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Messages - Beach Bum

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1
Kajar Laboratories / Re: Making Chrono Break!
« on: December 24, 2022, 10:52:55 am »
A necro that nobody will probably ever read, but I feel like you deserve some clarification as to why this post got almost a 1000 views but no replies.

People have tried to make Chrono Break in the past, some of them probably more talented than you (no offense).

There was a guy called Chains of Fate (I forget his real name) who probably came closest with his project called Chrono Crisis. Despite it being called that, it was pretty much what he thought Chrono Break would have been. He had some pretty talented people working on that, but eventually, it still went nowhere. See, making a game like this takes years. It takes more than that rush of passion you feel at the beginning. It requires people that can deal with the grind, with doing the most boring mindless tasks day after day. That might be fine if you get a paycheck for it. But doing it for free, and combining it with your personal life and actual career? It's insurmountable. It's definitely not something one, or two, or five people can do.

Anyway, Crisis went nowhere and some of the people who still had some passion for the project split off into something called Chrono Ark. This didn't get anywhere near as far as Crisis did before it died, because once again, the insurmountable task that is making a game like this + personal life + career.

I think many people have wanted to make Chrono Break in this community at some point or another. Some of them probably made an attempt. But pretty much all of them realize how nigh-impossible it is to do before getting anything significant done.

Then there's the legal trouble. There's no way you could make a game like this without getting sued. You could make it devoid of any references to prior games, but then nobody would care about it. If you did use characters or locations from prior games, you'd definitely be ordered to cease and desist.

Now let's say everything above would not be a problem. Your Chrono Break would still never be actually Chrono Break. That's because only the series' writer, Masato Kato, knows what he wanted to do with Chrono Break. Only he knows the story he was going to tell. If the writing comes from anyone's fingers but his, it will never be Chrono Break. Even if you're the most hardcore group of fans out there, a lot of it will still simply feel like fanfiction (see Crimson Echoes).

You've made a few gamejam games? That's cool. So did I when I was in school. It's nowhere near what you would need to take on a project like this. And anybody who has the skills required to pull it off isn't gonna spend their time on something like this when they have themselves and probably a family to sustain.

Keep dreaming, but give up on the idea of ever making Chrono Break. Maybe Square Enix / Masato Kato will revisit the Chrono franchise at some point.

2
Well, at least before 1999AD, since Lavos is still deep within the earth when the report was made.

No, the earthquakes were from 1000AD. In the prerelease/demo/etc. it was the reason the Zenan Bridge was not there in the 1000AD map. In the final build the mention of quakes is still there, but the bridge is fine. Still, earthquakes can be from various reasons, I doubt Lavos would be his first guess.

Yeah idk I just find it hard to imagine that you're dunked out of a portal in 1000 AD and just forget about all this Lavos business that was in the process of destroying your kingdom before you got portaled. But perhaps Melchior didn't share Belthasar's curiosity and just decided to let bygones be bygones and live out his life uneventfully.

The Lithosphere Investigation Report is weird. It's dated 2300 AD and shows a picture of the Day of Lavos, but speaks of Lavos as if it had yet to awaken:

Quote from: Monitor
   2300 A.D.
   Lithosphere Investigation Report
   ~
   ~
   - Report no. 27 -
   ~
   [Unknown Life Force,
    Parasitic to the Planet]
   Geologic Stratum Result - 65,000,000 B.C.
   Code - '"Lavos"'

   Slumbering deep beneath the crust...
   When Lavos awakes, this planet will...

The only explanation I can think of is that 2300 AD is when it's accessed, which means the time period the Dead Sea is frozen in. And that the picture isn't an actual recording of the Day of Lavos, but an illustration of what was likely going to happen once Lavos woke up.

If that's true, it means at least part of humanity in that timeline was aware of Lavos' existence before it destroyed the surface of the planet, but I guess were unable to mount a suitable defense.

3
I can't say much about the Lithosphere report, since there's almost no context around it... we don't even know for sure when it was created.

Dunno, but he equally had no reason to think the Lavos problem just vanished. The last he remembers from his own time period is that the beast woke up and was actively damning his home kingdom. Also, I think somewhere (don't remember where) it's said that there were earthquakes prior to Lavos' eruption... that should have been a dead ringer.

4
In the original Lavos timeline, the early humans still witness the Fall of Lavos, and name him Lavos as a result. Ages later Lavos' power is tapped into in the kingdom of Zeal. Presumably the Fall of Zeal happens much as in the keystone timeline, with survivors living among the Earthbound. Knowledge of Lavos should be intact up until this point. The survivors of Zeal know for a fact it exists, and the Earthbound should too, even if they've never directly felt its power. All of them should be aware that Lavos is still there, deep inside the planet's core.

Yet somewhere, over the course of 13,000 years, this knowledge was lost. It seems like it wasn't even reduced to a legend, because nobody in 600 AD or 1000 AD even refers to it as such. If humanity had known about Lavos' existence, I feel like somewhere down the line they could have staged an admirably pre-emptive attack, or even a defense in anticipation of its impact. Yet by 1999, the world was caught completely off guard.

How was this knowledge lost throughout the ages? Did the surviving Zealians and Earthbound not think to warn future generations of the danger sleeping deep inside the planet?

It's especially strange considering Melchior was displaced to 1000 AD, so they had a Zealian alive and well in the present day era who had been fully capable of warning the world about the threat Lavos posed. Yet he seemingly sat idly by as the world lived in ignorance until the Day of Destruction.

5
That kinda makes sense, actually. Type everything out first, then search and replace with the required commands. Only downside is that's a one way street, but maybe they had some sort of backup for that.

Interesting little tidbit about the dream sequence speech btw, when they step out of the elevator there are two copies of the "There's no turning back now" speech. One is said by "party member 2 (whoever the game happens to choose)" and another is specifically specified to be Leena. Maybe the party there was going to be Serge, Leena, and Kid before they decided on the random party member. That's the only line of that sequence where there's a copy specifically for Leena, the rest of the dialogue in this part just has "party member 2".

Also been trying to find a way to look at the models, seems like most of them are .OBJ files with .TIM textures, but the .OBJ files can't simply be imported in Blender or 3D Studio Max. Maybe there's some encryption or weird file structure going on.

There's also a pretty high res picture of the cinematic Frozen Flame model in the launcher files. Don't know where it's being used tho. I heard before that they didn't re-render the cinematics in higher resolution because they no longer have the original game files, but they must still have something if they were able to make a high quality render like this.


6
Interesting way of doing things.

Looking through the script, the "accent generator" thing they had was also pretty incredible. I wonder what kind of tools they used, seems like a bitch to type all this out.

Code: [Select]
{PARTY2%}:\n{Cap}{wha}t{-}i{stz}{-umeth}{-}it,\n{SERGE}?\n{Cap}{-you-}{-}{l}ook{-umeth}{-}t{rwr}oubled.{bpage}\n{Cap}{thd}i{sth}{-}i{stz}{-umeth}{-}it.\n{Cap}{thd}e{rr}e{'s}{-}n{o}{-}tu{rr}nin{g'}{-umeth}\nback, now!{mend}
Most of those bracketed parts correspond to a field of data inside the accent generator file, mesgen_en. It's actually pretty nuts how many letters and words are in there.

7
Actually, on closer inspection, it seems the entire script is in here. I still don't know what the {ERROR} columns mean, tho. Predictably, inserting new lines does absolutely nothing. I assume the code of the game calls line numbers when events are going on. Because of that, replacing text does work...

One thing that confuses me is how portraits are called. There doesn't seem to be a command for it in the CSV files, which is strange. Does the event code itself call portraits and assign lines to it? Will try to dig deeper into this.

Pardon my french, I'm childish.

8
It's interesting that they took the time and effort to redraw the Kid as a child portrait, even though it still does not get used anywhere. Same goes for the Dragon God. Redrew its portrait, but never used when it speaks.

The Serge-Lynx portrait that was only used in the forging screen of the original game is not redrawn, but they did take the time to upscale it. Which is strange, because the remaster does not use it anywhere, not even in the forging screen anymore. Maybe the game's code still calls to it somewhere.

9
Does anyone know how to view "en.csv" inside the lang.dat file? It seems like it should contain the whole english script, but there's many columns that simply say "{ERROR}".

This is a guess on my part, but I think those might be lines that are generic, not tied to a specific character, and get put through the accent generator thing they have.

Tried viewing it in Excel and Notepad++, but same thing.

10
So in the year 2300 AD Lavos sits atop Death Peak where it reproduces asexually, creating Lavos Spawns that eventually are supposed to take off and continue the cycle.

Mother Brain states that, given enough time, the planet will heal. Question is, is that possible as long as Lavos still lives? What happens to it once its "purpose" is complete? Does it live forever on the surface of the planet, or does it leave the planet after some time to find different planets? Or, does it simply die after a certain amount of time?

What do you think?

11
It seems extremely unlikely so many kings / queens resigned the throne at 33-34. Not to mention mathematically impossible. Even if they had kids at the age of 18, those would only be 16 years old by that time.

12
First off... in 600 AD, Guardia is ruled by King Guardia XXI and Queen Leene. In 1000 AD, it is ruled by King Guardia XXXIII and his wife was the late Queen Aliza.

Is "King Guardia" a title, or a name? As in, are all the Guardia kings from the same bloodline? And going by those numbers behind them, there have been 12 different kings in 400 years... isn't that straight up impossible? 400 divided by 12 is a little over 33... so in order for that to work every single king after Guardia XXI had to have passed on the throne around the age of 33. Seems extremely unlikely to say the very least.

Also... Lucca's little display to Crono shows that Nadia has descended from a long line of queens of Guardia. But... in both 600 and 1000 AD, it seems that the king was mainly in charge. And if Guardia is a name, then doesn't that mean King Guardia XXXIII is a descendant from a long line of male heirs all the way from 600 AD? Which makes Nadia a product of... incest?

Maybe I'm thinking about it in the wrong way. The fact that there's been 12 generations of kings in merely 400 years, when humans tend to live to 80-100 confuses me. The only way it works is if there have been some very unfortunate Guardia kings who died of extremely young age due to disease or being killed in action. But since it doesn't seem like there has been much conflict since the Mystic war, that latter one seems unlikely.

13
I guess they didn’t bother giving him much detail because you only see him for one short scene, and he has Serge on his back the whole time. Even though he has a normal walking animation, you never actually see it in-game.

14
Remaster does have some rough spots...

When collecting Funguy's lvl 7 tech, Serge's portrait is accidentally used when Funguy is talking, and during the first Orlha scene I think one of the writers was typing a little too fast...

At least Serge's butt is still intact.

15
Those are only the models he included in the online model viewer, there were also files dumped which could be viewed in Blender.

I exported this a long time ago, unfortunately Blender is kind of an annoying tool to get used to.

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