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.
an eccentric imp melts, in 2023 and 2004. I do like the stripes on the 2004 version of this animation, but I also repeatedly didn’t notice that I forgot stripes, which happened with the same sort of stripes on elpse back when I first started coloring in the comic strip pages. if I would have the patience to draw stripes on all the other sprites of this thing. is also uncertain.
The old version also simply has purple hands and feet rather than wearing purple gloves over them as, for now, the new one does. Surprisingly, it is easier to draw those melt since the form does not need to be consistent between frames. Since I didn’t draw this from eight angles, however, switching the gloves to hands shouldn’t be as big a deal as some previous not big a deals ended up being.
That trick I was so proud of on the linked page, to put all the angles in one image, made the game too slow, trying to load them all at the same time, so I had to re-insert them all separately anyway. I might have mentioned that before, but I immediately forget what I saw after saying them. That is part of the point of saying things, for me, to get them out so I stop thinking about them and can think about other things. But that does not prevent me from beginning to think about them again in the future! At best I can send them to the back of the queue.
a video of pictures I made last year set to some suspicious music.
I hope you hate pine cones, since three or four of these pictures don’t have one.
It took a ridiculous amount of time to make this considering that it is 95% comprised of stuff I had already made. My trashter plan to display gzdoom-engine material from within the gzdoom engine rather than as gifs of the source material did not help like I thought it would. I opposed gifs since while I design the graphics grouped, I have to separate them to put them into the game, and I refine them after separation, so I didn’t want the less-refined versions. and some pieces, like the launched yeep parts mentioned (but not yet drawn and so not shown) previously, were separate to begin with. howEVER, since I draw the stuff at ten times the 1993 game’s resolution, and my computer is less than top-of-the line, those graphics need to be reloaded each time the game is started, and then I am having it load extra graphics and generate extra objects on top of that, IN ADDITION to me running video capture software, which means loading all that tomfoolery in an extra window while simultaneously saving a copy of it all, the game can’t help but choke up for a few moments when stuff is exploding. and SO I spent an extra day, two days? trying to reduce that, just a few seconds of the dumb video. And I already spent an extra day drawing all those dumb letters and setting up the circumstances under which they appear and explode. originally they were to use the same explosion frames as the launched yeep globs, hence my using the same colors, but those explosions looked too uniform, unless those were themselves launching more globs, but more globs meant more lag. and SO i drew EXTRA explosions for the letters I and O that would prevent them from needing to launch globs.
but that still means loading extra graphics so it doesn’t reduce THAT much lag. I also had the letters L and F turn into I and G into O as they explode, and that still wasn’t enough! For the yeep section near the end, I had all the pertinent graphics pre-load before I started recording, but that wasn’t an option with the letters because they FALL FROM THE CEILING as soon as the level starts. I COULD have preloaded all the graphics if I had thought to suspend the letters on disappearing floors or had them teleport into the room, but I was too busy to be thinking! I also forgot to set the level to change the colors to something other than orange, so that the aftermush looks less like a nickelodeon logo family reunion but if I had, I would probably still today be trying to optimize or fix it in some way and I am glad to not be doing that.
I can’t even show this picture without needing to explain it. the level editor shows a 2003 dope rather than a 2018 dope because it assumes the player character uses PLAY-named sprites, but the newer dopes have DOPE-named sprites, and I simply never took out the old sprites. the weird background is irrelevant; it is the first graphic in the definition file, since for some arcane reason that graphic shows up invisible in the game, but not in the editor. I needed it invisible so that the background shows through it. there are other hacky ways to make the ground and walls invisible but everything I do is already hacky so I preferred something that worked consistently.
these are off-center relative to the player character’s viewpoint because they seemed to my own viewpoint to be showing up offcenter when I placed them IN the center. However by the time I made the video that seemed to no longer be the case but I was too tired from the endless re-records hoping for less lag and more interesting random splat locations, then inserting that into the video, cropping out the wrong takes, then moving it to the front, then dumping it all that since I wanted to go back and change something else in the setup and then need to re-record again, that I left the positions alone.
“AASCREBO” will go to the top of most lists. It is not necessary for the list to be alphabetical, but I was trying to amuse myself. Regular Doom2 calls it
which I dislike seeing in the list, and regular regular Doom calls it
which I hate even more, and not just because the base-2 display system means you aren’t actually ALLOWED to make 24-length wall textures! Even if that worked it wouldn’t work! screbo is stupid garbage that nemitz says, and I had already changed the poison logo to feature nemitz, so it fits. I placed it over the pile of skulls that is shown by default after coloring them purple. I don’t want any of the base game’s graphics in this, even edited ones, and nemitz endorsements of rubbish are anachronistic within this project’s complex chronology of being set before nemitz, but as noted previously these don’t actually show up! but even THESE are a problem since floor graphics are backwards on the ceiling. If I want to control invisible objects that it is possible to move beneath, I risk seeing not only a backwards S but a backwards nemitz inside the level editor’s 3d view mode. What could be worse than that? I probably won’t find out until I try to make next year’s video.
and after all that, I today realized: the ORDER of the primary content is terrible. It starts on a snake comic strip that nobody cared about and then ends on generic wall textures that nobody SHOULD care about. I should have started and ended on stuff with meaning. I too more concerned with irrelevant nonsense to consider the marginally more relevant nonsense. There is probably an important life lesson there but I am too concerned with complaining to process it right now.
a yeep floats in five directions
a yeep has a problem in five directions
a yeep explodes in five directions
its tentacloids and eyeballs disappear because they launch as separate objects that are not necessarily coherent in gif form. the body dissolves since i want to have an all-directional mass of glop appear in its place, since non-moving, irregular objects can look really awkward with extra angles. Which I know because several monsters larger than this one DO have multi-directional bodies when punished and can look quite awkward. And I will likely leave them like that, but I can be cautious about creating more like them. sometimes
this latest yeep differs from past yeeps in that it lacks a darker colored midsection. I tried to sort out what that was and how it worked and could not, and so now it is not there at all. Much like several components of this website, except for once I took out something I didn’t understand on purpose.
the old exploding yeep did not need to launch the tentacloids since it only exploded from one direction and did not need its body to dissolve and be replaced. In trying to solve one problem I continue to create one or more others. And I yet do not know how i will sort out the tentacloids. The present single one in the south-east angle may not be viable since it does not take into account the possibility of the yeep exploding while off the ground. ALthough the old yeep didn’t actually finishing exploding after being beaten and launch its eyeballs until it landed, so perhaps this way IS viable. i think overall whatever result i get this time will be superior to what I had.
the old exploding yeep is actually not nearly as old as its other sprites; I drew the explosion in 2017. prior to then its body only had a single dissolve frame and i considered the pink blobs launched from it to be sufficient. I actually changed that because it looked really depressing if the sprites were browsed outside of the game, or pog forbid if somebody warped to level 30 and tried to force the original doom 2 monster roll call to appear, where none of this stuff looks right, that one would look especially not right.
NOW if somebody tries that the game will show sprites too big for the screen, or just show the regular game’s monsters, or crash completely, so REALLY I can get away with doing LESS for the yeep now instead of more. But I seem unable to do less unless it truly matters that I don’t.
as always, it needs more refining, but is far along enough now that I was able to remove the sketch and tracing paper layers for this part which allows me to get more control over the rest of the layers since flash has an appropriately outdated interface on which losing track of numerous layers is quite easy. The next section does not involve these two dorks sharing space with each other and more importantly doesn’t have them both in front of and behind any detailed scenery that I need to break into pieces and across yet more layers so ideally that will require 3 and a half months instead of 4 to get through.
I recorded, hopefully, better voices a few weeks ago but have not had the proper mood to go into the music editing program recently to attempt to implement that or check its adequacy for implementation. I may also have said that weeks ago. I no longer have the energy to verify what I said when since I use so many stupid websites now. I try to keep this one as the most special but it tends to get the scraps, unfortunately, though these days my scraps are often more dignified than my finished pieces.
thankfully the purplish idiot is significantly easier to animate than the yellow one. I didn’t bother yet to include it in the previous similar updates but since it invades the yellow one’s personal space it is necessary to detail it to some degree and this just looked bad with only those parts filled in.
as before, this audio will likely be replaced. the small thing ended up having sillier, more pathetic movements here and later than I initially “planned,” since I hardly plan anything at all, and a meeplier voice may be in order.
now I need to prepare for the “art show” in october. relative to past years, I learned this week that I will supposedly only have 8 by 8 feet and far fewer neighbors, no opportunity to set up the space prior to the exhibition date, if I am even permitted to preview the space in advance, if I am even permitted to know where it is, and so my preferred tactic of overwhelming with quantity, to distract from my general lack of completed, appealing, cohesive or marketable work will not be possible. I had been rushing (if two weeks to draw six seconds qualifies as rushing) to improve the scrappy beet cartoon with the perhaps irrational expectation that I would be able to exhibit it like previously, which would have been extra important since I won’t have a new comic book, and I shall have neither. So I must determine what both can be had and what would be beneficial to have.
////////////////
addendoy: I obviously have not done much casual thinking about measurements lately; 8 feet is actually twice as long as I was imagining it was, and 8×8 is comparable to what I had in 2019, though setting up, exhibiting, and setting down in one session is still an inconceivable effort unless I scale back my expectations.
following from that, here is a bit more visual progress. This isn’t pretty but it looks much better than it did, and I think better than the six seconds before it presently do.
yes that is all it is. and it took me a week! Or possibly more than that. When did I update this last?
corresponding with the part at this location
it needs more work but it has also taken more work since I have a terrible habit of increasing how much work something I have done before takes. Incorporating a chair piece that the creature’s left arm goes both in front of and behind necessitates a surprising amount of that. In the second beet video, the hand stays behind the chair arm, even when it shouldn’t, and if anyone noticed, I apparently didn’t, until I checked on it this week or last week.
the flash animation program not allowing me to change the cursor to an “eyedropper” tool with the alt key nor of lifting colors off of inactive layers is also a problem.
i only today thought to make a palette-only layer that doesn’t intersect with anything else and is always active. I hope i remember that in the future.
with regard to use of those colors, should the whiskers be orange? and out-lineless? Uncertain. I drew the first frame like that as a placeholder, then wondered if they needed outlines or to match the skin.
the voice needs to be re-recorded also, plainly. oh so much to do. I thought I might have the voice redone tomorrow, but I am concerned I would find a way to make that also take a week.
the hat and the “gun” get launched as separate objects that land vertically and so I can give my self to excuse to only draw them from one side. This gif is actually from april, but I neflected to mark that post as “motional” when I went looking at first and just assumed it wasn’t here, but it is. Anyway I have by now inserted all the sprite pieces from this one into the “game” and know that so far they work.
this one is from today. Evidently I exported these gifs in a different manner, but I assure you inside the “game” they match. Or at least the non-falling versions I already put in match each other so far. This shows the alternate version of the upper imp because i decided they shouldn’t fall down the same way, even though that defeats a large swarth of the point of having this be an alternate version of the same thing rather than a totally new creature. but hopefully this is the last animation I do of this setup from multiple angles. Just too gosh darn many parts. Even something as simple as providing the sweatshirt? as an alternate for the scarf means I need to be conscious of what small area is covered by the scarf that suddenly isn’t covered and might need to be filled in long after I thought I was done. And then even more gets uncovered when I try to export the separate parts as separate parts, which I then feel compelled to correct, even if there is no need to correct it since it will never be seen by anyone else, since *I* will still see it. oh bo fo. I thought it would go quickly since this fall doesn’t turn and I wasn’t making alternate legs or heads for it, this whole fall sequence being an alternate. Though knowing me I still might. Though I often think I will do things that I won’t, as I rarely know me as well as I assume I do.
I don’t show the other hat or the scarf in the second gif since the scarf and the shirt use the same palette range and would possibly have layer priority conflicts so that one might be behind the other inconsistently, and both hats occupy the same coordinates, at least in aseprite. after I export all the parts and import them into the gzdoom data heap, I can put as many hats as I want into any part of any sprite. Why would I want more than one? Why would I ask infinite numbers of hypothetical questions? I don’t know me, so I can’t tell you.
Hm hm hm this is the first time I compared the two fall types and suddenly realize that I will in fact need to make an alternate gun landing mode since despite both being vertical, the second is “facing” up rather than down. whupth. Guns really never stop causing problems.
the first three frames can also be played repeatedly to make the creature appear confused or amidst a very stupid dance. some other monsters can already be knocked over temporarily if hit a certain way, maybe this can be an equivalent situation. Or just a stupid dance.
a vaguely sketch-like commission for a human called gingle of a frustrating imp called elpse
I was requested to have it mirror the pose of this this similarly insufferable imbecile called nemitz from 2015, and so it does.
also this website’s twentieth birthday was two days ago. That is not important. What is important is that it has existed for more than half my life. My life is not important if all i have to show for it is a website which also is not! However I also have elpse and nemitz, lope and dopes. Consequently my life is an unforgivable travesty.