Buyog's Lair

Where in the Galaxy is Hal Jordan?

Friday, January 07, 2011

So.

The 12 Days of Christmas have come, and they have gone.

As I'm sure you've noticed, without Hal.

Here's why.

When I first started working on Hal, I had a much smaller update in mind, something akin to the update I did for Lex Luthor when I added his Orange Lantern mode last year. What I ended up doing, though, was a lot trickier:

• essentially cramming 6 new characters into the somewhat-messy codebase of a 7th,
• trying to clean up that code messyness,
• integrating some improvements from Seth's remixed / fixed version of the character for DC vs Marvel (which isn't yet publicly available, alas),
• and manually replacing each of the hundreds of sprites in the SFF with a smart-paletted version that enables me to do the cool corps costumes (even though Jet the Phoenix and ArmageddoN did the sprite edits, it still takes a lot of time to cut and paste the sheet into individual PCX files for the SFF)

Combine that extreme level of ambition with the fact that I have a lot less time for MUGEN these days anyway, and you get a chain of several nearly-sleepless nights, and a character who is REALLY close to being releasable on time, but only if I'm willing to sacrifice quality. Red Lantern, Blue Lantern, and Indigo Lantern modes are all complete. Orange, Yellow, and Black are all missing at least one of their major custom moves. And until last night, I couldn't get the Black Lantern constructs to actually look black and not dingy gray — but the fix I came across (thanks, Sic-1!) involves writing more code - because Black Lantern mode now has to define all of its own anims for everything involving the ring sparks or constructs, since the transparency is defined differently than it is for every other mode! :-P

Hence, this post. Rather than keeping you in the dark, dear readers, I wanted to pull back the curtain a little so you can see what it is I've been working on.

RED LANTERN

ORANGE LANTERN

(hyper is unfinished)

YELLOW LANTERN

(2nd special is unfinished)

BLUE/GREEN LANTERN

INDIGO LANTERN

BLACK LANTERN

(2nd special is unfinished)

(hyper is unfinished)

So, there you go. I have to finish 2 more specials and 2 more hypers, plus cut and paste about another 3 dozen re-edited sprites (for the crouching and air basics). It's still going to happen, and hopefully still happen soon, but I missed getting it to you by Christmas, and now you know why.

Labels: Blackest Night Hal