Mortal Kombat HD Remix with MUGEN

now i'll add jarvis653 images as place holder and will start working on base of them

Yeah sorry I haven't sent you all the files yet, I'm still finishing off the Insert Coin and VS screen, fixing some centering problems in the others, and after that also doing some tests on the font styling. But I'm almost done, so I'll post another update very soon for feedback then send you everything I have for the UI. Apart from in-game UI which I still might have to resize all the current text for.

Have just been busy with other work this week but things should be running smoothly now.

PS:
Good to hear about you guys getting better equipment and having more time to put towards to the project. I'm still as optimistic as ever, I really think we can finish it eventually. Don't underestimate yourself, the workload may be overwhelming but with some determination it can be completed. I think if everyone keeps posting their own work then it encourages more progress too.
 
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@jarvis653: post some sample before you make all the text. for example i think the shadow is too separated in your images. look at the sub zero text in the bio pic or the choose your fighter.

@smoke.tetsu: sorry if sometimes my comments sound bad, i can't expres myself very well in english.

i made the half of the battle plan, having it at the beggining going from top to bottom and i have the right position for other matches, i need to implement a variable and set the enemy/enemies ID and move the "pl1" face
 
@jarvis653: post some sample before you make all the text. for example i think the shadow is too separated in your images. look at the sub zero text in the bio pic or the choose your fighter.

Yep I will definitely post samples for feedback. The choose your fighter, sub zero, and battle plan text all have that same shadow that the original has...kind of. The length is the same but not the thickness. I will fix that, but if you check the original the shadow is still very similar right now. But like I said I'll post samples for you guys to decide on.

Also, I've got all lighting correct, because I worked out from the start that most if not all of the UI has global lighting/shading at an angle of 135° and altitude of 30°. So that parameter is included in all of my work, whenever I've used it things look the same or close enough. But as with everything I do, it's non-destructive so I can tweak almost all the lighting with one single edit.
 
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I'm very excited to see this project. If you guys need a sound editor, I'm proficient in that field.

Good to know, thanks for posting. I've been planning to take care of the sound portion of the project after my UI work, so perhaps we could work together.
My ideas are to actually redo the music, by myself and with other people, but for the sound fx there's a bit more involved.

One method is just cleaning up the sounds, and one is actually replacing them. There's issues with each - if the music is redone then the sound fx, even cleaned up, may still sound inconsistent, but at least they'd be original. As for replacing them, it'd be too much work trying to redo them faithfully by recording new samples, so this is what I was considering - a combination of using existing sounds from movies for the actors, creating sound fx from scratch, and then editing them for consistency with each other and likeness to the originals.

It's the announcer for the game that will probably make the project require both methods. I'm personally against using a recording of someone impersonating him, especially if it isn't recorded with quality studio gear. So we could redo the music, replace the sounds, but clean up and use the original announcer. Otherwise it's redo the music, and use cleaned up sounds and announcer.

At the moment I'm still finishing the UI, but I'll be able to move on to this soon.
 
Good to know, thanks for posting. I've been planning to take care of the sound portion of the project after my UI work, so perhaps we could work together.
My ideas are to actually REDO THE MUSIC.

*cracks knuckles, looks at keyboard instrument*

Check your pm.
 
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My ideas are to actually redo the music, by myself and with other people, but for the sound fx there's a bit more involved.

What kind of style do you think you'd go with for the music? The music sounds to me like some kind of asian fusion type deal run through MIDI especially the character select screen song and the game over song. If you are a musician and know how to play various instruments of that kind and or knew people who did it'd be interesting to hear it with more natural instruments like strings, percussion, etc.

BTW, interesting trivia about the announcer. John Tobias said in twitter recently that it was actually him doing the announcer voice there in MK1. Not sure if I've mentioned this before or how many people here saw that.

Some of the sounds like the uppercut are very distinct to MK1 and if they can't be reproduced it'd probably be better to stick to the originals although in my experience usually upsampling sounds lowers the quality. But if you can manage to "clean them up" more power to you.
 
The choose your fighter, sub zero, and battle plan text all have that same shadow that the original has...kind of. The length is the same but not the thickness. I will fix that, but if you check the original the shadow is still very similar right now. But like I said I'll post samples for you guys to decide on.
look at this picture, there are like "holes" behind caracters, i mean... in arcade the shadow never leave that "holes". maybe you can put the shadow a bit high and to the left

unled2f.jpg
 
What kind of style do you think you'd go with for the music? The music sounds to me like some kind of asian fusion type deal run through MIDI especially the character select screen song and the game over song. If you are a musician and know how to play various instruments of that kind and or knew people who did it'd be interesting to hear it with more natural instruments like strings, percussion, etc.

I'll just copy and paste what I wrote to Grid:

"As for the style of the updated music, I'd personally like to combine the Asian influence with electro which MK has always been associated with. Making everything sound natural would take away its energy IMO; listen to the MK9 Goro's Lair remake for example, it sounds tame compared to the original. I feel some electro would kick the life back into it."

To explain a bit about the production, even though I am a musician myself, there is no need to record real people playing instruments for this. It's very simple - what we'll do is compose everything in midi, then lay modern plugins over it to give it the actual sound we want. To give you an example, I've recorded entire CDs with programmed midi drums, using such high quality samples that you would swear on your life it was a real kit. For that scenario, why the programmed drums work successfully is because not only are they professionally recorded samples, but work by alternating through a whole library of different recorded hits; a human drummer never hits at the exact same velocity consecutively, so my midi plugin randomizes the velocity samples automatically to imitate a human. Plus there are other things regarding ambience that I won't go into.

It will be a simple process - programming the music through midi, experimenting with plugins to create the style, and finally making a master mix.

Some of the sounds like the uppercut are very distinct to MK1 and if they can't be reproduced it'd probably be better to stick to the originals although in my experience usually upsampling sounds lowers the quality. But if you can manage to "clean them up" more power to you.

Yeah the original sounds can be made cleaner but they cannot be made high quality. That's why I proposed to remake them, and as distinct as they are, they definitely can be remade with a convincing likeness to the original. And again, they can be remade without physically recording a single thing.
 
I'm no musician, so it's all a bit like magic to me in terms of how it is created; but are you confident that you'd be able to replicate the multiple layers of the melody for each track so gthey sound just like the original only better?

From reading what you said above that seems like what you are suggesting. If that's so, You sir, are the man!

As for the redoing of sounds, would it be possible to clean the existing announcer voice audio to a point that it would match newly created sound effects? If so than I'm all for it. I think that it'd be super difficult to get someone to mimic the voices exactly though without it sounding bad.

I'd love for it to be somewhat of a hybrid. The sound of the screams/yells is another group of iconic sound that I think we would want to maintain without trying to really redo them. What are you thoughts on this?
 
"As for the style of the updated music, I'd personally like to combine the Asian influence with electro which MK has always been associated with. Making everything sound natural would take away its energy IMO; listen to the MK9 Goro's Lair remake for example, it sounds tame compared to the original. I feel some electro would kick the life back into it."
*snip*
It will be a simple process - programming the music through midi, experimenting with plugins to create the style, and finally making a master mix.
Yeah, that's why I here said asian fusion rather than just straight up asian as it'd be asian fused with some electro. The way you described it sounds pretty good and should hopefully remedy the effect that just running songs through MIDI can often achieve which screams HEY LOOK I RAN THIS THROUGH MY SOUND CARD!

Although as I understand it Dan Forden did quite a bit of MIDI stuff for MK in the first place... and sometimes it's obvious... especially in later games.


Yeah the original sounds can be made cleaner but they cannot be made high quality. That's why I proposed to remake them, and as distinct as they are, they definitely can be remade with a convincing likeness to the original. And again, they can be remade without physically recording a single thing.

If I understand you correctly I think you are saying more like.. "Even though they are very distinct I think they can be remade with a convincing likeness to the original"? That intrigues me.. I'd be interested in seeing what you come up with. I don't know how they made the uppercut sound for example and don't know if they didn't manipulate some stock sounds or what. Foley artists do things like punch watermelons to make punching sound effects... but that uppercut sound doesn't sound like a watermelon being punched for example. ;)

As a side note this subject reminds me of how before MAME got MK support and before I got a computer powerful enough to emulate it I used to play the PC versions of MK and when it comes to MK1 there where two versions. The original version with straight up MIDI music and the MK Duo CD version which had all the music rendered to .wav's and thusly sounded closer to the arcade especially since people like me didn't have really good MIDI in their computer at the time. Shame they didn't do that for the version of MKII in that collection. They pretty much only updated MK1 although it was worth it at the time for that alone.
 
For the announcer, I would recommend using the Steve Ritchie (Shao Kahn) voice overs from MK2/MK3 and some how enhance them a bit or the Steve Ritchie (Shao Kahn) voice overs from MK: Shaolin Monks. The voice overs in Shaolin Monks in multiplayer mode IMO out-do the original MK2/MK3 ones. It just sounds so much more deep and evil if thats the right way of putting it lol.

Have a listen :D

 
A remix sounds good, the only thing I would say about that is my personal taste. I don't like the modern model of re mixes sounding so complicated, that you can hardly pick out a tune to hum. The music from back in the day, sounded great but was easy to listen to and remember, it didn't sound like ambient noise.


Anyway... I got the new computer early, so I'm installing all my software. It's not a high end gaming system, but It's a lot better than my old one. I can run KOFXIII smoothly on it so I'm happy.
 
A remix sounds good, the only thing I would say about that is my personal taste. I don't like the modern model of re mixes sounding so complicated, that you can hardly pick out a tune to hum. The music from back in the day, sounded great but was easy to listen to and remember, it didn't sound like ambient noise.


Anyway... I got the new computer early, so I'm installing all my software. It's not a high end gaming system, but It's a lot better than my old one. I can run KOFXIII smoothly on it so I'm happy.

Nice, but how are you running King of Fighters XIII? It didn't come out for PC.
 
A remix sounds good, the only thing I would say about that is my personal taste. I don't like the modern model of re mixes sounding so complicated, that you can hardly pick out a tune to hum. The music from back in the day, sounded great but was easy to listen to and remember, it didn't sound like ambient noise.

Well they won't truly be remixes - all it will be is the exact original music, but with each instrument's sound replaced for a modern one. So the track as you know it will stay as it is, it will just sound high quality. Even with replacing the sounds, I want to try and get the feel of the original as best I can. Anway I'm sure that by now everyone knows how true to the game I'd like this project to be, and that goal extends to the music/sound portion as well.

Yeah, that's why I here said asian fusion rather than just straight up asian as it'd be asian fused with some electro. The way you described it sounds pretty good and should hopefully remedy the effect that just running songs through MIDI can often achieve which screams HEY LOOK I RAN THIS THROUGH MY SOUND CARD!

Although as I understand it Dan Forden did quite a bit of MIDI stuff for MK in the first place... and sometimes it's obvious... especially in later games.

The quality of legacy midi samples have no bearing on this project. The process remains the same, which is simply programming the music and then giving it sound, but the difference is that modern midi is very advanced and very high quality. Of course it depends on what samples you use, but the aim is of course to have the best production we can.

I'm no musician, so it's all a bit like magic to me in terms of how it is created; but are you confident that you'd be able to replicate the multiple layers of the melody for each track so gthey sound just like the original only better?

The multiple layers of music can absolutely be replicated as it is in the original. The sounds themselves will be different but as I said I will try to capture the feel of the of the original, and I think the best way to do that is fuse the Asian influence with electro.

For the announcer, I would recommend using the Steve Ritchie (Shao Kahn) voice overs from MK2/MK3 and some how enhance them a bit or the Steve Ritchie (Shao Kahn) voice overs from MK: Shaolin Monks. The voice overs in Shaolin Monks in multiplayer mode IMO out-do the original MK2/MK3 ones. It just sounds so much more deep and evil if thats the right way of putting it lol.

No because this is MK1, so using the MK1 announcer is the right thing to do.
 
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