MXLU Bestiary (WARNING: Bandwidth Road Challenge) (vXVI)

Jetaman wrote:Hey great job! But I don't understand why did you use ingame images instead of gif files? In my opinion it would look better.
Like this:

We havent used gifs, first because they would load forever, they are HARD to get and time consuming. It's simpler this way.

P.S: Act 2 its done, when Rishab comes back he just need to upload it. Gonna start with act 3.........its really huge.

Jetaman wrote:Hey great job! But I don't understand why did you use ingame images instead of gif files? In my opinion it would look better.
Like this:

There r multiple reason for me not using animated images even tho they were my first preference too.

1. Like Stealthy and sommy said above, they would be heavier in size and would take a lot more time to load once the thread is updated with all the monsters. ( currently pics of all monsters have ~15mb size and i m still missing many monster pics)

2. Some people who do not know how this game handle monster graphics would think that Marco must have had a folder with all monster animated pics which i should asked from him, but in reality, thats not the case.. the game handle monsters internally and i would have to extract 1 monster at a time from the various MPQ files of this game/mod.(extremely time consuming).

3. I was even ready to go for extracting 1 monster at a time and than slowly replace these pics with animated ones and Marco even gave me a tool to help me extract those images easily( it was still 1-by-1) but there were multiple problems with extraction too... first of all, i needed some internal information of monsters, which was not really an issue since Marco was all up for help in providing the information but then we tried to extract a few monsters and we found that i would need even more files to know exact monster color pallets and speeds of their movement, then it turned out that monster who have some kind of overlay (like Blaz have full set aura, Yshari boss have those swirls, etc) are handled by the game internally and does not appear on the monster when it is extracted. The solution of it was to extract the overlay separately and than combine it with monsters' gif in photoshop (i dont know how to use photoshop). KorCola was there with me at that time helping me, he was actually the one who explain all this to me bcz i had no idea on how to do this extraction stuff and he told me that even in photoshop there were problems with matching the speed of monster and their overlay effect. In the end, it turned out that by the time we would have extracted all the monsters, Sigma would have probably came out and thats saying something.. (we tried all this in November, 2014.. last year).

4. I have a life too and i was not ready to give another 5 years of it just to extract monster gifs. xD

it took me a loooong time to get all these pics and i had help of Suchbalance and Binary in getting the pics.. so i cant imagine the amount of time it would take to extract the images if i had to do it alone..

On bow bloodfire rogue:
I think blindside=the skill Dark Champions use in A5 (just go to frozen tundra, find a dark champion and you'll see what I mean). AKA: those glowing arrows that deal no damage whatsoever. I've seen them use that skill in Jail levels. On a side note, I've never seen them use Phalanx.
And now a few other infos that might be worth to add:
Shaman's firewall stack.
I don't know if this is a graphic bug, but invisible monster aren't affected by Vindicate (they don't get the symbol thing over their heads). Not sure if they still give buff when killed.
Cogs: Stay away from their corpses, unless you want to eat a whole (Insert Warforged Shaman's corpse explosion skill here) which will probably kill you in higher difficulties.

Any chance of you listing monster damage, hp, and resists per difficulty ala Arreat Summit, or is this out of the question?

Marco, I'm wondering if this can't be added to the [item] tag for making guides?

Seekers wrote:On bow bloodfire rogue:
I think blindside=the skill Dark Champions use in A5 (just go to frozen tundra, find a dark champion and you'll see what I mean). AKA: those glowing arrows that deal no damage whatsoever. I've seen them use that skill in Jail levels. On a side note, I've never seen them use Phalanx.
And now a few other infos that might be worth to add:
Shaman's firewall stack.
I don't know if this is a graphic bug, but invisible monster aren't affected by Vindicate (they don't get the symbol thing over their heads). Not sure if they still give buff when killed.
Cogs: Stay away from their corpses, unless you want to eat a whole (Insert Warforged Shaman's corpse explosion skill here) which will probably kill you in higher difficulties.

@blindside: can someone else confirm?
@rest info : cool thanks, i forgot those small things, will add them when i resume work here

Taem wrote:Any chance of you listing monster damage, hp, and resists per difficulty ala Arreat Summit, or is this out of the question?

Marco, I'm wondering if this can't be added to the [item] tag for making guides?

Monster damage and hp are really the infos that would 'cool' listed here but wont be of help at all in telling u if the monster is a thread or a weakling.. So marco and i decided to leave this info out of this.
As per resistance of monsters, i did asked marco for this info but he didn't replied to it so i just let it go...

As per making it something like [item] tag, that is a possibility but it is a lot of work, it took much time to make item tag even when they had all the items listed properly and everything, and bestiary is far from finish with just the info.. I was not in the item tag development so i actually dont really know exactly how much work it was.
We do have a [mon] tag to display a monster's pic, i can make a list of what name to be written in the mon tag to get the monster if u want since its not as straightforward as the item tag.

But i wont be doing anything in bestiary for around next 7 days now (going out of station with family)

3. I was even ready to go for extracting 1 monster at a time and than slowly replace these pics with animated ones and Marco even gave me a tool to help me extract those images easily( it was still 1-by-1) but there were multiple problems with extraction too... first of all, i needed some internal information of monsters, which was not really an issue since Marco was all up for help in providing the information but then we tried to extract a few monsters and we found that i would need even more files to know exact monster color pallets and speeds of their movement, then it turned out that monster who have some kind of overlay (like Blaz have full set aura, Yshari boss have those swirls, etc) are handled by the game internally and does not appear on the monster when it is extracted. The solution of it was to extract the overlay separately and than combine it with monsters' gif in photoshop (i dont know how to use photoshop). KorCola was there with me at that time helping me, he was actually the one who explain all this to me bcz i had no idea on how to do this extraction stuff and he told me that even in photoshop there were problems with matching the speed of monster and their overlay effect. In the end, it turned out that by the time we would have extracted all the monsters, Sigma would have probably came out and thats saying something.. (we tried all this in November, 2014.. last year).

Hey Rishab,
thanks for the explanation. Actually what you said made me think about gif animation with the overlay and I decided to take the challenge. It took me quite a lot of time to figure it out, but when I actually knew what to do it was pretty easy. The offsets of the aura are a bit off, but I was too lazy to adjust it and the pallete is not exactly what it should be. I'm not implying that you should do it, I support you static ingame images. I made this just to show that it's possible, and yeah, I didn't use Photoshop

Jetaman wrote:
3. I was even ready to go for extracting 1 monster at a time and than slowly replace these pics with animated ones and Marco even gave me a tool to help me extract those images easily( it was still 1-by-1) but there were multiple problems with extraction too... first of all, i needed some internal information of monsters, which was not really an issue since Marco was all up for help in providing the information but then we tried to extract a few monsters and we found that i would need even more files to know exact monster color pallets and speeds of their movement, then it turned out that monster who have some kind of overlay (like Blaz have full set aura, Yshari boss have those swirls, etc) are handled by the game internally and does not appear on the monster when it is extracted. The solution of it was to extract the overlay separately and than combine it with monsters' gif in photoshop (i dont know how to use photoshop). KorCola was there with me at that time helping me, he was actually the one who explain all this to me bcz i had no idea on how to do this extraction stuff and he told me that even in photoshop there were problems with matching the speed of monster and their overlay effect. In the end, it turned out that by the time we would have extracted all the monsters, Sigma would have probably came out and thats saying something.. (we tried all this in November, 2014.. last year).

Hey Rishab,
thanks for the explanation. Actually what you said made me think about gif animation with the overlay and I decided to take the challenge. It took me quite a lot of time to figure it out, but when I actually knew what to do it was pretty easy. The offsets of the aura are a bit off, but I was too lazy to adjust it and the pallete is not exactly what it should be. I'm not implying that you should do it, I support you static ingame images. I made this just to show that it's possible, and yeah, I didn't use Photoshop

Well, if u could explain how u did this in a pm or something then i will see if it would be time consuming or not or if marco would even want this done.. The issue of image sizes still exists..

OK guys.. so in this thread, my last reply will always have questions/queries that i have related to various monsters and i would really really appreciate if u guys would answer those since i m not playing anymore and cant confirm things from in-game.

Lol, I cant believe someone neg'd you for doing something in your spare time, that doesn't hurt anyone and could be useful to someone. :hammer:

Wotan wrote:Lol, I cant believe someone neg'd you for doing something in your spare time, that doesn't hurt anyone and could be useful to someone.

haha i know right?
oh well haters gonna hate hate and workers gonna work work..