Hello Newgrounds! It's been awhile, like a month and a half. Yeah, I keep forgetting about this place. So what's new with me? I'd say not much, but there's some stuff worth talking about, as well as a break through I made with the PS2 Astro Boy models!
First off, I've been having Anton brain rot. I know I don't play games too much, but I was really happy with the Anton Blast Demo! Am I good at it, NO, but I like it a lot more than Pizza Tower. You get to go at your own pace, and the count down segments don't make me anxious. I never really like timers in games, they just put me under stress. Speaking of the comparisons to Pizza Tower, people have brought that up and can I just say, they really aren't worth comparing. PT is skill based high speed rank based, where as AB (so far that is) is more smashing and collecting stuff. I feel they are distinct enough from each other and even from Wario Land to be seen as their own thing.
Some changes to the game have been proposed and shown for demonstration on the Summit discord. One of them being the bounce mechanic. In the demo, you can bounce multiple times before hitting the ground. From what I remember, Tony said the bounce relied too much on timing, making it difficult to tell if you'll bounce again or not. So he made it more noticable. Another change I noticed was there are more boxes to jump on in the blimp section, as well as the hidden rooms missing in the demo being present now. Over all, things are looking up for the game! I still have yet to beat the first level. Yeah laugh at me.
The now for the Astro Boy models!
So for those who don't know, Sonic Team made a PS2 game for the 2003 Astro Boy anime back in 2004. Before I get the models, let's talk about the website stuff. Just like Sonic Adventure 1&2, Sonic Team made a website promoting both the game. Cosmical shared the special Wallpapers and other graphics from the site on Twitter! GOOGLE DRIVE FOR WALLPAPER HERE However, when they provided the archive link, almost all the download links were defunct. They said they got them a few years back, so thank god these got saved! I also went ahead and just saved a bunch of web graphics and any other files that still worked. Here are some PDFs I saved!
Alright, now for the big one! The MODELS!
For the past two years, me and Z1pp3r have been trying to rip the models from the game with no success. We aren't a bunch of geeks with knowledge on this, so all we could do was find any information we could and follow the one tutorial video that's like 7 years old. Well, someone within our community discovered that a random Deviant Art user posted pictures of Uran's model back in 2013. I sent them a message asking how they did it, and they said they used the exact same methods we did. This pretty much told me that the new versions of the emulators just didn't work with any of the programs needed to extract the models and textures.
So I took a gamble by using PCSX2 0.9.8 (from the archive bc the official site just didn't have the plugin required) and IT WORKED. I got all the textures for Astro and color corrected them. Now I just needed the model. Here's where things get shaky. The program used to convert the models to the correct proportions didn't work, or that's what I think it is. Right now I can't confirm nor deny it's the programs fault, but importing it to blender shows NOTHING but a dot. I looked up this issue and only one thread said there's nothing in the file. So I had no choice but to import the RAW file, unstretch it and dig Astro out of the over models. In the end, Zip dug him out, and here's what he looks like.
His proportions aren't correct, so this model is still unusable. With that said, I made a lot of progress and new discoveries that can help more of us try to extract the models. Now why didn't the conversion work? Well, it could be two things. One, the program is outdated and or I didn't put in the right WxH size. or Two, we're not using 3D Max which none of us are getting because it's expensive as FUCK even for the month subscription. So we still have a ways to go. I haven't tried Ninjaripper, but from what I've seen, it looks like it does the same thing the emulator does but flattens everything into a pancake. So it's useless.
That's all I have for now. If you know anyone who can properly extract PS2 models and would be willing to help extract all of them, contact me in my DMs at Twitter. See you next time!