JPL

Hi folks. The LucasArts Places Mastodon and Cohost bots have been running strong for over a year now, but I haven't totally forgotten about the other part of this project, a browseable online repository for all the art. Around this time a year ago, I had a look around at all the different javascript lightbox libraries out there, and tried out a few of them. "nanogallery2" seemed as good as any, so I did a couple tests on my site, just to see what a single game's page might look like (ignore the page's CSS and overall visual style, that's just what my personal website uses): http://vectorpoem.com/lucasarts_backgrounds/gallery_tests/maniac64/ http://vectorpoem.com/lucasarts_backgrounds/gallery_tests/monkey2/ One of the difficulties I encountered was in how to handle all the games with non-square pixels (ie everything before Curse of Monkey Island). With HTML <img> tags it's certainly possible to non-uniformly scale an original 320x200 image to be the correct aspect ratio, but there's no guarantee it'll look good in most browsers. For the tests above, I pre-processed the images, doing the same kind of upscale + aspect correct that the LucasArts Places bot code does, effectively increasing the image's size X4 so that the nonuniform scale doesn't look too noticeable. The file size increase, while non-trivial, isn't the biggest concern; it's more that it's changing the original image from the collection, and one of my primary goals here is to provide those images as close to the source formats as possible. Of course, the answer there might simply be to have a "download original" link for each piece of art. I also wanted to present the art for each port of each game "side by side", with the alternate versions just a click away. Here's an attempt at that kind of functionality I just whipped up: http://vectorpoem.com/lucasarts_backgrounds/gallery_tests/multi_plat_images/ Alongside aspect ratio correction, this is another feature that off-the-shelf lightbox plugins don't have - as Ron pointed out, most of them are aimed at photographers. And of course there's always the dream features, like being able to toggle on a CRT shader, and heck maybe even embedding the music for rooms where applicable. And gosh, what if the few backgrounds that made use of color cycling (things like the labyrinth waterfalls from Fate of Atlantis) used something like the HTML5 Color Cycling Demo tech to present those? That's getting wayy ahead of myself, though. So I'm kinda wondering if this means I should try modifying one of the open source lightbox plugins to add these features. Or maybe there's already something out there that would work great for this, that I just don't know about.

That probably just means the program I used to extract the PNG was converting it then, that's good to know!

Wow, great replies folks! Some exciting possibilities here. Laserschwert, thanks for the PDF suggestion, I'm such a digital-only guy and not at all used to thinking of PDF as a target format, but it's clearly got high value for preservation. I was curious if the PDF specs support embedded PNGs with indexed color specifically (the PNGs in the sample you gave were RGB, afaict) - according to this page they do - because IMO it's important to hold onto that for uses like color cycling and palette swaps (see below). I hadn't considered the possibility of a subsite hosted here on mixnmojo but the examples you posted, Thrik, are great and really got me thinking how ideal it could be with the right presentation. My personal site is all hand-coded/generated, really basic CSS and barely uses javascript for anything, and I don't know anything about modern frameworks and stuff, but if there are lightbox implementations out there that could provide pixel perfect (even multiples, I guess, like ScummVM) + aspect-corrected scaling with good scrolling, that work work perfectly. The option of a CRT filter is a dream feature (some of the art looks 10x better with eg crt-easymode-halation.glslp in scummVM!) but I'm guessing it's not trivial; most CRT filters are done with shaders which implies a WebGL/WebGPU context (the latter of which I really want to learn for other projects!) so maybe that's in the gravy category for now. The absolute dream would be an individual image view mode that also supports color cycling for the few dozen images in the collection that use it, using something like this library used by the famous HTML5 Color Cycling page. But it seems like there's two distinct levels of fanciness here, the well-presented but nothing "dynamic" level that is super achievable with a well-designed conventional page (using a modest amount of js?) and the "fully dynamic" view which adds CRT filter(s), color cycling, maybe streams an appropriate soundtrack track (heck, give them an option where appropriate for Adlib vs MT-32, etc!)... just a full sense of "being there" in your web browser. The latter is much more experimental, maybe I'll mess with those ideas on the side to see how tractable it is. The former, though - I'm pretty sold on the idea of a LucasArts Places page that is hosted on a site more reliable than mine, has a nice browseable design, etc. I'd be happy to do the bulk of the work on that and/or collaborate with someone on it. That WinAmp skin museum is a beautiful achievement, I love it and I love how the layout offers this endless cornucopia of stuff. The LucasArts images aren't all the same size so it wouldn't be the same vast tiling landscape, and I think I'd want each game + version to be its own page. But it's inspirational for sure.

Heyy, thanks for the writeup! I ended up soft-launching the bot part of this first, on Mastodon and Cohost, because the code part was easy and the data was ready to go. I was planning on "announcing" it officially from my main accounts on those respective sites sometime this week, once the masto version had a couple more posts in its timeline. It's all good, they're out in the world and I'm happy to have people looking at em. I'm a little more uncertain on how best to make the actual images available in a collection, as I originally intended. The more I looked at archive.org, the more I realized it wasn't actually a great way to publish and browse certain collections of images - it's more of a "here's a big dump of stuff, all in one big directory" sort of thing, and you don't have much of any control over how it's presented, eg it's a long tiled scroll of square thumbnails. I'd really like to present this work in a format that's easy to browse (ie sorted by game and by game-version) and appreciate its visual quality (ie original res + click to view larger in a lightbox)... but I'm not sure what websites are out there for doing this, that has the commitments to archival integrity that archive.org does - ie I don't want to use one of those image hosting sites (like imgur) that are just going to "pull a photobucket" and vanish from the web when the VC cash runs out, leaving tons of broken links. This kinda includes even my own personal website, which even if bandwidth cost me nothing isn't going to be a reliable place to keep data for the long term future. I'm also thinking about the copyright status of this work - obviously the original artwork is LucasFilm's copyright, and I don't want to do anything that would make them feel like their work is being "pirated" or anything (even though it's hard to imagine it being used in this way - people using it in their own games without attribution?). In various senses these images are highly edited screenshots, and I've read several assertions online that game screenshots count as "derivative works". But they're very obviously not my artwork; the whole point of this is to celebrate the actual artists. I've used Creative Commons licenses for some things I've personally created in the past, but this is not that kind of case, so I don't think I have any right to stick a CC license on these files. So I dunno, I'd love to share the full collection of this stuff, but I'm not sure what the best outlet and format would be. Suggestions welcome but certainly not expected! Thanks again for the technical and moral support so far.

I'm now at a Release Candidate stage, as far as the actual images are concerned. http://vectorpoem.com/lucasarts_backgrounds Lots more work compared to my last update, here's what I can remember: Finished up images for the remaining games, eg the palette shift rooms in Zak256. Integrated all the costume-based parallax objects I know of: the Mansion interior in Monkey1, the Woodtick boat wreckage in Monkey2, and several in Fate of Atlantis (New York, Azores, Crete, Algiers, Atlantis). And one I found in The Dig. Did a file rename pass to replace all my 001_snake_case_style_names.png with easier to read names with capitalization and spaces, retaining the room number for its historical meaning. Renamed the game and version directories to be similarly more human-readable, eg "Commodore 64", "DOS EGA", "Windows", etc. Added and edited several more images I realized were missing or inaccurate when I was doing this big renaming + quality control pass. If anyone spots any inaccuracies, omissions, or otherwise at my temp archive link there, now's the time to call em out. Besides that, I just need to finalize the readme file and decided on a format for it (plaintext, markdown, HTML) - this is probably something where I should browse archive.org for the better put-together collections and see what they did. Thanks again for the help in getting this together! Serge and the rest of yall definitely get a credit in the readme, along with all the tools I used.

Thanks a ton for the info! I only just realized that the colors I'm looking for are in the exact same palette, and being shifted around like that. With accurate screenshots (which I was able to get easily, thanks to your room numbers list) I was able to work out exactly which ranges are being moved. I now have a python script that can manipulate the palette slots appropriate based on a series of commands for each specific image. Rather than think about the order of operations, I simply operate on a copy of the palette and "paste" ramps into that, and then set the output image to use that. That was the final technical hurdle facing this project. Thanks again!

Yeah, thanks! That's pretty much what I gathered was happening. What I'm having the most difficulty finding are the actual color values (or indices, for some existing palette I can sample) that the default palettes are being set to in these few specific rooms. I had an idea to go to one of them (eg the Yellow Crystal room in the Mayan pyramid) in ScummVM and take a 1:1 unfiltered / original pixels screenshot, sample one of the shifted colors, and then wrote a Python script to search all the existing background images' palettes for that exact color - thinking that it's defined in some other palette. But that didn't return any results! So last night I tried a more manual, lower tech solution on one image, as a test to see how it looked: I sampled a few (3-4) colors along one of the shifted ramps in the ScummVM screenshot (ie the actual colors specified by the game data, AFAICT), and then opened up the unshifted palettized image in DPaint IIe in DOSBox, set those same indices to those colors, and then used the "Spread" palette function to fill in the rest of the ramp with the approximately-correctly shifted colors. When I pasted this result back into GNU IMP over the screenshot, there were definitely some small discrepancies in color, but it looked "pretty close", and it got me closer than any other method I've tried to date. So I might just try that approach for the remaining 6-7 images that need these palette shifts. Which involves playing fairly deep into Zak (skipping to the room #s via the debug console doesn't work, because they're all variations on the same room!) which I hadn't done in years. What is that Palette Viewer program you've screenshot there? I've been amassing all kinds of old quirky SCUMM tools throughout this process and that one doesn't look familiar.

That's consistent with what I'm seeing; I'm down to looking through decompiled scumm scripts, and the numbers it's giving for room color changes are definitely all single digit numbers, and looking at the palettes in GNU IMP they're pretty much all even 16-color ramps. It'd be easy to swap one of those ramps (from another room's palette, possibly?) in for another, but the question is which one... it's kinda hard to just eyeball. My guess is that the alt palette / ramps are *somewhere* in existing game data, ie they didn't just make new palette ramps just for these swaps. I'm just not quite good enough at decompiling and reading these old scripts to know which ones they might be. Ahh, yes I remember those parallaxy bits! I forgot all about them, so I'll try them out.

Hi folks. A few weeks ago I started working on a spare time project: a complete collection of all the background art from every LucasArts adventure game (Maniac thru EMI), in palettized PNG format and in its original resolution and aspect ratio. My ultimate goal is to upload this to archive.org, but since they don't seem to support editing the actual data contents of collections once you've uploaded them, I want to make sure I get things right before I do so. So I thought I'd present my work so far to some adventure game experts. Here's a dump of the data on my personal website - as the page says, please do not link this page anywhere; I do not intend to host these files indefinitely and intend to take them down once the collection is completed and uploaded: [link redacted for now] The presentation on that page is also temp, it's just the quickest easiest way I found to provide access to all the data. I'll let the draft readme on that page speak for itself - see the sections on "presentation of the work". To be very clear, these aren't raw dumps from a ripping program, though ripped data was the starting point for most of the images, I've edited these images (some quite extensively, eg the runtime-generated maze rooms in some games) to get them as close to how they look in-game as possible, minus most of the characters, obviously - the idea is to foreground and celebrate the art, and the artists who created it. Stuff I'm looking for feedback on: Any artist credits I missed or got wrong in the draft readme. Any glitches in the images, ie places where I didn't patch in an object correctly, something is missing, etc. Anything I missed? ie entire rooms I forgot, etc. In the interests of not flooding the collection hundreds of very similar images, I didn't include every maze room as those are cobbled together from pieces, but I tried to represent most or all of said pieces in a smaller number of "iconic" room images. Filenames - my naming convention was arbitrary and probably inconsistent in several places. Also I may have simply gotten the name or purpose of a room wrong. I didn't replay all these games while working on this, but I did jump in and out of ScummVM a ton to check my work. I will probably rename all the files to move from snake_case to regular human filenames with capitalization and spaces. Any quality improvement suggestions, eg better versions of the existing images. Stuff I can't figure out: How to get accurate palette shifts for the rooms in Zak FM Towns that use them, eg the jungle mazes, the Blue Crystal / Yellow Crystal / Mars Ankh / Mars Teleporter room, and the Egypt / Mars sarcophagus rooms. These rooms were all authored in one palette each, with SCUMM code (RoomColor?) setting the palette shift appropriately for each variation. But I can't figure out how to get those shifted palettes and map the images to them. It was easy to do this with Zak C64 and EGA because it's only 16 colors and it was trivial to just eyeball em... not so much with several different arbitrary 256 color palettes.

I'd like to replay the game at some point and see things like Cogg Island and maybe even go for the "Trivia Lord" achievement, but I'm a little hesitant not knowing exactly how Trivia Cards work, and thus whether a full second run would be assured of finding them all: what determines whether they spawn in a room? Is the total pool of cards tracked across multiple savegames/runs (ie the way achievements are clearly tracked, such that you access them via the main menu not the pause menu from within a specific game session)? If I got a particular trivia question wrong on my first play of the game, will that card show up again on a second run? Do specific cards always show in specific places (ie is there a place I can go to reliably get the Cogg Island card?) Probably a few other things I'd like to know about em but those are the main ones. Thanks! If nobody knows, feel free to use this thread to research and speculate!

I think I'd always assumed 5. This shot is from a project I was working on years back using the GZDoom engine (not Autobiographical Architecture, another one) and never managed to finish. Several different game spaces "quoted" in it and strung together in a dreamlike way. I should finish it someday!