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BOO! (Did I scare ya?)

2009-11-03T00:06:00.001-05:00

So, it seems like I should post something here tonight, since I missed an update last weekend, and since I'm working on a couple of pretty creepy villains, Sinestro and Parasite, that are somewhat Halloween-appropriate.

So what should I tell you about? Hmmm...

Sinestro:
- no new screenshots yet, but I've gotten some great inspiration lately from the Blackest Night / War of Light storyline. Plus I've had several contributions from folks that have potential. Expect to see screenshots soon. :)

Parasite: some new stolen moves I can show off:

Eradicator "Speed Punch" special

Starfire "Star Sphere" special

Poison Ivy's "Toxic Kiss" special (sprites by Dead-X)

There are a few others I can't show yet because they're not coded, like Batzarro's Rhino Charge special he sprited for me in support of his cool Rhino character. Plus still quite a bit of "smart palette" re-editing still to do. Always more to be done with this guy... <sigh>

Oh! And I've started a site redesign that will integrate this blog with my other two into one big great ball of awesome. So far all I've done is move the navigation from the sidebar to the top, but there will be more tweaks, large and small, in the near future.

Upcoming Hal Jordan changes - a recap

2009-10-16T15:47:00.001-04:00

This week I was a little light on spare time for MUGEN work, and what I had was spent on hand-editing Hal's sprites to use the new smart palette. Lots of work still to do there, plus the code changes. I'm also going to try and incorporate some of my fellow ScruffyDragon SethZankuten's changes that he's been giving Hal to play-balance him; more on that in a minute.

I thought I'd use this week's update to recap all of my plans for this next release of Hal Jordan, War of Light Edition (call it Version 2.0 WoL). From my notes, from visitor suggestions, and as best as I can recall, here are the changes you can expect in the next release, coming sometime before Blackest Night wraps next year (I kid; it'll likely be 2012 before it's ready to download, and the world may well have ended already. Or this upcoming Decemberween. Not really sure yet, frankly):

General code changes

Merge Knockout & Smackdown hypers (per Seth)
Ion Force hyper (Seth's new hyper)
Add a throw or two
No attacks or get-hits will generate power bar... you have to hold taunt (ring charge) to up your power

All spectrum palettes

Custom intro and win/lose poses (several donated by ScruffyDragon forum member Amon-Ra)

Red Lantern

More aggressive stance animation
No voice samples... all moves will be accompanied by growls, grunts, and screams
Replace Ring Strike special with a red vomit/blood/plasma attack
Replace Soldier of Oa hyper with fighter jet

Orange

More defensive stance animation
Alter Plasma Sphere special: instead of holding the opponent in place, it'll draw them closer to Hal for a follow-up attack
Replace Soldier of Oa hyper with an "Orange Corps" group beatdown: John, Guy, Kyle, and Kilowog

Yellow

Replace Buzzsaw special with (different anti-air move)
Replace Knockout hyper with Parallax (fear entity, not Evil Hal)

Blue (+Green)

Powerbar quickly recharges whenever you're idle for a short time
Special and hyper moves cost half as much power as normal (since I can't give you a "200%" power bar ;))
Defense stats will be slightly higher, meaning he'll take a bit less damage than normally
Moves are occasionally blocked/missed/interrupted by the ring asking "what do you hope for?" (heh)

Indigo

As with the others, custom intro and win/lose poses
Increased resistance to energy-based attacks
(New special move to absorb / redirect energy from other corps (e.g. GLs, Sinestro, etc))
Replace Battering Ram special with Teleport
Replace Smackdown hyper with Enforced Empathy (e.g. Penance Touch)

Black

Custom voice clips
Super-robust healing factor (can only be KO'ed by a level-3 hyper)
Ring (i.e. power bar) charges very slowly, but using hyper moves won't deplete it

Hopefully more screenshots soon. I also have a YouTube preview vid in the works, but that's probably still a few weeks off.

Hal Jordan - Smart Palette

2009-10-09T20:53:00.005-04:00

smart palette -- red lantern -- orange lantern
Sinestro corps -- Default (GL corps) -- blue/green lantern
indigo -- violet (Star Sapphire) -- black

First, a quick note on this week's outage: I've done a move from my old web host to Dreamhost, and it took a couple of days to get the domain to switch over correctly. There was probably a better way to do the transfer that wouldn't have taken it down for so long, but at least it's done now, and good for a year.

Now, to tonight's topic: Hal Jordan, the Multi-Spectrum Lantern ® (heh). Friend and ScruffyDragon forum member ArmageddoN sent me some feedback on the color corps palettes I've been showing off over the past several weeks, and ways to make them even better (separate the glove hands from forearms so the Sinestro Corps palette can be accurate, lighten up the torso & gloves on the Black Lantern palette, etc). I took his advice, and also added another shade in the lower torso to make the suits a little more comic-accurate.

Oh, and I also added a palette for Star Sapphire (i.e. Violet Lantern), just for giggles. ;)

Hal as Black Lantern

2009-10-05T00:07:00.005-04:00

Here's the sixth and final palette I've got planned for the "Blackest Night" edition of our Hal Jordan character. As with Indigo palette, I'm speculating a bit on what a Black Lantern Hal would have as a power set, based on what we've seen so far from other risen heroes. Here are the ideas I have planned:

As with the others, custom intro and win/lose poses
Custom voice clips
Super-robust healing factor (can only be KO'ed by a level-3 hyper)
Ring (i.e. power bar) charges very slowly, but using hyper moves won't deplete it

And... that's the plan. I'm not sure when I'll have him ready for release, because that depends on some factors outside my control (my available free time being one of the big ones), but he's progressing. My ScruffyDragon teammate SethZankuten has also been rocking some cool tweaks to Hal for the play-balanced version that will become part of the DCvsMarvel game we've been building towards... some of those changes may very well make it back into this version, or they may get left as project exclusives for now, but either way, between the comics and the characters, this is a good time to be a Green Lantern fan.

Hal Jordan arcade intro

2009-09-26T21:03:00.005-04:00

Tonight I'm releasing a preliminary version of Hal's arcade intro for MUGEN, since it's been sitting half-finished on my hard drive for quite a while now. Enjoy!

You can download it from Hal's page, here.

Hal as Indigo Lantern

2009-09-19T23:56:00.003-04:00

Here's the fifth palette idea I've had for our Hal Jordan character to commemorate the Blackest Night crossover. It's pure speculation, because thus far Hal hasn't wielded the Indigo light, and (SPOILER ALERT!) it looks more likely that Ray Palmer will have that honor. I didn't plan it this way, but this week in Blackest Night #3 our heroes finally meet the Indigo Tribe, and we the readers start to see what they're capable of -- just in time for me to try and figure out what that would mean for Hal to wield their spectrum of emotional energy, the light of compassion.

So far we the readers don't have a lot of information about what the Indigos' shtick actually is. They appear to wield staffs as their power focus, but are depicted using rings as well. They also seem to have a knack for using / redirecting the energy of the other light corps: so far we've only seen this with green and yellow (in the "Tales of the Corps" miniseries a few months back), but there's no reason to think it won't work with the others as well. They also forsake individuality, even giving up their names when they join the tribe! So for that reason I don't really see Hal "Question Authority" Jordan fitting in well. But these palettes are pretty crazy already, and I don't see Hal joining the Violet corps (the Star Sapphires) without certain... biological alterations (they appear to have a females-only roster), so let's just run with it, shall we?

So what kind of customizations am I going to give Hal for this palette?

As with the others, custom intro and win/lose poses
New special move to absorb / redirect energy from other corps (e.g. GLs, Sinestro, etc)
Increased resistance to energy-based attacks

Kind of coming up short, here. I'm thinking I need more ideas... so if you've got any thoughts, feel free to post them in the comments below.

Next time, we imagine Hal as a Black Lantern!

Hal as Blue/Green Lantern

2009-09-19T23:20:00.002-04:00

Here's the fourth palette idea I've had for our Hal Jordan character to commemorate the Blackest Night crossover. It reflects Hal's status during the recent Agent Orange story arc: Blue Lantern Saint Walker had placed a blue ring on Hal's finger to purge the poison of the red ring that had overpowered him, and the blue ring was "overclocking" the green ring, but it seemed the two were constantly fighting for control. So.... the palette will actually be a mix of blue and green elements, not straight blue.

This palette will not only look different, but will also behave differently than red, orange, and yellow... since it's mostly defensive, rather than changing his attacks it'll affect him in other ways:

Custom intro and win/lose poses
Powerbar quickly recharges whenever you're idle for a short time

Special and hyper moves cost half as much power as normal (since I can't give you a "200%" power bar ;))
Defense stats will be slightly higher, meaning he'll take a bit less damage than normally
Moves are occasionally blocked/missed/interrupted by the ring asking "what do you hope for?" (heh)

So, mostly positive benefits, but at the risk of your high-power combo attack getting cut off by the overbearing ring. Seems like a fair tradeoff. >:)

Next up, indigo!

New portait

2009-09-06T00:39:00.007-04:00

(First off, sorry for the apparent "filler" nature of this post; the next episode of "Hal Jordan: Blackest Night Edition" is coming soon, but I'm still working out the kinks in the palette and how I want the intro to work, before I post it.)

With the above caveat out of the way, I wanted to show off the awesome portrait ScruffyDragon forum member The Arlequin just did for our in-progress Mandarin character:

(You may need to reload to see it; I was using a placeholder with the same filename before)

Isn't that awesome? It's now the image on both the Character Select and Mandarin pages of the site. Thanks again, Arlequin! :D

I also tweaked the code that I was using to generate my tag cloud on the sidebar... the maximum and minimum text sizes were too outrageous, especially considering how many different tags I am using. So hopefully you'll agree that it looks better now.

Since this is a long weekend here in the U.S., hopefully you'll be seeing "Bluish-Green Lantern" Hal on Monday.

-Edit- Fixed internal page links.

Hal as Yellow Lantern

2009-08-28T21:05:00.005-04:00

Here's the third palette idea I've had for our Hal Jordan character to commemorate the Blackest Night crossover. I can't find a comic scan of this look, other than the old Silver Age-style Bizarro Hal, who was also called Yellow Lantern. I don't recall it happening during the Sinestro Corps War crossover last year, but maybe it did and I just can't remember. But the fact that it's one of the five action figure variants DC is selling this summer gives me a clue that maybe it's coming up as part of Blackest Night.

Anyway, as with the red palette and orange palette, Yellow Lantern Hal will have several changes beyond the outfit and construct colors:

Custom intro and win/lose poses
Replace the Buzzsaw special with (something else)
Replace the Knockout hyper with one based on Parallax (the fear entity, not Evil Hal)

Next up, blue!

Hal as Orange Lantern

2009-08-15T02:56:00.005-04:00

Here's the second palette idea I've had for our Hal Jordan character to commemorate the Blackest Night crossover. Still no download yet, and I'm thinking "smart palette" might not happen... his current palette is pretty difficult to work with, and I don't really feel much like hand-editing hundreds of sprites. But I will do enough to make all of the palettes work, anyway.

As with the red palette, Orange Lantern Hal will have several changes beyond the outfit and construct colors:

Custom intro and win/lose poses (the custom intro you see in the above shot is courtesy of my talented friend and ScruffyDragon forum regular and contest winner, Amon-Ra)
More defensive stance animation
The Plasma Sphere special will behave differently: instead of holding the opponent in place, it'll draw them closer to Hal for a follow-up attack
I may alter/replace one of the hypers, too. Not sure yet.

Next up, yellow!

Green Lantern: First Flight

2009-08-10T01:37:00.002-04:00

(Listening to: Ring Capacity, by Kirby Krackle)

I watched the new straight-to-video Green Lantern movie, First Flight this weekend. Overall I enjoyed the heck out of it (and the soundtrack was EPIC), but I had a few quibbles.

Most striking to me was that, despite a few nods to current continuity (e.g. Sinestro's "evil" uniform, his motivation for opposing the Guardians), but overall the mythology Geoff Johns has built up over the past few years isn't there: the yellow impurity, Abin Sur's killer (and why he died), even the role of the central power battery is different here.

I don't want to be "that guy," I recognize that the GL's decades-long history of published comics needs to be streamlined in order to produce an approachable film, but I personally felt that a few more nods could have been easily made, for example Abin Sur's killer could just have easily been Atrocitus, even if his backstory was different. And framing the "green power" and "yellow power" in terms of the emotional spectrum would have been a nice touch, even if their respective entities and the other five color corps aren't referenced. But then again, there's nothing necessarily preventing those aspects from getting grafted on after the fact, just as Johns has been doing in the comics themselves. If successful enough (hint: go buy it!), I can totally see them doing a Sinestro Corps War movie.

Which would be at least 31 flavors of awesome.

Hal as Red Lantern

2009-08-06T06:27:00.007-04:00

Here's the first of several palette ideas I've had for our Hal Jordan character in honor of the just-launched Blackest Night crossover. No download yet, as I'm working on a rather complicated "smart palette" to enable some costume alterations.Red Lantern Hal will have several changes beyond the outfit and construct colors:

Custom intro and win/lose poses
More aggressive stance animation
No voice samples... all moves will be accompanied by growls, grunts, and screams
The "Soldier of Oa" hyper will be replaced by a new move I won't reveal (yet)

More to come soon. Still busy getting settled in to our new house and new work responsibilities, plus I'm working to try and merge my blogs at my new host (more on that soon), so I'm plenty busy even when it looks like nothing much is happening. ;)

War of Light idea

2009-07-18T17:46:00.004-04:00

Sorry this is a day late, still neck-deep in boxes from last week's move.

In honor of the new Blackest Night / War of Light event that just kicked off in Green Lantern this week, I'm toying with the idea of releasing a series of patches for my Hal Jordan MUGEN character. The idea is to redo the sprites so that I can do custom palettes reflecting all of the various other lantern corps that are part of the ongoing event, and give each alternate palette a custom move or two, maybe a custom stance or intro or winpose as well. The first candidates will be red, orange, yellow, and blue, as Hal has briefly wielded each of these rings in recent issues of his title. (Indigo and Violet may not happen, in fact... that remains to be seen). Anyway, I'll be taking a look at what it would take to redo Hal's palette to support this kind of customization, and will post more news soon.

Updated Omega Red powerset

2009-07-10T13:00:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I showed off the Omega Red power set I was making for Parasite. I wasn't really happy with having the "death spores" only as a hyper, and I remembered an idea someone on the ScruffyDragon forums suggested to me a while ago: why not have the special release a single spore, which seeks out and clings to the enemy and does a negligible amount of "nuisance" damage, then have a hyper that cranks the spore power "up to 11"? Sounds unique and crazy enough to be something I'd try to fit into this character... so I am. =) So far the spore special, shown here, is done. I'll do the hyper soon.

A few new Parasite screenshots

2009-07-08T05:09:00.005-04:00

As I slowly work my way through my Parasite "to-do" list, I'm finding things I want and need to change. I noticed yesterday that I hadn't added the preview screenshots for the Wonder Woman and Captain America stolen specials; so here they are:

(Stars-n-Stripes sprites come to me courtesy of my ScruffyDragon teammate JeffPR, and the Fierce Olympian sprites are ones I adapted from some donated by Acey of Infinity MUGEN Team)

Weekend delay

2009-07-05T21:59:00.005-04:00

Missed my regularly-scheduled post for this past Friday, and I apologize: the long Independence Day weekend kept me pretty busy. That said, I've been working on expanding out some of Parasite's power sets:


Poison Ivy's "Explosive Growth"	Aquaman's "Telepathic Stun"

Iron Man's "Plasma Beam"	Invisible Woman's "Invisible Maelstrom"

I'm also toying with the idea of taking on a Poison Ivy WIP... the only one I've seen that's been released is pretty disappointing, and I'd like to see more good comic villainnesses in MUGEN. No promises, though -- not even sure about sprite base(s) yet, so that'll be a deciding factor. I've already got a couple of really-hard-to-frankensprite WIPs (Elektra and Sinestro are both tricky to get "right"). So stay tuned for more details on that.

I'm also in the process of a major site revamp, and I'm considering merging all of my blogs (this one, my Coding blog, and my Root blog) into a single WordPress blog, with the content separated by categories. Would this be a good idea, or not? Please post your thoughts in the comments.

Parasite: Marrow and Omega Red powers

2009-06-27T03:32:00.003-04:00

Yesterday Zvitor released his first beta of Omega Red. In honor of the occasion, I've added support for him to Parasite... so far only the "Death Spores" hyper is done, though, because I have to do some hairy frankenspriting to make the special look right.

I've also got the Marrow power set mostly done. The Stinger Bones hyper needs a little work, but it's getting there.

Link: new version of Fighter Factory

2009-06-26T08:07:00.002-04:00

Just a link this morning; I'll have the regular Friday news on my WIPs later tonight.

The other day I read over on Marcus McElhaney's blog that VirtualTek has released a new version of their Fighter Factory software, which is my main tool I use to assemble and program my characters. Tons of updates make this an upgrade worth doing, even though it means having to re-learn some of my techniques. Check it out.

New site features: tags/labels

2009-06-20T22:14:00.004-04:00

So, yesterday I got an itch to try and write some code to auto-generate a "tag cloud" to present a slightly different way to dig into the deep content on my blog. It amazes me that I've actually been writing this thing for nearly 7 years now! (since August 2002) That's a lot of content to go back through, if you were looking for some particular post that had dropped off of my front page due to age.

So, as of yesterday, all the content on this blog has now been tagged (Blogger uses the term "labels," but it amounts to the same thing, and "Label Cloud" doesn't sound as snazzy), and you can see the label(s) for any given post at the bottom-left. (this post is tagged as "site news"). If you click on the tag/label name, you'll be shown a single, large page that includes all of my posts on that subject. I've also added a preliminary (and admittedly rough) Tag Cloud section to the navigation bar on the right side of the blog.

You probably know how tag clouds work, but in case you don't: the size of the tag name indicates how often I talk about that subject. Some of those surprised me: for example, I expected the "12 Days of Christmas" posts to be pretty prominent, and the tag reflects that, but "Lobo" still has all the rest of them beat, hands down. Makes sense, I suppose: if you view that tag's page, you'll see that early on I posted just about every little stinking detail of his progress up to the 1^st alpha release, 1^st public beta, 2^nd public beta, 1^st "it's done" release, and last year's remix. Plus I still think of him as one of my favorite MUGEN "children." So yeah, I've posted a lot about Lobo. ^_^

One note: a lot of those early posts are broken in one way or another... either because I linked to my old CJB-hosted redirect (prior to getting my buyog.com domain), or because I used relative paths to link to stuff, or because the old content doesn't exist online anymore (which, alas, is the case with many of the old screenshots, sprite animations, and alpha/beta releases). At some point I may go back and fix some of them, but then again, maybe they're more authentic this way. What do y'all think?

Anyway, I've found it mildly diverting to trip down memory lane and see how far I've come in the past 7 years. Here's to many more.

Kind of a slow week

2009-06-19T08:45:00.004-04:00

I've been busy finishing up a paper I'm submitting for publication this week (grad school thing), so haven't had a ton of time to work on MUGEN. That said, I've done a few things.

First, a little clarification on last week's update, since I got several comments on it that missed the point: the Doomsday in that screenshot ISN'T available for download, nor will it ever be, because it's just a training dummy I created for making demo shots like that one. It's got a stance animation, taken from DeanJo's full-fledged Doomsday WIP and that's all. And no, I have no idea when DeanJo's project will be done and released. So I'm sorry to have gotten everyone's hopes up. For now you'll have to be content with the 3d Doomsday, or Team Spoiler's less-than-ideal-but-not-horrid version. (And no, I won't email those versions to you. Google for them if you need to, or look on Infinity's forum. What am I, your concierge? =P)

Now, with that out of the way... a guy at the ScruffyDragon forum that goes by the name "Matt God Church" wanted to help out with Parasite, so he sent me his edits for a custom strong punch for the Carnage powerset. Plus I've been experimenting with custom moves for the Green Lantern powerset. So here's a peek at those two:

I've also been thinking this week about how the customized basic attacks are going to interact. As cool as I think it would be to have, say, a stretchy, Plastic Man-style Venom punch, I fear it may open up too huge a can of worms if I set the precedent that all 100+ power sets can interact. That would mean I'd have to come up with (and edit!) 100² = 10,000 different possible attack combinations! Clearly, that's NOT gonna happen.

So, moving forward, I think I've decided that power set #1 will determine the customized behavior of punches, and power set #2 will likewise determine custom kicks. Separate them out that way, at least for now. Maybe later when I'm done with my grad school, independently wealthy and retired from my day job, and crazy bored, THEN I might consider editing 10,000 different sets of basic attacks for a single MUGEN character. Or, y'know... maybe not.

Custom punches for Doomsday & Ice

2009-06-12T00:56:00.003-04:00

My partner Jet the Phoenix continues his great work on designing custom powerset-based attacks for Parasite... here are the custom punches for Doomsday and Ice:

(Note that the Doomsday character in the above screenshot is just a "ragdoll" I put together with a few sprites from DeanJo and Kal-Elvis. It's not finished, it's not public, and no I won't trade you for it. It's just a test dummy I use for Parasite, until the real one's done.)

Someone sent me a message this week, saying that he was afraid that Parasite was maybe getting TOO awesome, and all of this custom stuff we're throwing in will make the character bloated and slow. All I can say in response is, we're shooting for a truly unique experience here, and I'll do all I can to make sure he's the best -- and most bug-free -- as he can be.

Parasite Gets All Venom-y

2009-06-05T01:34:00.003-04:00

Jet the Phoenix continues to crank out custom powerset ideas for Parasite, and I'm trying to keep up by coding them faster than he's sending them (I'm behind right now). The current plan is to give him some combination of custom hard punch, hard kick, guard, and stance for each of his different powersets, when possible. Here's a peek at the Venom customizations to hard punch and guard:

More Parasite customizations

2009-05-30T05:11:00.005-04:00

Sorry this is late; Grad school tasks took priority last night.

My Parasite partner, Jet the Phoenix, shared a great idea with me recently: over and above the special and hyper moves, different power sets should "feel" different. His suggestion for one way to achieve this was by customizing his guard and his strongest base attacks. So far I've been working on Ice and Thing power sets, but others will get this treatment over time as well:

-Edit- I neglected to mention that the new stuff I'm adding to Parasite is almost all Jet's work at this point, and the guard effects are no exception. He's a great partner, with a ton of really good ideas to make the next release soooo much better than the first. :)

More Parasite smart palettes

2009-05-22T04:34:00.004-04:00

I'm apparently suffering from Parasite-derived insomnia tonight. It's 4:35 am, and I've been making crazy Parasite palettes for several hours now! I think I may have gotten it out of my system now, though. ;)

(Some of the "normal" ones up there, and a few of the custom ones too, are courtesy of Sei and JtP. The really insane ones are all me, though. ;))

Promising character updates

2009-05-15T22:51:00.007-04:00

As I mentioned earlier today, there have been some pretty cool things happening with my in-progress characters in the past few weeks. Here are a few of them:

New Thing 1

* I recently received an email from Jet the Phoenix with a very generous gift, and a great idea. The gift was a large subset of Parasite's sprites, edited to include the white stripes that his modern incarnation usually sports:

The idea was for a very sophisticated "smart palette" for Parasite, which would enable me to not only have the green shorts and white stripes versions, but a ton of other character-inspired variations as well:

Shortly after JtP sent me this stuff, I shared it with my friend and talented sprite artist Sei, and completely unsolicited, she generously sent me a new, more aggressive stance for Parasite, using the smart palette JtP had designed!

New Thing 2

* In another unsolicited and generous offer, Sei sent me this new stance animation for Lobo, which I will be adapting to the character soon:

New Thing 3

* Lots of people have been sending me their ideas for Sinestro moves. Some have been really good, and I'm looking for ways to incorporate them into the character. No screenshot this time, but trust me when I say he's looking pretty promising.