Cyber Panic 2000 - Full PSX/PS1 "Gameplay" Video

This is the full fake gameplay video I made for Squishy Eringe\'s amazing Cyber Panic 2000 videos.If you haven\'t watched them yet, please do. They\'re amazing:CyberPanic 2000 - Ep.1CyberPanic 2000 - Ep.2CyberPanic 2000 - Ep.2.1CyberPanic 2000 - Ep.3Torrent for high quality versions, plus an unreleased demo clip: http://tstorage.info/d3pc6r0rfnr8Wall of text:Iwara keeps giving me annoying AJAX errors, so I might as well keep writing until my upload succeeds.The video is fully made in Blender 2.79. I used the old Blender Internal render engine, because it can easily be forced to not use texture filtering. (It\'s also from the late 90\'s, so that\'s not too far off, lol.) That old renderer was discontinued in Blender 2.8.I used Animation Nodes 0.20 and a whole mess of tricks to get the PS1 look:"3D" graphics: Contrary to popular belief, the PS1 GPU can only render 2D graphics. The CPU has a vector co-processor that transforms the 3D scene to 2D screen coordinates, which are then used by the GPU in screen space. Screen space means they\'re pixel coordinates in integers, which is what causes the PS1-typical wobble effect. This look was approximated by using ANodes to forcibly reduce the 3D coordinate precision relative to the camera\'s point of view. One thing I was unable to emulate is the PS1\'s affine texture mapping, which Blender doesn\'t support, because it looks bad and is seriously outdated.Color depth: The PS1 only supports a 15 bit frame buffer for most graphics functions, but can support 24 bit for bitmap graphics and videos. But the 15 bit stuff is rendered as 24 bit before being written to the 15 bit buffer, so it can use dithering to reduce banding. However it needs to use 15 bit when rendering characters over a video, like FF games do, in which case the video will be reduced to 15 bit, and it apparently can\'t use dithering for the characters. (Confused yet?)Dithering and bit depth reduction were done as post effects in blender\'s compositor. The space video was converted to the actual MDEC video format, used by the PS1, and converted back to an uncompressed AVI, to get the correct look. If you look closely, you can observe that the whole screen is undithered 15 bit while Ashley is on-screen, but switches to 24 bit for the video, once she is off-screen. For a real-life example of this, you can check FF7\'s intro sequence, which switches to 15 bit while the camera moves toward the train station and the characters appear.Graphics overlays and text boxes: These were made in separate blend files.The character HUDs were made by ANodes manipulating a custom shader. So the health/limit gauges are actually fully functional and take numerical inputs that can be keyframed. The limit gauge rainbow effect is part of that custom shader, and once it\'s at 100% automatically switches to the rainbow texture and starts cycling the texture\'s hue channel. (Look up the HSV color model for more info.)Text boxes were also animated using ANodes. I came up with a minimalistic dialog markup that stores the text speed, character name and dialog, one textbox per line. To make it advance through the dialog, the line number was keyframed and ANodes did the rest of the parsing and animation by itself.The battle menu was similar to the text boxes, only scrolling through lists. I added the limit skill rainbow effect at the last second, which was derived from the limit gauge shader and is activated by ANodes, based on the skill scroll position, plus it uses texture coordinates to apply it to the last line only. (Meaning it would be messed up if I scrolled further.)Models, textures, etc. I used Blender\'s decimate modifier on Erin\'s models to make them low-poly, but had to fix a lot of stuff manually. The corridors, battle stage, railguns and space scene were modelled from scratch. I made all mechanical textures myself. Credit for the earth texture goes to NASA, which was actually a full video so that made things easier. No idea where the star background was from.I ended up changing 4mat\'s Red Sector theme (which Erin used) to "Blinded" by Rage, because it seemed a little more period appropriate for the PlayStation (mid/late 90\'s). The battle music was changed for the same reason. It\'s called "Razorback" by Peter Hajba. If it sounds familiar, you might have played the original Unreal Tournament. Plus it has a nice victory theme now: "Vulpine Skyflight" by Beat.