Golden Axe Curse of Death Adder 3.0

[Count Monte]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLDGsVyYmSM#

Being a huge fan of the Golden Axe series, and someone who especially loves the Arcade-only Revenge of Death Adder, I decided to add in some new playable characters, enemies, and levels to this mod.

Dora and Goah were two playable characters found only in Revenge of Death Adder.  I ripped Dora's sprites myself, and cleaned them.  I replaced Stern with Kain Blade from Golden Axe: The Duel, and I also added Gillius from Duel (these two were in the Guardian Heroes mod).  I added Stern, the giant that Gillius rides around on, but I actually made him a ridable mount.  Gillius can also ride a bear, bull, jaguar, elephant and horse - since the coding and sprites were already made by someone else. EDIT:  Burn King is the man to thank for the Duel chars and ridable animals.

The only thing that should be done to complete this is to make it so Kain Blade can also ride on those animals - which will require quite a bit of sprite work. 

So between my own efforts, and compiling the efforts of others, I've tried to make this in the true sprit of Golden Axe. 


I uploaded the pak as well, but for those who want to download the whole thing here's the link:

http://www.mediafire.com/?9x5np7ac7fgh90n

[maxman]

No screenshots (yet)?

[stevie.forever]

hey just download this mod  thanx,but it can do with abit more work to make it exciting,found some faults with the gameplay aswell,feel if the mod was being rushed for download sorry.

am work on ma mod's when i get round to it and taking my time,don't like to rush them.
oh you can use ma ga sprites count soon as am finished my project  .

[nocturnus]

fantastic mod!!! one thing: can u add counter hits too? sorry but i like very much

[RedRibbon]

 very cool!

[Tony78]

Thanks, Count Monte, for this new mod!

This game is very nice to play. I apreciate very much sound effect and the musics: some of them are taken from Jenesis version!

But there is an issue: the engine crashed in the 3rd stage, just after the boss.
That's the log says:


FATAL: attempt to spawn object with invalid model cache id (25)!


I tried with build 2123 version and the same happened.

Thanks for your work!

[kmilloz]

what?s happened to the Kain? Test Openbor3340 and others...

[Count Monte]

Hey guys, try downloading from the Mediafire link.  I used OpenBoR v3.0 Build 2859, Compile Date: Jul 16 2010 when I was working on it, and had no problems.

Well, the only problems that seem to exist on all versions is that I use drawmethod to resize the characters, and sometimes when they jump near the left side of the screen it crashes.  I'm hoping someday that drawmethod will work more like MUGEN, which let's you change the sprite size without losing image quality.

To fix Kain, just add this line at the top of his stats:
 
palette      data/chars/kain/idle1.gif


And you're right, I did rush to release this, but that's because I'm doing a big update to my D&D:Warduke game, and I wanted to get this out there just in case.  I was reading a few days ago about someone who had an HD crash and lost all their work and wished they had released a demo or anything. 

[Damon Caskey]

I'm hoping someday that drawmethod will work more like MUGEN, which let's you change the sprite size without losing image quality.

I don't want to derail the thread, but misinformation like this needs to be set straight.

OpenBOR's resizing will never "work like Mugen", because Mugen doesn't work like that. If you saw sprites in Mugen re-sized "without losing image quality", it was because said sprites were more conducive to resizing; IOW, there was loss, you just didn't see it as much.

As I stated in another thread, you can't re-size an image without quality loss. Let me repeat: You can't do it. Not with Mugen, not with OpenBOR, not with Photoshop, Gimp, or anything else. It is a mathematical impossibility. You could have Stephen Hawking write us a custom formula and there would still be loss. Please stop suggesting otherwise; I've had at least a dozen emails asking for this non existent feature to added because of statements like yours.

DC

[Count Monte]

Damon, please trust me when I tell you that MUGEN's engine handles this sort of thing much better.  I've spent a lot more time modding in MUGEN, I'm still fairly new to the OpenBOR scene. 
As you know, if you go into photoshop and shrink an image you lose quality.  OpenBOR's drawmethod looks very similar to that.

Whereas in MUGEN, when you change the x and y scale, especially to make the image appear smaller, it actually looks sharper.  I'd invite you to test this out yourself.

[Damon Caskey]

I'm fully aware of how Mugen behaves, and I will concede it uses a better algorithm for downsizing. Probably Bicubic. However, less loss != no loss. The guys at Elecbyte are good, but they aren't good enough to break basic laws of science.

OpenBOR's formula has advantages of its own. 1. It is much less CPU intensive (important for consoles, which mugen can't run on). 2. Cleaner up-sizing.

Given you can never eliminate loss completely, and the advantages our current formula offers, I seriously doubt it will ever be changed. If it is, we would be offering the extra formulas as an option, not a default.

Anyway, I have no problem with requesting alternate formulas. My issue here is suggesting we add a feature that is completely beyond the current sum of human knowledge, while at the same time implying a similar application has done just that.

DC

[Count Monte]

Heh, Damon, sometimes when you read text as opposed to talk face-to-face, things can be misconstrued.  Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the OpenBOR engine.  I'm having a blast modding on it, and learning new tricks.

All I'm clarifying is that I won't resize the sprites in photoshop, because the quality loss is permanent.  If I use drawmethod, while it might be buggy, there's hope that in the future the engine can be improved and then the sprites will suddenly look much better.

This Golden Axe mod is a perfect example of why drawmethod is so valuable:  In order to use larger character sprites from Golden Axe:The Duel and Red Earth/Warzard and have them interact with smaller character sprites from older Golden Axe games so they all are the same scale and look like they belong together.  Now you can have the best looking version of Gillius and Kain starring in a sidescrolling sequel, and that's what makes modding so cool.

My plea is that a better working version of drawmethod would open up a lot of options to the community. 

[Damon Caskey]

I think we are getting somewhere.  

One thing you need to understand though, is that drawmethod was never intended to be a substitute for pre-processing of sprite resources. It's meant for special effects, where up-sizing is more common then downsizing and performance is paramount. IOW, making it more suitable for downsizing means making it perform worse in other aspects. There is always a compromise with any formula. Adding a Bicubic option probably wouldn't be that hard, but there is no way we can make it the default. Software image interpolation of any kind is extremely CPU intensive. If we switched to a more powerful but less efficient formula like Mugen, consoles would grind to a halt.

I admire your creative use of it to bring differing resources together, but really, you should consider a Photoshop batch. Nothing says you have to ditch the bigger originals; with uniform offsets they can be kept on standby in case we ever add a bicubic option. You would not only get the advantage of a more powerful formula then either OpenBOR or Mugen uses, but also have a smaller memory footprint in your module.

DC

[utunnels]

Hmm, the problem is OpenBOR does almost everything using CPU, before the final transfer to the screen. I must admit scaling/rotating sprites is really a nasty job, if you want to avoid hardware. Maybe it is only a couple lines of code via openGL or directx and the result will be much better.

I took a look at the source files, and found my dirty code is still there. 

Actually I didn't borrow a single line from any professional graphics coder, I just scratched mathematical and geometrical calculations on paper while consulting long forgotten formulas in textbooks. I do hope someone could improve them, really.

[Expio]

Irregular mod for a ultramegafan of the Golden Axe series.

- Good Things

Gilius mounted over a polar bear killing a army of amazons BEST-IMAGE-EVER I have a new desktop theme.

Golden Axe soundtrack.

Fun.

- Bad thigs

When Dora throw a enemy you will be hit by the flying enemy.

Kain can not do a grab hit to some enemies.

No Golden Axe feel. In to the original games the fight is more... paused.

Palete problems with the last versions of openbor (i play only with my psp version) Gilius (my favorite golden axe character) is the only playable player without problems.