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Messages - Schala Zeal

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1
General Discussion / Finally, vtubing as an OC "Schala"
« on: March 16, 2024, 08:47:21 pm »
So, a good portion of you might know I've vtubed as... myself, full Toriyama design and all.. However, because of C&D always being a possibility, and me wanting to do some fundraising, etc, and flex my creativity without restraint, I spent about 5-6 months making a "reboot" -- original character, original backstory I'm still trying to figure out, but with the same name with 'Zeal' dropped.



What I have so far is that Schala is an elf sorceress thrown forward thousands of years in time. She is originally the princess of an ancient magic elven kingdom, Lemuria, worshippers of an entity named Som. At a young age, Schala was discovered to be a magical prodigy, being able to weave dreams into reality. Yet her gift was squandered and abused by her mother, Queen Samelle, and she was sedated and plugged into a machine that would siphon her dream energy and use it to subjugate everyone, while simultaneously attempting to bring forth Som. Disaster struck one day, and she was awoken by an anonymous rescuer, who, in finding escape was futile, threw her into a time rift, before facing their fate.

Chrono Trigger Schala was the "foundational" inspiration, of course, but I've drawn on other design and character development inspirations. Her cold visage hides beneath it the loving, caring little girl she once was. She has a fascination with technology, yet has a fragile psyche and might sometimes lash out. My goal with her was to project a lot of how I differ from the game character, into her. This way, I can build upon her as I learn and grow myself. I wanted to make her an antihero. I wanted her to come across as someone who can be sympathised with, even in their misguidance.

Her weapon is the Masamune -- a different one of course, which is conjured using her inner mana into solid steel (think Tenchi Muyo weaponry) and it can also split into 2 blades for each hand.

2
ChatGPT has become a boon to me as a coder and cybersecurity hacker.

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Fan Art / Re: VTuber Rig
« on: October 11, 2023, 02:04:05 am »
Archiving this vtuber rig, but I'm not discarding it. I have a more personalised, legally distinct rig with new lore upcoming as my 2.0.

Simply put, she was the Crown Princess of the ancient magical elven civilisation of Lemuria, and a prodigial sorceress who could weave dreams into reality. However, one day disaster struck and she was flung forth into the far future, where her anguish turned to wickedness and she grew to be a formiddable, nightmare-weaving sorceress.


4
General Discussion / Temporal Flux: Echoes of a Dream
« on: September 19, 2023, 03:08:47 am »
So about a month ago, comic entrepreneur Lucius Merryweather launched a new vtuber agency named Astraline and gave its members all new vtuber avatars and an animated backstory/lore for each of them. I had been watching Fred Knudsen since before he joined the agency, and when he did, it got me thinking creatively.

I myself have been vtubing for over a year now, not really feeling settled into a brand. Everyone knows me as Schala, and lately I settled on a Toriyama style avatar I commissioned an artist friend to draw while I learned Live2D and rigged myself. (see attached) The problem, of course, is that I had to gimp myself from not just monetising my streams, but also fundraising for charity, to keep Square's eyes off me.

The advent of Astraline lit a spark of creativity in me and I really sought out to establish an original character, or at the very least, a character that won't have a legal potentiality looming over my head. A few ideas came to mind, but nothing really solid. Then I had watched Audio Pulp's What Would Chrono Break Be Like? series. Couple that with a few ideas of my own and I had a solid idea and began drafting up a backstory for my new vtuber character -- It would be "Schala" but using the Chrono Break fan lore with some rearrangements, it would be vague enough to be considered its own thing.

So I set off writing up draft after draft of my story, every day pouring in new elements to really ground it as its own "Chrono-like" story. Around this time, I started getting intrigued by the Godot game engine while also working on my "open source Chrono Trigger engine" I mentioned some months ago, which by the way is still in progress. It was only recently that an idea hit me: a game tie-in! I had written so much draft story that I essentially made a mythos!

I have already participated in a few game jams (examples here and here) and even coded my own semi-working 6502 emulator. Having 20 years of coding under my belt, Godot is very easy to pick up, so this would make a fine test of my skills and ambition.

What I have so far is that I used the Chrono Break fan theory series as a foundation, and initially tried blotting out any legally-distinct references to the Chrono games. From there, I started putting in my own ideas and interests, along with some Lovecraftian horror elements in place of a connection to Lavos.. It actually culminated this morning with my idea for a title - Temporal Flux: Echoes of a Dream. This title implicates what the story is about as well as pay homage to the Chrono fan games such as Crimson Echoes and Prophet's Guile.

Ultimately I do want to put Echoes of a Dream out on PC, Mac, and mobile. Consoles are an eventual possibility, but beyond my scope right now. I'm still juggling around whether it should be chibi 3D or HD 2D Octopath (and rumored Trigger remake) style.

The story so far is written to be self contained but with room to expand should it be successful. Ultimately, whether or not it's spiritually considered a sort of unofficial spiritual sequel Chrono Break was meant to be, I leave to the player. As its own series, it need not be under that pressure to measure up to the Chrono games. It can be an exciting adventure all its own, or it could give Chrono fans a sense of unofficial closure.

I'll post more info about this tomorrow. Goodnight all!

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What do you mean nevermind the licensing? Also, if not Lua, what scripting language would you recommend? I haven't done anything scripting wise yet, so there's still time for suggestions.

6
Thanks Mage! I went ahead and updated the OP with a (growing?) list of legal considerations as well.

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I've renamed OpenCT to the Kajar Engine first because OpenCT and OpenChrono are already used, and second, to possibly put in Cross support eventually.

8
I just found out some of the files were encrypted with a Blowfish block cipher. The whole Blowfish initialisation table is in the EXE. I just found the offset which has the decryption key, so that's going to help write the importer. Once I get the importer done, I can start on the actual engine.

9
So for the past few months, I've been coding a project I've dubbed the Kajar Engine. What this is is not a remake of Chrono Trigger itself, but its engine. If any of you know what GZDoom, Brutal Doom or OpenRCT2 are, that saves me an explanation. It's a free, from scratch, open source reimplementation of the Chrono Trigger engine. I wanted to wait til I had hit a few working milestones with it before I officially announced it. Last night I just got it to extract and import the Steam port's game data. My goals for this project is to make this the most optimal way to play Chrono Trigger, while making it easy to mod.

Project page: https://github.com/Schala/KajarEngine

Legal considerations:
- As stated, the engine will need the assets from a retail copy of the game to import and run.
- The Steam and mobile retail ports use Blowfish encryption for some files. While the "initialisation tables" are public domain and in the engine's importer, the encryption key is proprietary, and embedded within the Steam/mobile binary executable. The Dolphin project was denied on Steam because it had copied the Wii decryption key from the system, making it legally ambiguous. To avoid the same fate, the engine looks within the EXE at a hardcoded offset, reading 64 bytes from said offset. The downside is that this will likely need to be updated with any future patches to Chrono Trigger's Steam or mobile ports.

A list of details:
- Coded in Rust to make this as bug free as possible and not make debugging a pain in the butt
- Has an importer that extracts the game data from a legally purchased copy of Chrono Trigger. Currently, only the Steam port as it is the easiest, but more ports are planned to support, thanks to the plethora of modding info the compendium has
- As this is open sourced under the GPLv3 license, this will make Chrono Trigger 64-bit capable and allow the community to keep it up to date and add new stuff. As per the licensing terms, it allows you to modify the code as you wish, but if you plan to share your work, you must also make the code available for your entire project.
- Enemy AI and other functional code will be converted into Lua scripts upon import. The modding capabilities themselves will use Lua for AI, story driven code, etc. Lua is the scripting language used by WoW addons and Roblox, to name a few examples, and as a coder, I love its embedding efficiency.
- For major modding, I want to look into developing a plugin API. This will be coded in Rust, but it can interop with C too, for those who find it easier.
- The game will use the Bevy engine to run, as I find it the easiest, powerful, and most minimal to pick up.
- The Kajar Engine is being coded to surpass the hard-coded limits imposed by Chrono Trigger. With modding, putting in new character slots, for example, will be a breeze.
- As the game data is imported, special hash table files will be created. This will allow integrity checks between the vanilla game data and modded content. If two or more mods modify the same content, an error will occur.

What's done:
- resources.bin extraction
- TIM to PNG conversion (actually for possible Cross support, but I already coded something years ago, so this was easy)
- DRP import
- CPT import
- TBT import

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Fan Art / Re: VTuber Rig
« on: July 21, 2023, 12:58:29 pm »
I should

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So... I decided to take Chrono Trigger and throw its text into google translate to get severely scuffed, then back to English. The result is... nothing short of amazing. Also featuring my vtuber!

Part 1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-VgLUCOtLg
Part 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEogaMliFwg

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Fan Art / Re: VTuber Rig
« on: April 06, 2023, 06:27:17 pm »
Mother's outfit and my pendant are today

13
Fan Art / VTuber Rig
« on: April 06, 2023, 02:45:48 am »
So I had a prior vtuber rig, still safely put away. However I came across a vtuber with a Toriyama-style anime girl rig, probably because she streams nothing but Dragon Ball games. This got me thinking of commissioning my own artist to do something I'm surprised I hadn't thought of before.

This is still a work in progress, but my artist was able to draw a Toriyama style Schala rig based off various official and fan references. All drawn from scratch, animatable layers. All that remains is the shading and pendant, along with Queen Zeal's outfit, before I rig it next week



However, why stop there? I decided to get a little non-canon with it and buy a little extra. Did somebody say Toriyama-style Harle?





And lastly, an underwear shot!


14
Kajar Laboratories / Systems programming/reverse engineering
« on: January 21, 2023, 10:23:39 pm »
So I've been enthralled with the Rust programming language lately, which rides developers' asses to make properly working code.

Recently, I've made a proof of concept 6502 CPU emulator and accompanying disassembler in it. The NES uses the 6502 CPU and the SNES uses a CPU that builds on that. One of the features I want to add that should be easy to code is feeding in a text file that maps labels with ROM addresses. I could, with Mario Bros 1, type up a ROM map that I can then feed into my disassembler and it will label things such as the sound loading function or the cheep-cheep sprite location.

Eventually, I want to take the NES emulator and extend it into a 65C16/Ricoh 5A22 emulator that will carry the same disassembler features. Using that, I've been inspired by Geiger's Snes9X debugger and want to make something modern and more robust.

I believe the Compendium has documented the Chrono Trigger ROM locations, along with Temporal Flux. Once done, I hope to have my emulator be able to set debug breakpoints in the ROM, step through, step over, etc., complete with labels for data and functions, so the user can see exactly what assembly is being executed.

Eventual future plans may include a decompiler to C, to make it even easier.

Right now the only foreseen difficulties are the graphics. I plan to use WebGPU for the graphics

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Kajar Laboratories / Re: Heightmaps
« on: January 21, 2023, 09:54:10 pm »
Sweet!

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