Christmas release?

[ZeaLitY]

The Cerulean Lake is captivatingly beautiful. It is like the secret jewel of the project in itself...

That image I've attached is godly. The water is already dreamlike, but to stroll up to the edge with nothing but the infinite clouds beyond Zeal awaiting your eyes...

I guess we have that classic dilemma now. The image I've attached is so striking that it could be used as a project screenshot. But it gives away the surprise.

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[Chrono'99]

If you want to show a picture of the location, maybe we can have this one with the textbox. It hides half of the screen so it still keeps a bit of surprise for players (then again, it shows the Nus...). Note that I changed the color of the textbox, as you can see. How does it look? I tried to have a good balance of blueish-purpleish.

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[justin3009]

Looks really nice.

[nightmare975]

I take it we're releasing it tonight?

[FaustWolf]

What's the status of the ending art idea? I'm back in action now; go ahead and release and I can follow up with a separate patch if you guys still want it in later. Unless it's been taken care of?

[ZeaLitY]

You can pick up where you left off. We'll wait until your patch is ready. Oh, and hit the interview questions after, and I'll simulrelease the interview and feature.

I'm going to submit the news story to Destructoid and other sites which ran our Retranslation news before.

[FaustWolf]

Will do; thanks for waiting up. Hope this doesn't delay things too long -- doing my best to make the results worth it. Hoping for an ending pic patch tomorrow.

[ZeaLitY]

Anyone want to record a few scenes of playing Prophet's Guile for a Youtube preview video? The scenes would be limited, but could show

• Battle at Magus's castle
• Magus's status screen
• Magus walking on the 12000 B.C. / Zeal overworlds
• Magus walking through Kajar or Zeal Palace
• Magus talking to Queen Zeal as the prophet
• Magus walking through the beast's nest, perhaps a battle with one of our new enemies
• Magus walking around Mt. Woe
• Magus beaming down to the Ocean Palace (we don't show too much, though)[/i]
  

The music would be "The Boy Who Feared Time" by OneUpStudios, and would start directly with the electric guitar around 0:40. So the video could only be like 1.5 to 2 minutes long. Anyone want to give it a try?

Also, I'm assuming this forum becomes public upon release?

[FaustWolf]

Do we have any way of converting ZSNES movie files to AVIs at all? MPEGs would do as well.

If so, the clips could be joined, demuxed, and remuxed with the desired music.

Eh? Looks like there might be a way to dump video straight to AVI. Gotta find out how they did this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkVDmDpjWyI

I still have to read through this yet, but it looks promising...
http://board.zsnes.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3103

[Chrono'99]

Not sure about ZSNES, but I think SNES9x can directly record into AVI files.

I'll be away for the next couple hours, so here's a patch with the recent reported bugs corrected, just in case we're ready to release before I'm back or something. Don't hesitate to report other bugs or typos if you find other ones though.

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[FaustWolf]

I'll try the mencoder ZMV -> AVI method with ZSNES and throw up a test vid of Magus' status screen. If SNES9x can record in AVI directly, that will probably work better though.

EDIT: Awright, I'm just converting to SNES9x for this one. Way easier than what I was going to try; thanks for pointing this out Chrono'99.

[FaustWolf]

The videos come out pretty good. Take a gander at this:
http://rapidshare.com/files/82054154/PGIntroTest.avi.html

I've dabbled in video editing, and could take care of demuxing and remuxing as well as splicing the clips together I imagine. But I don't know how to do fancy transitions between scenes and fade-ins, that sort of thing. Is anyone here really really experienced in video editing?

In any case, we can capture the necessary scenes very easily with SNES9x.

I'm starting anew, so I can gather the following on my way:

Battle at Magus's castle (that's the intro, right?)
Magus's status screen
Magus walking on the 12000 B.C. / Zeal overworlds
Magus walking through Kajar or Zeal Palace (just a walk, or a walk and talk?)
Magus talking to Queen Zeal as the prophet

If others are interested in doing captures and have appropriate savestates (oh shoot -- have people been playing through in SNES9x all this time? I don't think there's any way to convert savestates from ZSNES to whatever format the SNES9x uses, is there?), all you need to do is File -> Record AVI (yay for user-friendliness ). I'd recommend using the XviD MPEG-4 codec on its default compression settings, since I've never had a problem with videos that result from that codec.

EDIT: Ooh, I've found a fade-in / fade-out effects filter for virtualdub, my video editing program of choice. If nobody else can take care of the actual video itself, I'd be very interested in giving it a shot. Zeality, can you throw up a link to the music file you wanted to use for this?

[ZeaLitY]

Yep, that's the intro, and just a walk is needed with maybe one NPC. I'll edit the music now that there's a definite contributor.

I'll begin putting the interview on an encyclopedia page in case Ramsus is unable to upload it for me.

Edit: I'm not sure if they're good at editing, but justin3009 and Vehek have both uploaded gameplay videos of their own making before.

[FaustWolf]

Alrighty. It'll take me about a day to get all the clips gathered, smushed together, and demuxed (with 90% of that time devoted to gathering).

If anyone happens to be around the later scenes and is using SNES9x, it would be awesome if you could do some captures and upload them somewhere, maybe on Rapidshare or another file uploading service, since the vids will likely be too large to attach on the forum if we want maximum quality.

Ooh, that's right, I've seen the vids done by Justin and Vehek. If they'd like to handle the editing, that's fine too since they have more experience than I. Let's get all the clips done and see where the cards fall.

[ZeaLitY]

BG music:

http://chronofan.com/Zeality/PGMovie.mp3

I'll prepare submissions to ROMHacking.net, Destructoid, and the other places.

...Damn, I guess we're virtually ready to release. Uh...well, time to get cracking on that interview...