the next page but you ought to know me better than that!
really stupid idea i had years ago but only believed i had the means to execute this year and it still took longer than was remotely reasonable.
years before that I messed around with ripping my own spc music out from super nintendo games, and observed that I could play save states from the emulator “zsnes” as if they were spcs, even though sometimes there was stuff wrong with them, such as tunes playing with the wrong instruments loaded. That is is how I ended up with the screwy mario paint music which reminded me of dopes. somehow or another i ended up with a version of this options screen tune from the super nes game sparkster which only had this single sound channel active, and it made enough of an impact on me that I continued to dwell on it for long afterward. I thought for certain it must be an error, but the snes plugin for winamp allowed me to disable individual sound channels on a properly created SPC of the tune, and indeed that corny organ is in there just like that, buried under the audible instruments. I hadn’t run winamp in years but I had to dig it out again to export the different layers of the tune for this dumb cartoon. Imagine, if winamp had only been more shoddily coded and unwilling to run on windows 7 this whole mess might have been prevented.
the yeep and meteor were added late when I realized someone might assume this was just a dumb loop of the first pose and turn it off early if I didn’t show something else non-cyclical happening. they need to see that it is a dumb longer sequence than that.
but i also have to consider the organ grinder’s situation: you are trying to encourage people to give you money but then some dumb DOPE comes along and starts doing some STUPID DANCE. it is hard ENOUGH to attract customers when your only skill is spinning a handle to make corny music come out of a box, but NOBODY is going to come with a DOPE there, even WITHOUT the horrible dance.
what are you looking at? me? do you think i am going to bail you out of this? it is not my fault that the music is corny and decided to degrade to its base corniness. if YOU choose to degrade and TRANSFORM into a regular dumb old corny animal that should not be my problem.
some bits i forgot to check on until just now, not worth mentioning since I can fix them silently later. the point of this was to change things that other people WOULD notice.
I think it is superior to the old version, though possibly only because it is a substantially less compressed video. back in 2006ish I considered it secondary to the swf version. now websites will not play the swf version at all so this is all there is
and even the swf is huge now due to all the “brush” lines in it rather than the ugly “pencil” lines with bucket fills from before.
I fixed some of the issues but then I remembered that I need to re-match the beet herald (internally known as “lactorp” but i never truly decided on that)’s mouth to the re-recorded audio even though some of those mouths I only drew a week ago since the replacement “it’s heeyah”s I only recorded this week.
LATER! I made more changes, including text outlines like the other two videos. There are still some pencil-tool-drawn objects remaining, maybe they can stay. but after repeatedly being disrupted by hearing it I realize I need to re do the voice right before “come look, come and see” again. It no longer sounds like greegorp, the character with big glasses, but it doesn’t sound like this character looks, either. oh what a life, oh what a house.
yet later i recorded it to sound more nasal. I hope that is all.
beet 2, again, with marginally redrawn visuals that took much longer than is justifiable for the level of evident difference, with very quickly altered audio that is substantially more obvious
possibly not quickly enough, since though I changed my mind about some of those percussion effects, then my electricity went out in a storm so i could not post upload a video at all and the sound program fl studio responds yet less favorably when my computer machine only feeds it battery power.
this gif attempts to show the state of a largely empty section of my music compositional space in the 2017 version of the music versus the 2024 version of the music. The only thing limiting me from piling in even more was me subconsciously not wanting to go beyond the vertical extent of this space and thankfully I did not think about it hard enough to consider: I can extend this space infinitely. Most critically affected seems to be the “they come from far off distances part” because I must have thought the singing sounded worst there, and so as much distraction from that as possible without blocking it entirely (or singing it better) seemed to think it was in order.
I could add proper sound effects to the cartoon but it seems like i would rather add every drum noise possible to the music, with my typical level of organization. since I am just dropping them on the time line rather than assigning them to a drum slot, it is difficult to keep track of which ones I have used, and likewise difficult to control them if they turn out to not be in the composition’s best interest. if I can’t quickly find one to replicate I will often just add a new one from the collection of 5000 or so that I downloaded back in 2015. Ideally I would use my own recorded noises, since I have just as many or more of those but since those aren’t integrated into the flstudio interface and my hard drive is organized worse than this timeline I generally give up searching after adding in about 3 of them. Very likely I could have them integrated into the software but aRRRRRRRRRHHH I’VE BEEN PEGGIOED
it is the beet 1 cartoon that really needs help, and especially to have its comically low-resolution youtube edition replaced –at the time it was the most I could upload on my crummy internet and I encouraged people to watch the native vector infinitely upscalable SWF flash video instead and HAW HA HWA that used to be possible– but I had wanted to reupload this one since the original export had some idiotic setting applied accidentally that for whyever reason I needed years to notice. i could have simply disabled that setting but I seem incapable of doing anything simply.
a video of every drawing from 2023. naturally i spent more time making the title animation than assembling the slide show, which itself took several days because there is apparently no program that can batch export .clip files and the keyboard shortcut for exporting singular files in xnview hasn’t worked the last few versions. Also thanking people who gave me three to eight dollars altogether and then were never heard from again and who won’t see this video ought to alienate the last few people who have made prolonged attempts at supporting me in more meaningful ways who didn’t get thanked in this video. It ought to but since none of the names are legible due to flash animating this more slowly than it appears when output most of the time and the screen being packed with irrelevant junk, some of which appears in FRONT of the names, so I hope you can enjoy this curious mess of unreadable scrolling letters.
oh! the music was mostly made in 2004-2008. It was chosen for this due largely to the length and the fact that it had not already been used in a video. Then mostly “today” i tried to rehabilitate it with drum noises, more midi trumpets and a conclusion, then also an introduction due to the extra time from the conveyor belt animation, and I swear curse and profane that it sounded REALLY nice five hours ago, when I was listening to individual parts of it through one ear bud while sharing a room with wrestling documentaries and legendary zelda tears on a moderately sized television box before going outside to do an improper superstitious year-switching ritual in honor of a dead person whose incorrect version of the ritual is inexplicably important to me to keep repeating even though it hasn’t yet worked. although since I keep doing the ritual I don’t actually know what would happen if I DIDN’T do it. I certainly won’t suddenly not have poisoned a coherent fake sitar tune with fake trumpets and sound effects
AND SO after sleeping i reduced the volume of the new trumpets and corrected one minor animation matter that I kept dwelling on, and so now THIS version is roughly adequate.
yes indeed i cheated ANOTHER update out of this same thing!
i suppose that is that for now. Unless it isn’t. It could be worse. Which I know from wanting to fix something wrong with it every time I look at it and that one component subsequently being less wrong the next time I look at it.
which also means I am impossibly critical of part 2 now. i had already started on redoing part 1 but had not expected to feel that way about both of them. 2 does have to be reuploaded regardless since the one I posted a few years ago inadvertently had some awful interpolation filter on it (placed on -every- video piece by unchangeable default, alas) that fades between EVERY frame and inadvertently makes the whole thing look like a $1 “digitally remastered” public domain cartoon dvd. somehow I only NOTICED that last year, and seemingly only considered “hey i can turn OFF that dumb filter and REPLACE that” within this week.
I changed the fake ending because I didn’t want a piece of someone else’s video within one of my “important” videos, but weird 1960s Harry Secombe pickwick may yet return the next time I have difficulty deciding what part of my candles to set on fire.
ah ha! sound effects it could use. but i cannot spare 2 or 3 more days of putting them in and constantly noticing more visual problems for the time beaning.
and a third: this may result in the sparsest “year in pictures” yet but i WILL get that dumb cartoon out. or outer than it was. I finally got annoyed enough at the beet beast’s flat face to try and make it more angular. i may have subconsciously been channeling kumquat when i should have been thinking about more of a rotund lope. maybe i was sub-subconsciously averse to that since I still have not concluded or explained the rotund elpse in the comic strip for the past few years / hour of comic strip time.
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and a second updirt: i underestimated how treacherous the larger character’s whiskers have been. the rudimentary way I have them drawn the first 30 seconds look more like “whiskers” but less like whatever weird bulb-ended things I decided to draw them like in the later 30 seconds more recently. And now I must choose one!
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indeef, now that I am looking at the animation from even two years ago it confounds me that i ever thought it was acceptable! even on the easy-to-draw purple imp, some of the movements are awful, and I have no choice but to improve them. I wish that meant I was good at animating now, but it only means I was worse at animating before.
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more of this. it feels to me like cheating to use this as an update since the effort I put into cleaning the animation and backgrounds is mostly obssive compulsive in nature and impossible to discern unless you have been seeing the dirtier yet once-acceptable contents constantly like I have. AND i still need to apply that habit to whatever perceptive dirtiness may have accumulated since the last time I had the first half open for editing.
as possibly previously mentioned, I needed to separate 3beet.fla into two files some time back, since it was taking prohibitively long to make saves, with auto-saves a particular nuisance but that I did not dare disable since flash has historically been the most crash-prone program I use as of 2006 when I stopped being able to use Ben Morris’ Doom Construction Kit in after I switched to a windows xp computer and could no longer use dos applications except through emulation and decided I finally needed to learn how Doombuilder worked.
goop lorp was that 17 years ago?? how old AM I? And this level still isn’t finished.
I definitely need to re-record the audio, even if it is destined to eventually be re-recorded by someone else because the line “roundabout this time” especially sounds bad. I don’t have underbreathed enunciation issues when I practice singing it in the bathroom so presumably I could do it better now. i could even just re do that part and paste it in where it belongs. But I haven’t yet because audio editing requires, from me, a different state of mind than tedious image editing does, and asking other people to record is several layers worse. But I try to optimistic; I always believe a situation can get worse.
11-23-2023
oh nuts I totally lost track of what day this was updated. i had best force something out
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yes this again, but now all its movements are filled in! not all fully shaded and I would like to make them look more cohesive and fish-like, but for now i can focus more on the beet crony. and also displace that text heap from last week that was not meant to be such a heap or have a week’s worth of prominence. i occasionally worry that this blue creature looks too much like the gobliins 2 character winkle even though i feel like i have considered and dismissed this before. i don’t want it to be yellow because then it looks related to the larger creature. green and red feel too generic, though. meepwhile grey and brown are too boring and orange simply doesn’t suit it.
winkle has a similar skin tone, head point and sharp nose, although its nose is not a beak, it lacks a tail and wears clothing. winkle has a mischievous nature and of the two heroes is the one more likely to annoy another character and be physically abused on account of it. Although the frog in my example yells at both of them. I used to collect sprites from this game a long time ago in windows 95 before the dosbox emulator existed, and goblins 3’s odd use of the video mode made them too scrambled to grab when windowed, but the collection was one of few pictures I accidentally deleted! I attempted to remake it via proper screenshots once I knew how to do that but I did not feel as inspired and consequently it is lacking in gobliins 2 poses.
indeed
Another scrap of beet beast animation. I believe I am more than half done with this creature and after that theoretically progress could be if not faster at least more linear, with fewer multi-layer characters using multi-layer furniture that they are both in front of and behind. This seems a bit out of synchronization with the audio. as long it is out of synch consistently, moving it back in is simply a matter of dragging rectangles on a grid. the bootleg sony vegas that I use for video assembling –crucial, since the flash video data is presently in four different files, and two just for this part– tends to stutter at the start of clips so it is hard to match video to audio with precision without a few tries.
HM and that black spot in the center I thought was on my screen when I first noticed it a few minutes ago but evidently it is in the video! I wonder when it appeared. I hope it doesn’t mean what it does in Treasure Island, that pirates are coming to murder me, because I don’t want to die with my bedroom so untidy.
here is an annoying hanging imp
it drops down and hits
this pig so it turns and stops yelling “herrow” at and pushing back the player, since unlike this video from February that area actually has other constructions in it now that prevent the pig from merely being ignored.
the imp is summoned by this problematic lever.
if the lever is used enough times the imp will get yelled at by the pig and then appear again beside the lever to hit that instead, which then afterward renders itself unusable.
the lever is behind the hammock imp,
who must be attacked with a strawberry.
the strawberry comes out of a vending machine which for the time being can be directly activated by the player. It only has one frame but I use internal manipulation to make it jump up slightly when attacked and then shake after landing since for now i am not forcing my self to animate it. I didn’t even finish drawing it, really; the large strawberry on the upper right is pasted over directly from the hand animation above it here.
But still that is five separate animated objects all for this single dumb little task. The lever at least can be reused to activate other situations and the pigs can decorations elsewhere, but I really do not manage time well. There may be more evidence of that fact in the immediate digital vicinity.
the hammock imp can officially be offended by a strawberry in real time. implementing this as usual took more effort than it should have, but also as usual it involved doing something for the first time that I expect will be easier on subsequent uses of the same technique, which as usual probably will not be.
the gif version has a shadow. the one in the screenshot doesn’t because I only just added it and it still looks awkward. But it looks worse without one. Wolfenstein 3d (and blake stone) sprites had shadows drawn on the ground but conventional doom engine never did, since they can leave the ground and in the 1993 code there was no way for an object to check if it was on the ground. And also perhaps the only way to ensure the shadow was never lighter than the ground was to have it always be full black, which looks cartoony. Never mind the bright red blood or weird saturated blues in the palette. But cartoony works for what I am doing, at least to a degree.
there is a way to automatically generate duke-nukem 3d style shadows behind objects but that looks bad with anything meant to appear attached to the ceiling or that might possibly appear near an edge, as the shadow will always display in full even if it runs out of level ground
the snapping motion is for if the player attempts to attack it with something other than a strawberry, which for the moment flings the player backward into the air (surreptitiously using four wah blasts fired at once) without inflicting damage. HOWEVER, this view change makes clear that despite the shadow issue the object still isn’t REALLY attached to the ceiling! If I make the ceiling lower, the top of the sprite gets visually cut off from the ground view which prevents you from seeing the creature escape through the ceiling when it does and also that I applied a minor palette conversion to make sure the trap door is the same color as the ceiling!
see?! you almost can’t! see it! which means it might as well not be there at all! aye yike so much to do
also this is my first time running the game since upgrading my RAM from 16 to 32 gigglebytes back in may. Now the game only slows down approximately exactly as much as before
I decided that early in the dope “game,” in order to progress it would be necessary to annoy this thing, whatever it is, by throwing, probably, a strawberry at it, after it asks you to bring it some blueberries.
I have yet to draw in the orange ribbon-things. yet I made a retaliatory gesture for if the player tries to attack it with something other than a strawberry, even though i could have just have the thing “WAH” at and force backward the player since, as evidenced by the linked sequence, it does have that “power.” But I also like the idea of it remaining calm UNTIL the strawberry.
AND all this will probably only be seen once!
I like in hexen how some “switches” are activated with situationally relevant items rather than just pressing the activate button in front of them, but I dislike the heretic/hexen inventory system, as it uses buttons I do not normally press, and they can be used regardless of what the hands are doing and can be used rapidly and stupidly in the heat of combat, provided you have remapped the buttons to something more practical. I want to try out the idea of using items the same way as weapons. it is tricky because generally only buttons 0 through 9 can be used for selecting those, but since the player is controlling a dope i probably wouldn’t give it too many items at once, and i would remove weaker versions of weapons that get replaced so the same number could be used to select them. like chaingun takes over the pistol slot, that sort of thing.
OF COURSE i have seen modifications where the pistol still has value since it is more precise, or like in dark forces where the chaingun-like gun uses more bullets than the regular gun. right but a lot of this is still speculative. Yes even after 6ish years of development, after more years of more passive development before that, I still do not know precisely what I am trying to do.
nuke dukem 3d has the equipped weapon go away and a hand show up and use keycards, when necessary, without needing to designate a keycard as a weapon, but I don’t know how to do that in the doom engine or if there even is a way without another pile of code I don’t understand and I hate asking for that.
my idea might still be annoying, unless the solutions are fairly intuitive, especially with thrown items that would need to be picked up again or replaced. this one isn’t intuitive, but since, at the moment, the strawberry is the first item you can get and there are only two points of interest that you might think to throw it at i IMAGINE it is functional, which is an improvement upon imagining that I might think of things to try later.
But I also need to make more comic pages. It is funny to have a project where even less takes longer to happen than in that.
I never finished playing lagoon either. I much prefer the present tasks I am never finishing.
a creature previously identified as zipe or eemp that i want to be able to jump, like the fyip now can, but also jump kick despite those requiring different animations because i am never efficient where it counts.
i like the idea of fyips flopping over if they try and jump down from too high a point. obviously i haven’t made any frames for that yet! but zipes being glop-formed (similar to dopes) simply splotch on the ground slightly. i have not planned nearly well enough to have their glop characteristics matter more deeply than that.
also now seeing these against this dark background I realize how inconsistently colored they are, a likely consequence of the regular jump frames being totally new while the kicking frames I initially drew in 2019 before I introduced shadow colors and simply altered this week. Of course the jump pose uses a walk frame as a base, BUT both the walk and kick attack were based on 2003/4 era sprites, with the kicking motion made after I amended the game palette to have two extra dark browns, which I guess carried over into the remade sprites to some degree even though those were all made with the same number of browns available, so in fact they didn’t match before either, but it wasn’t as glaring as this since the shadows weren’t colored then. Does that make sense? It shouldn’t. I will need to see which looks less out of place once I implement the new set of motions. The creature being colored isn’t nearly as tough as it thinks it is whatever the case.
today is this website’s twenty first or twenty second anniversary. I do not talk about my birth-day but i mention its. However I named myself “bimshwel” after it and retroactively renamed it to just be this/the/that website so I owe it at least this courtesy. It will continue to be malnourished on update quality.
for the first time in united states of america history a president, former or otherwise, has been criminally indicted. but I want to talk about something more important.
not the most imaginative vegetation but the movement makes a difference compared to the old versions.
I also tried to make their scales relative to each other more consistent, but I did not succeed! These are full size and the gifs are between 20% and 25% of full size.
I should see about adding stripes to something since the spots may get tiresome. I have the power to make the spots glow in darkness by making an overlay for each frame with only brightness values, which I already did for the eyes on one of the imps, though I am wary of doing too much of that after all the slowdown I have already had from sprite over-laying.
the colors seem at first a tad flat relative to the old versions that I made with whatever colors I felt like, but the solution to that is more directly within my grasp without additional images needing to be loaded than brightness is.
I still CAN use whatever colors I want, but I desire to keep animated objects within the 256 color game palette so that the file sizes would be lower than true color images, since these are quite larger than before, over 1000×1000 pixels per frame, on average, and there are quite a number of frames! But I am able to alter how the palette is accessed.
Unfortunately this program, called Slade, has a strange malfunction in its palette recoloring manager –apart from its frustratingly small window sections that ordinarily can’t be resized and the few that can will rapidly revert to their default size– that will copy the first gradient color on to the second one if a graphic that the palette change is applied to already exists within a set of definitions that I view within this editor. And it may not be apparent here but I have swapped seven sets of colors so far, two gradients for every set of 16 colors, because a single gradient across that many looks worse than the regular palette. And so I must immediately remove the data for that palette change from the file and put it into a different one that will never be opened in this editor ever again. and if I didn’t get the colors correct –which I can’t really be sure of until I see it within the game– I have to manually text-edit the color numbers to tweak them. HOWEVER up until maybe two weeks ago I also created them by text-entering the numbers so this tedious inconvenience is still an improvement. Even with the bug it lets me establish which palette indexes are being replaced rather fast.
so I only need to figure out HALF of this!
these things can now jump in places where normal monsters would stop and turn around. once in a while they even get somewhere.
for whatever reason in the south-west-facing angle I had the left arm lower, but every other angle had it up, but it was west and north-west that looked out of place, so I “corrected” them to match southwest even though that one is wrong. the jump looks too ostentatious with the arm in the air. it looked like the creature should be making that pihGAA grunt that Kyle Katarn in Dark Forces does when he jumps. It was making me laugh.
but maybe that is good and i should switch them back.
they also have marginally improved pain frames, since part of alleviating the repeatedly cited “lag” associated with this creature is exporting its sprites as single pieces rather than layered fragments that can be reused for different versions of itself (but that ultimately create a load problem since the game struggles more with volume than mass, essentially), so rather than have them wiggle around independently I have no choice but to animate them properly. however their “death” frames and all frames for the shorter pointy-noised “fyop” are still layered like before so those are not in here, though they tried to be. And then I spent too much of yesterday trying to make a better looking test area to show the sprites in, and I ended up filling it with so much useless doohickery that the video capture still gave me problems. Also the test area is still ugly.
in any event now I can do more important things
or I can start redrawing and adding needless animation to old pieces of scenery that nobody will notice because they hang from ceilings and aren’t interactive or important. ah, a life well-spent.