Open SenhorFlibble opened 2 years ago
Andrettin
commented
2 years ago Please, there's nothing to apologize for, it's perfectly fine to use issues for these, well, issues :)
Thanks for sharing the dragon! I think it wouldn't fit in very well with the game's existing graphics, though. But it would be a cool resource for modders.
SenhorFlibble
commented
2 years ago Speaking of modder resources, I've been digging the Stratagus forums (sadly abandoned, as it seems), and discovered Nikita Sadkov's posts from 2016 where he, among other things, discovered high-quality unused building sprites for both original factions that are lying in the Aleona's Tales CVS repo. As far as I can tell, it has everything except naval structures, the Dragon Roost, Fortress and Orc towers.
The credits have the author's name: Lital Natan. No other info is available. Might be the same as this guy. Anyway, I thought those could be pretty fitting for Wyrmsun or mods, considering their high quality and general compliance with the Warcraft II style.
I've had Aleona's Tales on my radar for a quite while without actually playing it -- wanted something more like WC2 visually, which Wyrmsun catered to just perfectly -- but recently I decided to check out the latest version of AT, only to find out that it was broken (v2.4.3 bundled with Wargus). I managed to figure out that this was caused by faulty and/or incorrectly arranged PNG, which I was able to fix.
It also turns out that some graphical assets are incomplete or of subpar quality, which is a shame because the game offers more than WC2, including advanced scenario scripting -- I fondly remember playing around a lot with StarCraft Campaign Editor so this speaks to me (although it is my understanding that there is no proper campaign / scenario editor for Wargus / AT, everything still needs to be done by text-editing scenario files). There's generally a charming style to the game, with some fairly high quality pre-rendered and hand-drawn sprites.
On a slightly different note, I've been unable to run Kyran's Timeless Tales branch from 2016 which uses Wyrmsun resources alongside AT ones, mentioned here. I downloaded the most likely set of Wyrmsun data & scripts, but it appears that this release also requires a special version of stratagus.exe that supports the scripting, which I don't know where to get, if anywhere at all.
SenhorFlibble
commented
2 years ago I frankensprited a new "wild" farm from Wyrmsun assets: link
Which license can this be assigned? Should this follow the same license as the original assets I used?
Andrettin
commented
2 years ago @SenhorFlibble yeah, I've had great fun with Aleona's Tales in the past :) And sorry for the long delay in answering your comment!
Timeless Tales is IIRC not much different from AT, other than being rebranded. AFAIK Timeless Tales does not require Wyrmsun at all, the Wyrmsun graphics it uses are all in its repo. Just a stratagus executable should be enough (maybe the latest one would work?).
Andrettin
commented
2 years ago I frankensprited a new "wild" farm from Wyrmsun assets: link
Which license can this be assigned? Should this follow the same license as the original assets I used?
Cool :) Yes, in this case using the same license as the tree stump would be necessary. The Mushroom Farm is under the CC0, so any modification to it can be under any license. But the tree stump has more restrictive licensing; it is dual-licensed under the GPL 2.0 and the CC-BY-SA 3.0 (which require modifications to be under the same license), so that the wild farm would have to be licensed under one of those two licenses (or both).
SenhorFlibble
commented
2 years ago In the meantime I updated the Aleona's Tales fix: aleonas-tales-2.4.3-fix-r2.zip
I decided against importing any Wyrmsun-based buildings into AT for now (including the frankensprited farm from my previous posts) because of the notable disparity in art quality, even though AT has used Jinn's lumber mill for a long time. However I used some unit sprites, namely the riderless gryphon and the Gnomish Caravan, to make better placeholders for the Daemon and Goblin Sappers, respectively. In the process I found out that MSPaint (from Win8.1), of all software, is very good at downscaling pixel art images.
AFAIK Timeless Tales does not require Wyrmsun at all, the Wyrmsun graphics it uses are all in its repo. Just a stratagus executable should be enough (maybe the latest one would work?).
Unfortunately this is not the case, the scripts are dependent on a Wyrmsun folder being inside the TT folder, as explained here. It is however not clear which version of Wyrmsun and / or of stratagus.exe are required, and my attempts to guess had failed so far. Predictably, any Stratagus version I used crashed with errors related to Wyrmsun LUA scripting, as TT apparently tries not only to use the graphics and sounds but also call Wyrmsun LUA scripts as well.
Andrettin
commented
2 years ago I see, I hadn't realized that it directly required Wyrmsun (or maybe I've forgotten; it has been quite a few years since Kyran did Timeless Tales). Either way, it's nice to see work being done on Tales, it was fun to play its campaign back in the day :)
SenhorFlibble
commented
2 years ago It looks like Wargus 2.4.x included a version of the updated Frontier Force campaign similar to the one in the Timeless Tales repo. You can start the campaign just fine in Aleona's Tales 2.4.3, but from mission 2 it expects to have new NPC images for briefings as shown in this video by Kyran, which are not bundled with any Wargus release at all, but even when these assets are added it still freezes because I believe it also expects some extra LUA scripting too.
I guess this can be bugfixed eventually but will take some figuring out the details. Sometimes the stderr.txt files generated by Stratagus have preciously little useful info (e.g. they gave zero indication of which PNG files were wrong or missing in the default 2.4.3 installation, pointing to some legit files instead). But for now I guess it would be easier to just roll back to the old version of Frontier Force from v2.3.
BTW, do you know why the development of Timeless Tales got to a halt? It appears from forum posts that there were Kyran, Yukiko and possibly some other users working on it, but at some point in or after 2016 it just all stopped without any indication. Really a pity, because it seems that they tried to push scenario scripting to a new level with branching missions etc. There can't be too many Warcraft II-inspired games :)
Andrettin
commented
2 years ago It looks like Wargus 2.4.x included a version of the updated Frontier Force campaign similar to the one in the Timeless Tales repo. You can start the campaign just fine in Aleona's Tales 2.4.3, but from mission 2 it expects to have new NPC images for briefings as shown in this video by Kyran, which are not bundled with any Wargus release at all, but even when these assets are added it still freezes because I believe it also expects some extra LUA scripting too.
I guess this can be bugfixed eventually but will take some figuring out the details. Sometimes the stderr.txt files generated by Stratagus have preciously little useful info (e.g. they gave zero indication of which PNG files were wrong or missing in the default 2.4.3 installation, pointing to some legit files instead). But for now I guess it would be easier to just roll back to the old version of Frontier Force from v2.3.
BTW, do you know why the development of Timeless Tales got to a halt? It appears from forum posts that there were Kyran, Yukiko and possibly some other users working on it, but at some point in or after 2016 it just all stopped without any indication. Really a pity, because it seems that they tried to push scenario scripting to a new level with branching missions etc. There can't be too many Warcraft II-inspired games :)
I remember the TT briefings Kyran was working on, but unfortunately I don't really know more than what you said.
Kyran and Yukiko are the same person, and he was AFAIK the only person working on TT. He still pops up in the Stratagus Discord from time to time, maybe you could ask him there :) https://discord.gg/dQGxaw3QfB
SenhorFlibble
commented
2 years ago the scripts are dependent on a Wyrmsun folder being inside the TT folder, as explained here. It is however not clear which version of Wyrmsun and / or of stratagus.exe are required, and my attempts to guess had failed so far. Predictably, any Stratagus version I used crashed with errors related to Wyrmsun LUA scripting, as TT apparently tries not only to use the graphics and sounds but also call Wyrmsun LUA scripts as well.
I was eventually able to run Timeless Tales with Wargus 2.4.3 and Wyrmsun data from version 1.9.2. However, I had to make the following changes:
Other than that, the Wyrmsun directory must be called Wyrmsun and be located in the same parent directory as the Wargus directory, e.g.
C:\Games\Wargus\ C:\Games\Wyrmsun\
I'm attaching a zip with modified Wyrmsun scripts: tales-fix.zip.txt
Apologies once again for possibly using the issues system for a wrong purpose, but I know no other way to communicate with you.
I've attempted to improve the dragon sprites from Aleona's Tales using the ESRGAN neural network, specifically using a model called Pixel Perfect (4x_PixelPerfectV4_137000_G.pth). It upscales images to 4x the original size and smoothens the dithering. I then downsized and palettised the result: original colours, team colours.
Since Wyrmsun does not appear to have a flying dragon unit yet, perhaps you could make use of it?