A lot of people have played EarthBound for SNES at this point but the first time I played the game was on a used cartridge some friend at school got at a pawn shop, which I managed to trade for before he could delete the save files on it.
The first time I played EarthBound was trapped in an area you can only access at the end of the game, likely using items and strategies that the enemies in the area would require. There were no NPCs, no shops and as I recall only a few items to find, but the save file came well equipped and the characters were all at their max level.
After a bit of a riddle in the final boss fight you are warped back to the main map of the game and given the opportunity to walk some of your companions back to where you found them. You can visit most if not all of the game that was available before you fought the final boss, and you have some access to your inventory as it was available in the normal game, but you can't fight in battles without resorting to game genie type exploiting of the game's functionality which I obviously didn't know at the time. And you don't really need your items, they just help with fast travel. But there's a bike you haven't been able to use since you met your first companion...
So for me my first experience of EarthBound was a game where you fought a few endgame creatures in a bleak, foreign landscape, played the boss fight as one does, then got released into an open world with no constraints and no need to solve puzzles or defeat enemies. In 199X on a Super Nintendo. The villains were already reformed or licked. The bystander NPCs were right where you last left them. You could just take a walk home, which I did. Many times.
(Really liked Proteus, Ed. Got the boxed set. Only found this little game all these years later. Watch your step out there.)
Dan Lowe
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Hey thanks for replying. I'll post this in posterity so I can stop tiptoeing around the idea publicly. @ you but also just @ the idea of using 20 year old photoshop which is the clutchest sht I truly idolize. Swiftkey dvorak and autocomplete is a curse and if it seems long don't read it (I already agree with you)
I was just in the mindset pricing some tools/tokens this last few weeks not even to generate new art but pixelate images or 3D models into pixel art in 'my' style so I didn't have keep stitching it. The pixelizer effect alone built into this is worth 1/3rd of the price or more and then you're just looking at a month of subscription costs if you trust this to produce a particular effect. You could also do it with cameras and frame grabbing in unity but the time to learn it alone in my experience has been frustrating. Even what you just did here takes either photoshop or a knowledge of their free online tools/GIMP or the great photoscape (see the rabbit hole if you're a complete amateur). If you're wanting to make 500, or in my hope 500,000,000 unique NPCs in a pixel art game this tool opens up whole new procedural dreams I've had for decades. I play elite dangerous, no man's sky and single player vanilla minecraft. give me any procgen in any methodology and I am very happy.
The big AI companies must be panicking to switch to real-time video because this kind of app is going to replace the need to ever buy tokens on someone else's server or get photoshop etc, especially if they let people copyright pixel art any much more before every pixel location style has been churned out by some asset seller and only homebrew is allowed with some kind of cultural tip/donation peer pressure to replace litigation over copywritten nintendo pixel art games. (Thank everyone who has released stuff on CC licenses so far, it may be the only hope and we need to reward all the existing pixel artists by buying their games or getting them art grants etc because there's no way that games as a medium can survive anyone hoarding a style of pixel art through copyright. It just needs to be referential and not profitable for someone who can straight rip it off or have a robot rip it off.)
Homebrewed, in house trained models are something else and I am so ready for them in a pajama sunday JRPG message board space. I call this sort of app a log cabin game. Power's out, there's no internet. Just a fire going and winter outside. You'll have to go to bed before the laptop battery runs dry. The scourge of the dotcom to web3 era has to leave us old ladies something. Once you disappear into the hills like I have these offline tools are a place to relive deep, retail nostalgia currently/ironically displaced by current smartphone surveillance craze
PS I love Bing image generator and use it to make all my out of the park baseball player photos. This might be even more archaic as a topic but it's lowkey unfair to MLBPA to have historically made sports stats a public event that can be reported in the public domain if you care about their rights as laborers/etc. I don't need to follow real life sports at their ticket/parking/satellite tv rates and am very close to just simulating batted ball baseball. vin scully voice gen, ken burns documentaries, none of which existed in real life or will ever be marketed to anyone but myself in private. I have to go to a gym or pay bills or I would already be retired in my 30s because my life is complete
Not to use Astropulse's comments as a discussion board but could you point out some of the other models that handle sprite art well? The $65 seems pretty good when you consider API/token costs but I'm curious to see what is out there. I follow a lot of AI projects but admittedly none dedicated to pixel art
Once this is installed and offline, it runs off its core 20GB dataset? This seems like an incredibly good price point.
I've never subscribed to any of the generative products out there because I was never satisfied with the pixel art, and I don't want to be surprised down the road if something ended up being copied from somebody who didn't consent to training. I'm still running a desktop with a 1060 6GB and 8GB of RAM but this software is getting bundled with the hardware upgrade when I do it.
Got this for my mum but the integrated GPU of her new-old PC wasn't thrilled with blender itself so it's on the back burner but very cool prototype environment. (This runs great on my own iGPU and fine on an actual graphics card obvi. Your plugin itself is very lightweight if these comments have any weight.) This has craft potential to rival a roomful of baskets of threads and textiles IRL when you think about how quickly parallax photography and physical projection frames like Looking Glass are going to come in the next few years. This will let people create so many knick knack desktop projections. Won't even need gaussian splats cause we've got MRMO-Stitch.
Supported this early on so I got what I got for pretty cheap but it's been in limbo for a long time now and so I don't think it's rude to recommend another project that seems slightly less in limbo but for 1/4th-1/2 the price called Smack Studio. This app is more PICO-like while Smack Studio is just a pixel editor with some neat rigging and rotation features. In my own bored journey I've moved past both apps to slicing SDFs in plugins like Mudbun or Clayxels. That way you can just render a 3D object and assign 2D sprites to points in your 3D graph and render them Daggerfall or Mario Kart style depending on the angle you're looking at them. Theoretically you could do way more angles than either of these programs support out of the box. We're talking about buying abandonware here cause it has its usefulness (try it on steam, return it if you don't like it). Smack Studio isn't abandonware and Mudbun and Clayxels are professional rendering plugins.