u/Honest-Golf-3965

Title says it all.

Mist has volumetric lighting AND physics interaction with the player models. It'll even leave a wake when characters move through it.

The towns, dungeons, world map, and battles all have their own treatment, since the scale on each character/models varies so the mist had to as well.

It was A LOT of work to get this working, and it will be a lot more to start getting the real-time lighting to also light the mist volume as well.

That said, this is running on my laptop at a rock solid 60fps, and over 120 when uncapped. (Ryzen 9 7000 series + RTX card so I expect nothing less).

Definitely added quality settings to lighting, shadows, and volumes and all that so people with even lower end hardware can still play and enjoy. I also chose to run at 1280 x 912 (so scaled up 4x from the original retail of 320 x 228) NOT something insane like 1440 or 4k (ew) that just wastes pixel power on adding nothing to a game like this. I opted for more rich features than raw resolution - though 16:9 widescreen and like 1080p are on the "to do after the main port is done" list, as it has its own view related issues that would just soak up time I dont have.

Hope this is a fun update for y'all!

Quick update, working on the battle animations. Victory celebrations are on the list for tomorrow, but today I had been testing the "trail" effect from the game. That was a heck of a thing to try to get right. I'm not certain it's 1:1 just yet, but I really, really like how it looks in the solid 60fps with the updated rendering engine.

The mist is volumetric now too, and hopefully soon I'll be ready to do a playthrough of RimElm as a video :D

So the gameplay has some bugs, but the rendering is really coming together! We have volumetric Mist, which I intend to have react to the RaSeru, hehehe, in addition to accurate atmospheric depth and analytic Sun and Moon lighting options. This game kinda feels like it could have had a lot more horror aspects going too, its really getting that nice creepy vibe! haha

That said there are certainly some struggles. The animations are playing back at 2x the speed, so I'm going to be trying some frame interpolation on the anims to see if I can play them at half speed and smooth the vertex positions with some math. Probably will work well, since the meshes are all rigid body and not skinned deforms.

The opening scroll was a REAL pain, lemme tell ya, but its coming together. Once I can find the gondola mesh, lmfao.

I have a blender set up and I know how to do projection painting (Arcane tv series was done this way) but it could seriously change the visuals of the game. So I'm considering a toggle for that perhaps, or maybe 2 versions, idk. Depends on how people feel about the underlying visuals changing vs just the rendering quality.

The gameplay itself is still faithful. Damage, attributes, items, stroy, etc.

That said, if there was a resource of QoL or "we all frickinbg hate this pls fix" things that break the game I'm all ears. I have NO idea how any of the speedrun skips will be affected, its not really on my radar at the moment.

Once I get the animation speed fixed, I'll be recording some video too! Just cuz it looks real silly otherwise.

It is more or less fully playable from opening up to the Hunter's Spring as well, cutscenes and dialogue included. So the vertical slice is pretty close already. Hope to hear from you all, and will post again soon!

Hey all, just dropping an update after a busy couple of weeks away. Still making steady progress on the gameplay. Working towards a playable vertical slice of Rim Elm from start to finish.

Fist 2 screenshots show the battle system from last time, now complete with all Rim Elm valid encounters. Bees, Tetsu, Gimard. Slime, Gobu, etc are all working. Including Arts, Items, Spirit, and scripting. Woo!

Bonus is that the analytical sky I replaced the background sky billboard with really adds a lot to the scene without breaking the style imo. Thats all running in shader with no texture - so nice and memory performant for the ever growing VRAM issues. (Though to be fair the game's memory footprint is TINY given everything uses ps1 meshes and textures).

Last 3 pics show the WIP on the Zeto invasion event. Definitely need to set up the "night time" lighting once I get the actual EVENTS to play out correctly. The pre-roll intro is actually proving to be a pretty tricky event to rebuild, but progress is being made all the same.

Hopefully have something more end to end playable in the coming weeks, which I can then show off in a video instead of just pics.

Thanks for being interested in this old game that inspired me to become a game developer all those years ago.

Been a while since I've posted!

Been working on getting the actual gameplay and UI up to retail standard playable. The dynamic light and shadows REALLY works in some cases. Others, well it'll be a bit more work.

Bonus 3 photos at the end are me fighting with the character model scale, and then one of me toying with the new dynamic lighting system in the genesis tree area.

Put a retail vs my version render side by side (yeah Vahn was still too big at that time, lol) but it can give you an idea of the difference so far! You can really see how much just the resolution difference changes the look of the ga .

To start, it has yet to stop amazing me just how well the assets and textures of this game have been holding up at the new overall resolution.

The original game was a 320x288 screen and I'm working in 1280x720 widesccreen now, and yet the textures still look great. They were really cooking back then.

So what am I working on now? Well since I've got point lights and spot lights working now I'm getting emissive lights working. The screen shots are without bloom and tonemapping, so that is just the emissive material doing its work. Next step is have it correctly injecting light into the global illumination so it will add color and shadows to the environment like the points lights do.

The shadows in the example rn are coming from the analytic Sky/Sun/Atmosphere shader in the scene - not the tree - so we're close but not quite there yet.

I'm pleased that it seems like (sepecially with the darker and more saturated tonemapper on) that I can keep the "vibe" of the game with all the upscaling and new rendering.

Will make another update once the glow is working. Cuz I just KNOW it's going to slap when the Genesis Tree is actually lighting the area around it. Especially the revived version.

I think some basic foliage like grass could really bring the scene up to a more modern look too, without losing the classic texture resolution look. So we'll see if that is reasonable after this is done.

I'm also working on the opening scene for the game, and hopefully have a video up for that sometime in the next few weeks. For now Vahn's animations are 4/5 times working, but the camera keeps getting blocked by geometry and that's been a pain to figure out. Also the UI is just a pretty "programmer art" stand in, so its plain blue boxes, haha.

Thanks for all your interest in the work so far!

p.s. if y'all haven't seen the youtube video Avalanche Reviews did on the Silent Hill decomp/recomp project created by created by Chris Hardin (also known as KushAstronaut / SlickAmogus) then I would definitely reccomend you check thta out! The decomp/recomp scene seems to really be taking off. (I'm not affiliated with either the SH recomp nor AR youtube, just suggesting y'all check out something cool if you're also interested in decomp/recomp scene. My work is considerably more ambitious than the faithful remake that SH1 is)

Been a while since my last update, since I had been fighting with signed distance fields for a while. However, finally, I was able to get them working. This means DFAO and Dynamic global illumination can finally get under way! Once that is sorted, its on to either reflections or mist/fog effects next.

Looking foward to getting a more moody emissive Genesis tree scene set up in the game.

Note: This still uses the game disc and assets, so no this is not Unity or Unreal Engine - it is in fact a dedicated engine for Legaia. Maybe ps1 in general later, but for now this is a nice update.

So the editor I've been building is getting very close! It's been very useful for testing that the asset extraction is correct.

I built it using my own rust UI Lib called "Helicon" that I had made for another project. It'll be prettier later, just needs to work for now, haha.

For now this is basically just asset/scene validation and a way for me to place my own light probes and such. However eventually I'd like it to be able to produce the authored game events we so used to seeing.

The game sim is stepped 60hz playback. Its honestly kinda like a really fancy punch card in a way. The engineering is really clever. Legend of Legaia is actually where I learned about a technique called "Actor Pooling" that I've used in modern games as its a massive optimisation technique all devs should use and know.

Anyways, this has been a lot of fun to work on while enjoying some time away from work. Hope I can get this to a state where people can actually use it!

Mini update today. I was able to get SSAO, Bloom, AA, Tonemapper, Cascade shadows, and velocity buffers all working! Aaaaand I disabled the retail version baked shadows on the characters to help restore that nice look they had instead of the really weird look they had in the last post.

Next up, volumetric fogging effects and real deal dynamic global illumination. Since my target is 1280x720 and not like 4k or some nonsense that means we can likely have near lumen quality irradiance caching that runs on a potato.

I'm experimenting with another thing that is very tied to the lore of the game too, but I don't want to spoil it this soon if I cant make it work.

Oh, bonus is the editor tooling is progressing along as well. Almost able to author some light probes and meshes into the scenes instead of relying solely on the disc for data. Getting closer each day!

Another day, another set of screenshots!

We're getting closer to the retail gritty darker look, and the shadows/AO is really nice in the environment. That said, the characters look kinda weird so I'll have to see if something is adding shadows to those characters inadvertently cuz they dont look as good as the flat shading that retail had.

I've attached a side by side of the lit version, and the retail shading so you can compare (see how the "flat" characters pop more? yea need to get back to that) but also threw in some of the buffers just cuz they're cool to look at.

While I wait for some travel things to resolve for my vacation I had some more time to noodle today.

Soft shadows work!! And...It actually doesn't break the classic look at all imo! Love that already. I'll need to address some spots that just aren'y casting self shadows correctly yet, but we'll get there.

Got a bit more work done last night and now the models ACTUALLY show up as expected in the level. Turns out most of them were wayyy down at -128 so I couldnt see them despite being "in the scene" as I had thought.

Just a few screen captures for ya today. I'll deal with the color grading later on, its pretty washed out compared to the darker and more saturated retail version - but look how smooth that is!

The UI layer is last on top, so I'll be able to keep that classic res feel without also having to keep the game at the like 360x288 resolution it used.

I'm targeting 1280x720 16:9 for the final look. So it should run on a modern toaster quite comfortably too