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Sacred 2, The Ancaria Beautification Project


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On 4/24/2022 at 8:25 PM, Vishanka said:

There you go, Jungle and Thylysium Slum area 'fixed'.

5Llsx1W.jpg

sdP51Jm.jpg

 

 

Nothing short of dazzling. I've gone back and forth over your work and its a unique eye you have applied to Ancaria, like nothing really seen before.  A lot of the colors in the palette and styles originally used were garish and eye sores :lol: but you've added a touch of lush, details and with restraint, its an inviting world.   Thanks for adding so much to this game Vishanka, your time has brought wealth. 

And bit thanks Steve for this marvelous Colab... helping each other always gets us forward :hugs:

:)

 

gogo

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  • 2 weeks later...
17 hours ago, Vishanka said:

Thank you, I'm still on it, just a bit busy :P got a promotion in my job that I love. It's a bit chaotic and busy at the moment but it will calm down soon.

nice work on the promotion Vishanka! Its been tuff at my job with a lot of changes happening  during these unruly times. Im delighted to hear your job has recognized your steadfast and detailed work... Champagne and chocolates time ?

:Laie_58:

gogo

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  • 1 month later...

@Vishanka  May I use some of the patches and miniobj files for Diablo 2 Fallen?  Namely the grass and ground textures for Tyr Lysia + Artamark.  They're pretty similar to the ones I have, this would mainly save me the trouble of going in and making the little yellow grass tips that are oh so lovely.  With full credit to you of course.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Thylysium's botanist reporting for duty!

Tried my best to work on those flowers.
I had a version with more pink but then I liked the red ones and the people I asked also liked it better with red flowers added.

EAhSpUu.png

w32oqrF.png

 

eMKJM3m.jpg

M6USAzu.png

 

One more at night

o6TzdPC.png

kN4FfT7.png

 

What do you think?

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22 minutes ago, Dax said:

Pink and white mixture looks best I would say.

That's the original texture, but that's also a feedback for my work then :crazy:

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I prefer the one at the top and second from the bottom, Vishanka. The second from the bottom has a deeper, richer shade of pink which looks quite splendid. :agreed:

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2 minutes ago, Hooyaah said:

I prefer the one at the top and second from the bottom, Vishanka. The second from the bottom has a deeper, richer shade of pink which looks quite splendid. :agreed:

Thanks, I didn't change anything to that texture, it's the original.

I really dislike the quality of the original image though, but what else to do with it? You can't view it up close because it's so messy

Sw2ei0W.png

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The pink could be a bit darker shade of pink and the yellow could be substituted with red or violet or cobalt blue. I'm not fond of the yellow, but the white looks good. I was instructed to use a little splash of cadmium red here and there in paintings during my Major in painting. You can see such in the works of masters like Monet, Manet, and Seurat.

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Well, imho, original art design is superb, it has its own unique style - iwould call it anime-like and sunny day with no clouds. Many people complain that colors are unnatural, toxic and bright. Well the grass is looking exactly like it should under bright sun(the problem there is no sun in game and proper shading but thats another story)

This mod I would call rainy/cloudy day. Its very cool, but for me it is somewhat off the general game art style, for ex. jungle region are not looking like savannah anymore:dntknw:

Well, all my rantling is about that pink flowers were introduced specifically to be in tone with brigh sun/anime art style.

For your mod red are more proper, naturally looking and just just:lol:hands down.

Imho, this mod is ideal for Diablo Fallen, since diablo 2 art theme was nighty and rainy...

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33 minutes ago, lacr said:

Well, imho, original art design is superb, it has its own unique style - iwould call it anime-like and sunny day with no clouds. Many people complain that colors are unnatural, toxic and bright.

When Sacred 2 came out I was hoping for a sequel to Sacred 1.
To me the game never felt like Sacred though because they overdid it with the goofy style. I think I started modding after a month when it came out.
The first part also had A LOT of jokes and humor, especially if you're german, but it was interwoven in a darker world that I would have liked to have seen in Sacred 2 as well. The first game with better graphics if you will.
That is definitely a personal preference and of course everyone sees it differently and that's perfectly fine.
I actually have Sacred 1's color palette in mind for the mod and I want everything to look less overdone, that's correct :)

What you can't see here is that I also replaced the music with Sacred 1's, the voices, NPC dialogues, monster sounds... I tried to remove the kobolds completely but it's so much work... (not part of this mod, I mod a lot for myself)

If it were my thread I might have called it Sacred 2 Underworld or something at some point, depending on how much more I tinker with the game. :D

 

47 minutes ago, lacr said:

For your mod red are more proper, naturally looking and just just:lol:hands down.

Imho, this mod is ideal for Diablo Fallen, since diablo 2 art theme was nighty and rainy...

That was actually my feeling too, not only because of the color palette but also because of the more realistic texture. This was also often done in the original textures, I.e. real plant species were used. In the case of trees, the individual species are even included in the file name.

I don't know why they didn't do the same with the flowers, but I think the filename "doesn't stay like that" might have something to do with it. :D

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1 hour ago, Vishanka said:

That's the original texture, but that's also a feedback for my work then :crazy:

Oops. Well, I dont got Sacred 2, so I cant be blamed. Lucky me.

Speaking of S1, do not know if you still play it, but I can say that some big things are happening right now in terms of modding. Had in mind anyway to ask you and Lindor to take a closer look at the new text file. If you want to of course. Its a bigger story. Quite time consuming, but I really would like to hear a different point of view.

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2 hours ago, lacr said:

the problem there is no sun in game and proper shading but thats another story

well, actually it does. You just can't see it because the camera is the sun/moon. Each pixel shader has "light_col_amb" which is moon light and "light_col_diff" which is sun light as input, and these two are dependent on the ingame time. Most of Sacred 2 uses Blinn-Phong-Shading for specular and diffuse, and they always depend on the sun and moon model.

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41 minutes ago, Lindor said:

well, actually it does. You just can't see it because the camera is the sun/moon.

But wouldn't that mean that if I turn the camera, the shadows would have to turn with it? But the shadow moves with the "position of the sun" throughout the day without me moving the camera. Is that something different then?

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1 hour ago, Vishanka said:

But wouldn't that mean that if I turn the camera, the shadows would have to turn with it? But the shadow moves with the "position of the sun" throughout the day without me moving the camera. Is that something different then?

Shadows are calculated from a separate shader for each object, each gr2 model has a "shadow_map" assigned and from there the shadow is calculated. The first step is a function for the shadow in pak/shader/include/shadow.shader, the second step includes a different shader which then sets up the vectors to project the shadow at the ground. There are lots of different shaders which do that, I haven't looked super deep into it but I think it depends on your ingame settings and texture quality which shader is used. The vector for each Vertex is called "posInLight", and is calculated by multiplying the position of the vertex with the hardcoded "lightMatrix". I assume this Matrix depends on ingame time, but I don't know for sure because it's hardcoded.

So short answer: I do not know.

 

EDIT: Oh and btw::thumbsup:

Edited by Lindor
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4 hours ago, lacr said:

Well, imho, original art design is superb, it has its own unique style - iwould call it anime-like and sunny day with no clouds. Many people complain that colors are unnatural, toxic and bright. Well the grass is looking exactly like it should under bright sun(the problem there is no sun in game and proper shading but thats another story)

This mod I would call rainy/cloudy day. Its very cool, but for me it is somewhat off the general game art style, for ex. jungle region are not looking like savannah anymore:dntknw:

Well, all my rantling is about that pink flowers were introduced specifically to be in tone with brigh sun/anime art style.

For your mod red are more proper, naturally looking and just just:lol:hands down.

Imho, this mod is ideal for Diablo Fallen, since diablo 2 art theme was nighty and rainy...

Well I agree in part. The darker, deeper grass colors were based on the grass textures I made for D2F in the first place. I was also going for that same Diablo look after all.  Vishanka was able to really achieve what I was going for, with more realistic eye-pleasing tones.

But big parts of this mod really do make the game more beautiful and not Diablo-like at all.  All the gorgeous flowers for example. I think these designs very much suit Tyr Lysia which is supposed to have an idyllic, abundant landscape.

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My 2 cents:

I personally like it colorful, with high chroma and lightness. That's why the swamp region is my least favourite, it already was in Sacred 1.
The last picture is my favourite, This particular area however is where the rich high-born elves of Thylysium have their meetings, I think the flowers should be a little bit denser there to make it look less like wildlife and more like an expensive well-tended flower garden. But I think this would immediately make lots of other areas have denser flowers as well where it would be inappropriate?

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10 hours ago, Lindor said:

But I think this would immediately make lots of other areas have denser flowers as well where it would be inappropriate?

The density is mainly an optical illusion of the way grass and flowers are created in Sacred. It's just 2D textures that are stuck together like paper Christmas trees you used to make in elementary school.

100_1194_1260229972.jpg
That means if I add a blossom to the flower, there will immediately be 4 more blossoms in total; I found that 4 blossoms per flower (=16) is the maximum that still looks good, for most plants, after that it gets too overloaded.
Personally, I want it to look good zoomed in too, not just at max distance.
I'll try to add a flower each for pink, white and yellow and leave red as it is. I'll be walking around for a while to see if there is a conflict in other places - this yard screamed for rose species but in regular grassland roses don't really fit.

There are 3 more of these files and at least 2 of them are also used as wildflowers.
I hope they haven't used this type everywhere in an inflationary way..

 

11 hours ago, Flix said:

All the gorgeous flowers for example.

In fact, I take a little bit out of it; I've tried around a lot in the last few months and also used the original models again to try to stick to what Ascaron might have had in mind, but the blossoms are huge and everything gets really TOO colorful. Above all you can see that it's always the same model with copy/paste and a different color. But worst thing are the plant stems, they are just not done well and look like a graphics bug. One just didn't notice that as much since the grass somehow overwhelmed all the flower colors with its bright green.

I think the flowers everywhere should enhance the landscape in an interesting way and add variation but not be too eye catching. If you take a screenshot, they should fit into the overall picture, but you shouldn't have to stop at every carpet of flowers as if it was something special, I think that's too much of a good thing.

 

For Diablo Fallen it might help to just darken the flower blossoms... buuut if it was my mod I think I would replace most of the flowers with wildgrass... and just keep a few flowers like buttercups and dandelions... nothing special...  just an idea :)

25004895_max.jpg

 

Edited by Vishanka
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On 4/20/2022 at 2:12 PM, Vishanka said:

Unfortunately, I don't know about the Addendum Version.

Should be adequately compatible. If you don't mind, I'll encorporate the mod into the next iteration, all credit references present.

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On 7/9/2022 at 9:53 AM, Vishanka said:

Thylysium's botanist reporting for duty!

Tried my best to work on those flowers.
I had a version with more pink but then I liked the red ones and the people I asked also liked it better with red flowers added.

EAhSpUu.png

w32oqrF.png

 

eMKJM3m.jpg

M6USAzu.png

 

One more at night

o6TzdPC.png

kN4FfT7.png

 

What do you think?

spectacular

i feel like im in the Montreal Botanical Gardens...

you pushed every petal powerfully

:superman:

 

gogo

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6 hours ago, Vishanka said:

The density is mainly an optical illusion of the way grass and flowers are created in Sacred. It's just 2D textures that are stuck together like paper Christmas trees you used to make in elementary school.

100_1194_1260229972.jpg
That means if I add a blossom to the flower, there will immediately be 4 more blossoms in total; I found that 4 blossoms per flower (=16) is the maximum that still looks good, for most plants, after that it gets too overloaded.
Personally, I want it to look good zoomed in too, not just at max distance.
I'll try to add a flower each for pink, white and yellow and leave red as it is. I'll be walking around for a while to see if there is a conflict in other places - this yard screamed for rose species but in regular grassland roses don't really fit.

 

Thanks Vishanka

Great explanation of how magic in this game is manufactured.

:schot:

gogo

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On 7/9/2022 at 9:53 AM, Vishanka said:

Thylysium's botanist reporting for duty!

Tried my best to work on those flowers.
 

 

 

On 7/9/2022 at 9:53 AM, Vishanka said:

 

What do you think?

Looks like Thylysium's loves you for their botanist posting

:thumbsupsmiley:

gogo

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