25 March 2006, 19:56 | #1 |
Graphics Astronaut
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: ziggurath
Posts: 34
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P.I.D. and Elfmania datadisk graphics released!
Hi all!
First section from my web gallery -the amiga section -is now done. And as I've been promising you many times here before, I have now released -with housemarque's kind permission- all the unused P.I.Dollarally and Elfmania datadisk materials on my webpage for everyone to see. Here's a sample from each (you may want to click..) It took quite a bit of my free time, because I had to go through piles of old disks and transfer them all to PC, then to convert them into GIF's - and there's LOTS of material; and I wanted to preserve them all. That's why it took so long. I'm sorry that there is no actual code to download;if there was it would be there. There's also other stuff worth to see; like unused animation tests for the Alien Incident game and my Nemesis the warlock upgrade that was done for Amiga. http://www.miharinne.1g.fi/amiga/Amiga_index.html Believe me, I'm really happy to show these out to the world at last. 12 years of wait is quite enough. |
25 March 2006, 20:04 | #2 |
Missile Command Champion
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Germany
Age: 52
Posts: 12,477
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The animations from the datadisk looks awesome, a shame that they didn't release it. I love the background with the treasure room.
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25 March 2006, 20:41 | #3 |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2004
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Cool, Elfmania has always been one of my fav games mainly because of the beautiful graphics.
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26 March 2006, 07:38 | #4 |
Powered by Motorola
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Good looking stuff in there.
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26 March 2006, 12:56 | #5 | |
Moderator
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27 March 2006, 23:01 | #6 |
Registered User
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The gallery is great!
Is that a female poster on the last frame? http://www.miharinne.1g.fi/amiga/ter...odder_walk.gif Here's the released version of the Altar/Cartilage split EP cover. http://www.metal-archives.com/release.php?id=8126 |
27 March 2006, 23:05 | #7 | |
Banned
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Quote:
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28 March 2006, 05:17 | #8 |
Graphics Astronaut
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: ziggurath
Posts: 34
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Yes, it was Stavvys 'butt poster' we did the digitizing in his room. Terramarque office was actually his home, and my home too, it was a 6 room apartment which we all rented together. I wouldn't recommend living in an office, though
thanks for your comments, and thanks for that EP link too! |
08 February 2016, 22:24 | #9 |
Registered User
Join Date: Nov 2017
Location: Italy
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The site disappeared: can someone help me to find that stuff, please?
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08 February 2016, 22:31 | #10 |
Registered User
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Location: ?
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Same, would love to see this stuff.
HOL has the P.I. Dollarally stuff: http://hol.abime.net/5568/screenshot |
12 February 2016, 13:07 | #11 |
Zone Friend
Join Date: Jun 2006
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P.I.D. as slideshow
[ Show youtube player ]
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16 April 2016, 10:44 | #12 |
Registered User
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Location: Auckland
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Thinking about this again since the artist for the original Elf Mania (NOT the original poster) passed away.
Does anyone have the complete set of Elf Mania graphics since the site went 404? Does anyone know anyone who might? |
16 April 2016, 12:48 | #13 |
I Identify as an Ewok
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: North Lincolnshire
Age: 45
Posts: 2,356
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The only way will be to contact the original poster. His last activity was February 2012. Maybe someone know an email address for him? I would like to see this as well.
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16 April 2016, 15:12 | #14 | ||
Banned
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Quote:
What a shame it was never released and this note on HOL made me sad Quote:
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22 May 2016, 12:19 | #15 |
Posts: n/a
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Hello,
I had headsup from an old colleague that this thread was updated and I had to make new profile since I no longer remembered my password and my email had also changed couple of times. I am glad people are showing interest to my old work again. I have all the stuff (I worked on) from PID and Elfmania, both on my A1200 hard drive and converted into animated .gif's Lots of stuff has disappeared with my site, which is a bit of shame, because it had lots of animated character portraits. It should be noted that they were planned as animated wallpapers. I am hoping to release these again, however I need some time and thought to think of best possible place for them. It should also be noted that they are still copyrighted by Housemarque, which may limit their use a little bit. Right now I have deadline breathing down on me, so I am not able to do anything else, not for couple of months at least.. If I had proper time, I would like to reconstruct those portraits as wallpapers and animate & scroll them, so they would match the original plans. It would feel proper to finish them off. But I have no idea when that is possible. Might take very long time. Here's some sample gif's for you anyway. |
22 May 2016, 18:22 | #16 |
Banned
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Hello there mjr,
Your graphics are absolutely awesome Do you think there will ever be a chance to finish P.I.D.? I get it that you're missing stuff and would probably have to re-create etc... There are loads of coders on EAB who could possibly help you |
23 May 2016, 11:36 | #17 | |
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Quote:
I also wish it would be possible to "finish" P.I.D. However, due to number of reasons, it cannot be finished. It can only be recreated. I give list as of why's. -Stavros never made it past the rolling demo. The rolling demo is lost, I tried to search for it but in vain. -I could only describe the game and what happens in it, or what was supposed to happen, from my memory, as what I remember from my discussions with him. And he didn't necessarily tell me everything. -Legally, the project is property of Housemarque, and their permission would be needed -The way background graphics is built is time-consuming to the extreme. I would not want to go building the levels they were originally meant to be built, therefore making it run on stock amigas would be impossible. You would need at least 8mb ram and HD install support. -I don't even have all the background art and car sprites, as I wasn't so heavily involved with those. They could be mined from Housemarque's A1200, but again that would take time. And they were not all finished. - Even if source code could be located and recovered from A1200 hard disk that is at the HMQ storage room, it is probably highly optimized spaghetti which would be extremely difficult to build upon. You would need to re-engineer it and build it from the scratch in order to be able to work with it. Also, the cars had surprisingly complex physics (each wheel was modelled and had their own traction, you could do sliding and other driving stunts that are common these days in car games but were absent back then). It would take time to figure it all out and make it run 50fps on unaccelerated Amiga. Technically the game was every bit as ambitious as Elfmania, which had some unusually complicated things (such as neural net and individual strong/weak points for every character and AI that was able to exploit it) running under the hood. To summarize it; recreating P.I.D would take years and hundreds of man hours, and it is likely that Stavros would not be pleased, if other people would start messing around with his baby. Even though PID is legally owned by Housemarque, not Stavros (AFAIK), I would still advice against recreating the game. Just believe me on this one. Best thing I can do, and I would be able to do some day maybe, would be to create mock-up video using animation software which could give you an illusion of what the game could actually have been. To make them run on amiga under some code would be tempting, but that would quickly lead to other things, and I don't want to open that particular can of worms. I am sorry. Same goes for Elfmania datadisk: Elfmania is already built-in to support the data disk, but most of the character art is unfinished, and making the characters for that game is exceedingly laborious due to memory-saving tricks: after animating the characters, the sprites were sliced in horizontal parts, which were recycled all over the sequences in order to save the memory. And sometimes you had to alter the animation in order to recycle more parts. And thats why the animation in that game was smooth but bit flat, really. And I dont even want to think what it would take to figure out how the code for Elfmania works. Last edited by mjr; 23 May 2016 at 11:48. |
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23 May 2016, 14:59 | #18 |
Registered User
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Location: Auckland
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Welcome back and all that!
I'm quite interested in the Elfmania datadisk thing. When I first heard about the datadisk I wondered if it was possible to simply "paste" the new characters over top of the old ones in order to get around needing to integrate the data disk with the core game, but I figure with what you've just explained about the horizontal slicing that wouldn't work either :/ |
14 November 2023, 11:06 | #19 | |
HOL/FTP busy bee
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Germany
Age: 46
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Since Miha's old website is down and I just got the backup to add some images to HOL I think it's a good opportunity to add the diary of the Elfmania data disk to this thread:
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15 November 2023, 20:46 | #20 |
mä vaan
Join Date: Nov 2001
Location: Finland
Posts: 1,688
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Nobody know who was Stavros Fasoulas. Name might be was just a alias.
https://www.pelit.fi/artikkelit/suom...vros-fasoulas/ Article in Finnish, but not a problem in these days. |
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