#rapturezoo

[surely-sims]

How's your bioshock cc set coming along? I'm huge fan of your content and seeing your announcement a while ago about bioshock themed cc sparked joy in my heart. That great depression-esque art deco just hits different, am i right folks?

Hello! Hi!

I'm so glad you're excited about it :) I'm so excited about it too- but I'll include part of the note I put up for my patrons a few days ago to let them know I'm pausing billing.

I'm waiting for my brain to swing back around to wanting to make cc- because I really believe that when creators push themselves to put out content it can sometimes come out kinda mid.

So short answer is I don't know- long answer is above. There's just so much possibility and fun I can have with this set I don't want to feel for a second I'm not doing it because I really want to.

Sorry that's not really a good answer, but it's the best I have.

xo, Anne

[kirtlandswarbler]

Is there any way to freecam around Jessamine's memorial ceremony on dh2's intro? We see a bunch of npcs like some servants and the high overseer who move out of the throne room and just disappear/die so I wonder if another npc actually kills them or if they just drop to the ground like some of the ceremony's guests

you're very in luck because I actually captured the High Overseer's path just yesterday!

In the video below, you can see him first move to the right door beside the throne, and then he's teleported into the unlit waiting/sitting/whatever-it-is area behind the throne room. And yes, once he leaves the player's sight, his censer freaks the fuck out. If you watch the left door, you can see Alexi leave first, then one of the servants starts to leave before I move the camera into the waiting room to show Yul in there - the other servants who leave the room also leave via this door, and all end up in the waiting room, where they idle for a while until they get despawned at some point in the cutscene (I don't remember when exactly they despawn but it's at the very latest when we choose our player character.)

The fact that Yul just casually walks out has haunted me since I saw it - of course it happens off-camera so it can't really be considered canon, but his entire disappearance from the narrative is just so.. weird. Obv we get to see him again later when he's dead but, like, it's just weird that he's so absent. Oh well DH2's narrative has so many weird points who knows why they ended up going with this. The loading screen implies we were meant to visit the High Overseer's Office again on our escape so I wouldn't be surprised if we would've seen more of him there.

[emilycaldwin]

callout post for @rapturezoo:

A GOOD AND LOVING FRIEND!

cares a lot!

is fun to watch movies with!

is super cute!

has great ocs and writes extremely well!

has a beautiful soul and can express words very well!

spreads good vibes all the time!

he is a good person with lots of interesting things to say!

pure and precious

has good jokes and poetic words that make me happy

has gone through too much and does not deserve that

very talented!

[kirtlandswarbler]

@rapturezoo said:

Also have you noticed that the ground entrance to the tower doesnt match the checkpoint behind it??? like the rails go through the door yet outside they are elevated??? like wdym harvey

I investigated this and actually I have discovered something very fun:

so you would think that these two doors are two opposite sides of the same door, right? They're the same make and model and the only other doors in this level that act as loading doors are indeed the same door from opposite sides. Why shouldn't this be the same? So then where did the rails go, as you pointed out?

BUT

they are not actually the same door! There is a yard between these two doors that we never get to see.

It is only very sparsely decorated, as it was clearly never meant to be seen up close, with only some of the treetops and some hints of the walls peeking out from some angles. Here it is in Long Day as seen from the street-side door as well as in DttE from the street-side door and from the Tower-side door respectively.

The rails abruptly end after the big metal doors -

and of course on the other side they start on the ground -

so while the devs didn't actually build anything inbetween I think it's very safe to say that in this unseen yard the elevated tracks comes down and turns into the ground-based ones we see on the other side.

The trees - there's four of them - do look like they'd give you trouble, they look awfully close to the middle where the track would presumably have to run. But I do think it's completely plausible to headcanon that there's a combination of things at play here: the placement of the trees isn't exact and they're pushed more off to the side in "reality", the trees were under care of a gardening team before Delilah took over and any branches overhanging onto the tracks would've been cut (although the tracks would've still had to curve slightly to avoid the middle-most tree), hell maybe Delilah and her folk even made the ones in the middle grow there in the first place in order to further block the tracks, and finally who knows maybe there's some sort of elevator system for carts just like there is one in the waterlock and up to the throne room so the whole thing would've taken up less space.

Just out of curiosity I went and checked the area out in DH1: during the intro there are no rails but then again this area was never meant to be seen at all by the player (I'm going to have to say something very funny here: please ignore all the Dauds in this screenshot.)

When we come back in Return, we get a better look: the rails are there now - I wonder if it was Burrows who had them put in?

In Return you can actually already see the towers marking the end of the unseen yard, although the yard itself doesn't exist (just the walls), while in the Intro they didn't bother to build it at all since the player would've never seen it from this angle.

[kirtlandswarbler]

@rapturezoo said:

Surprised to see that Dunwall Tower is rendered too. I've always thought that we were meant to see more of it during the first mission but that it got cut along the way. There's some pre-release renders that show a rather pristine interior of the Tower that does not match the state its in during Death To The Empress, so I'm curious

and:

Curious that they decided to model the unseen yard too, I wonder if the riverfacing facade of the Tower is also modelled in A Long Day in Dunwall. I still think we were meant to see more of the palace on the original first mission, there's a few pre-release images that show a few interiors before they got Delilahfied but that we never see in-game (in that state)

so the opening map is a bit complicated.

While the intro cutscenes are playing, here is what the Tower looks like as a whole: left is a copy of the throne room that gets used during the cutscene, right is the actual throne room set in its real place for when we get to explore it ourselves. (right image is the same view from the harbor side while you're in the playable Tower.) As you can see, neither of these are supposed to be seen from the side or from the river.

(Quick fun little peek behind the curtain: everybody hanging out in the respective throne rooms right at the start of the opening cinematic)

Here is what the outside of the cutscene throne room looks like - just enough there to make the little shot you get of Emily walking towards the doors work. Don't know why they only included one of the middle standing rows of columns. Interesting that they blocked off the doors though - I will expand on that at the end of this post.

Meanwhile the "real" throne room's outside looks like this (left during the cutscene, right during play):

What you'd see if you exited the door was this:

Once we transition to the streets map, the Tower changes to a version designed to actually be seen, but only from the side and below: here's what the roof and yard look like in this map.

From the river, here's what you'd see - first image is while you're in the tower, second two is while you're in the streets.

Plus bonus views from the Hound Pits Pub for funsies:

Circling back to those blocked off doors in the cutscene Tower - did you see how in the playable Tower version, they left the one door opening empty (and the other doesn't exist), and how in the streets version there just wasn't any door/opening there at all? In Death to the Empress, one of the doors - the left (from the river) one - is blocked off like the cutscene one but the right is not - there's a door here that we can't actually open ingame, but clipping into it we see that there's not actually the same kind of iron blocker behind it like on the other side and in the cutscene Tower, just a grey Template box. But that's the only difference between all these maps that made me go "hm why did they do that if you never see this in the first place".

So tl;dr: I'd say we can be sure that by the time they were building these maps they knew the player was not going to be walking out into the rooftop yard. That being said I haven't seen the screenshots you're talking about so if you could link them that'd be dope! :DD

ALSO UNRELATED SIDE NOTE THAT ISN'T WORTH ITS OWN POST: doing this made me realize that the decoration behind Delilah's throne in her painting is actually the (somewhat crown-shaped) decoration of the throne room yard balcony railing! Ain't that neat

[kirtlandswarbler]

@rapturezoo said:

Have you tried getting a look on what's at the end of the broken down stairs Daud sees when he starts the level?

you mean these? you can get up there in regular gameplay, there's some tyvian ore at the end to loot.

This did make me think about these stairs, though. What the hell are they there for?

The road that ends in the front gate of the mansion used to run through a tunnel through the cliffs, which has since caved in. Judging by the remaining planks anchored in the wall as well as the planks on the ground there it looks like the stairs used to split off from the road right at the mouth of the tunnel.

At first I thought that maybe the stairs would've connected the upper town or neighborhood or whatever it is to the Brigmore estate...

but no, looking at it again there's no indication the stairs ever lead upwards from the little outcropping they end on. The ruined outlook platform type architecture above had a railing around it, at least on the side that could've been a candidate for connecting to the wooden stairs. It's broken now but it's clear that even the segment that's missing wasn't wide enough to support a connection to the stairs, and the rest of the wall is smooth with no anchor points for the stairs.

So just some stairs up to the little cliff, just for funsies? A nice place to watch the sunset by the river? But there's..... these.

These wooden supports. Two of them, going down to... nowhere. Dead end. The fence is there.

There are no other wooden supports on this rock wall (screenshots taken from inside/ behind the rock wall to more easily show there are no further wooden supports).

The horizontal planks are splintered at the end so it's possible the original support beams were longer, maybe supporting a second wooden stair leading down to by the fence in a curve. Again - why? What purpose is there to these stairs? The other outcroppings that were at some point used as hangout spots by the Brigmores all have some kind of furniture on them, to help with the hanging out and such. This outcropping just has that piece of raw ore on it. Of course it's possible these particular chairs or similar items were removed between then and when we visit the mansion, or rotted away or even blown down by storm.

Last idea: on the other side of the mansion, but on the same side of the rock wall, is another outcropping. This one ends very abruptly - I wonder if maybe the outcropping with the wooden stairs originally connected to this one and ran all the way along the rock wall. This way you could've skirted the entire mansion grounds by taking the stairs up by the tunnel and walking along the side of the cove here. But then that still wouldn't explain the two wooden support beams covered above.

hm. architectural mystery.

[kirtlandswarbler]

@rapturezoo said:

What about something with the unmasked female aristocrats? We only get to see them girls in their "daily attire" in Dunwall City Trials, as all of them mostly appear in Lady Boyle's wearing masks

For this one I imagined they're kind of buddies with one of the maids who took them up to the second floor balcony so they can hang out and share some hot goss away from all the other guests

[kirtlandswarbler]

@rapturezoo said:

Omg???? How did you even manage to do this?😭😭 the only way i've been able to pull off something like this has been in the sims but then again it never looks the same

The heavy lifting was done by AlexNG's amazing blender importer. You need to unpack the game files with quickbms first but then you can just import the map file of the Tower interior (maps\campaign\dunwall\return\interior\dunwall_return_interior_p\dunwall_return_interior_p.bwm) into blender with the importer. It links all the textures etc. by itself, it's honestly amazing. Mad props to AlexNG for their incredible work. Obv you need a pretty beefy machine to import entire maps into one file though - I cut the map down to just Corvo's apartment and even just that portion takes six gigabytes of memory to display.

For comparison, here's what the apartment looks like imported into Blender without my cleaning efforts - I replaced the shattered glass on the cupboards and display cases, deleted the trash and dust and stuff, moved knocked-over objects to more normal positions and edited some of the dusty floor and carpet textures to make them less grimy. :D

i took a screenshot of the entire apartment from a bird's eye view for you since that'll probably be helpful if you wanna rebuild it in the sims :3

plus the same with the overhanging wall panels removed