firubii

[firubii]

dizzy guilty gear strive

[firubii]

just came up with a new sentence: you can touch the cat in many ways

[firubii]

this is flirting. btw

[firubii]

recent alipatchy sketches

[firubii]

wow i havent posted on here in forever

anyway with some free time i had recently i put together a simple .net library for working with pretty much every file format unique to the modern kirby games such as every 2d level data file, hal's binary yaml format, "cnd" files that control rendering information and occasionally background object placement, font glyph filters, generic archives, scene preload information, and the 3d collision format for kirby star allies's world maps

no editors obviously, just stuff to help with the programming side of making cool stuff that interacts with the game files

[firubii]

the current dev holdup is actually just lack of functionality in some tools that we need for doing the final like 2 things

keystone you should talk about something in regards to kirby fighters 2 community edition

Oh you're right I haven't done that yet! Regarding Kirby Fighters 2: Community Edition, there is a metric TON of stuff to talk about here. The dev team is some of the closest friends I've ever had. Smash Tactics is a thing because I was able to test the game over and over again with the members of the dev team. We've spent many hours sharing progressively crazier character ideas. We have created some warcrime moves. (or, well, more warcrime moves. KF2 already has plenty of those) I think, however, the best place to start for CE on the KF2 lore account is probably just a development history.

So it's late September, the year is 2020. Kirby Fighters 2 was leaked, got a trailer, and released all within the span of 24 hours. Soon after that, firubii (you might have seen her before) shows her findings from a Twitter datamine, that being evidence of a 3D Kirby game. "Wow! Awesome! I sure hope it's nothing like Battle Royale!" I say at the time. But I digress.

A few months pass and eventually fish gets in touch with Firubii for I believe checking hitboxes and frame data? We get a few things for some of the weirder moves from characters like Ninja, but the fact that a modder was among us got people excited. The prospect of a balance patch mod was an undeniably appealing one and could breathe new life (and a time) into the game. And one that Firubii was interested in.

March 16th, 2021 rolls around and Fish pings everyone saying that they had set up a poll for balance suggested for Firubii to implement. They also got an all star cast of top players and fighting game expects and colgate and me. because I "have lots of opinions." We're all put into a dev chat and poll responses start flowing in.

This poll was crazy. You had Ninja downplaying Mag like crazy. You had Celica Trying His Best. You had nonsense adjustment suggestions like "Not really that effective." But my favourite would have to be probably Qwertz saying to EVERY balance suggestion box "The game needs no balance changes, only quality of life changes."

So we all in the chat start throwing around ideas while not really getting anything done. This will be a running theme. About a month later I was like enough is enough and starting pinging people for proper balance discussions and locking in changes. There's a few notable things we did for v0.1, including making Sword a LOT faster, giving Hammer Palutena's Lightweight, (the s4 custom move) making Bandana Dee's spears stick into the ground for a few seconds, and making Cutter's boomerangs bounce off walls. That last one was our first real criminal change, as Cutter could effortlessly lock down the entire screen. I spent hours labbing counterplay only to find none and grew to despise the character and suggested massive overcorrections for v0.2. Oops.

Overall v0.1 was pretty good! It had some iffy stuff and launched with a Whip desync in game but other than that it was a success I think. It came out during July of 2021, a little under 4 months from the initial announcement. There's a few public tourneys with good turnouts but run via Parsec and Parsec makes me want to commit violent crimes. Progress on 0.2 also goes fairly well. There's some bad ideas in there like making MK not very fun but overall it's not so bad.

Until development just HALTS. To my understanding, I believe it was something personal Firubii was going through but I don't have all the info. Then again, I didn't ask. Like sure, I'd like to have the new CE versions as soon as possible, but ultimately the well being of the people actually making the mod is the top priority, it's why it's so irritating when people are jerks about CE's slow development. Obviously I want the new versions out. But we all have lives outside of this and sometimes other things need doing.

Eventually 0.2 gets out, at the start of Febuary 2022. It's solid but still has some things that irk me. After a few months, we ask for player feedback on overall balance and specific changes and get not many results. Granted, CE doesn't have much players so balance discussion is somewhat meaningless for a game this unexplored. I think 1.0 fixes all of the glaring flaws though.

At some point, once again, development freezes, and this one was rough. No communication from Firubii led to a lot of dooming, especially with how close we got to actually launching 1.0. We DO actually know why she vanished for so long this time, it's because her house caught fire. It didn't burn down don't worry! But this still caught us all SUPER off guard.

Anyway, CE resumed development and went for a little while, but hit a brick wall when trying to add training mode. I'm not an expert on the inner workings of KF2 but I know Firubii talked to Ryn (yes, the goku in strive Ryn) about it a little bit. I actually posted about this to my Threads account but who gives a shit about threads. That's more or less where we are now. It's been a while since the last tester build but what can you do.

There's also a few other things but there wasn't really a good place for them. Colgate thought it was a good idea to make a tierlist video for a game no one could play. It wasn't. I had to spend the days after that video doing damage control. There was a playlist where people could suggest songs to add to CE, but tbh it was more just an excuse to listen to music in VC while we could still do that. We were gonna move off Gamebanana because the site is run by N*zis but this was during the fire arc so didn't happen. AV also thought it'd be a good idea to shittalk CE and ask to join the dev team in the same day. There was also the time we had to rush out a trailer for Savi's Dream Display but I have a few criticisms about that which I'll share with him one day.

I think that's it? If you wanna download the mod I'll link it right here: https://gamebanana.com/mods/303920

[firubii]

last night i had a weird dream where some new hit game had an unnecessarily good furry character creator for absolutely no reason that also let you export the model and i wish it was real

[firubii]

patche

[firubii]

my very first guilty gear fanart ever

based on this image

[firubii]

wip mayburi comic :3c

[firubii]

[firubii]

REIMARI REIMARI REIMARI

[firubii]

[firubii]

i want to make more posts about the inner workings of kirby games but im not really sure what to talk about next

[firubii]

monthly patchy

[firubii]

[firubii]

the outlines in kirby's return to dream land deluxe are very interesting, theyre definitely the cleanest 3d outlines i have ever seen anyone do

visually theyre just the model but darkened and expanded out a bit, and instead of clipping into any geometry they simply fade out and seem aware of the other outlines and models in the scene, merging together perfectly

im VERY surprised no one else has done this, because the way they pulled it off is actually EXTREMELY simple

(this will go into kinda technical graphics rendering talk)

the first clue is that looking into the code used for rendering reveals that the game draws the outlines after the rest of the scene has been drawn

specifically, the order that objects are drawn from this function is:

opaque models (deferred rendering)

decals (deferred)

opaque models (forward rendering, essentially just fully rendering every single model)

outline models (forward)

transparent models (forward)

interestingly, outline models count as transparent, disabling transparency rendering will also disable outlines

the next hint about how it works comes directly from this enum listing all of the passes the game draws

the most important part of this is "OutlineDepth" and "Outline", which reveals that the outlines render their own depth buffer!! this contains essentially how far away each pixel is from the camera, in ingame/world space units

looking into the models themselves, all of the models for characters have duplicated meshes that use a material specifically for outlines

using this information alone, its very easy to recreate the outlines in blender!!

this is achieved in the same way, by rendering the raw scene and the outlines in two separate images using blender's render layers feature, with the outlines being significantly darkened, using only the diffuse texture, and the meshes themselves expanded slightly using geometry nodes

the rest of the models are rendered normally with PBR

determining where the outlines are drawn is just the result of some extremely simple math using the depth buffer of each layer

if you would like to see the result of this math, this is the "outline mask buffer":

as a bonus, if we gaussian blur the outline we can achieve a similar look to the game's promo art as well!! however, this doesnt look super good, improving on how this looks specifically most likely requires more tinkering in image editing software like photoshop