One of the problems with posting something every day is when you run out of stuff to post, or at least, run out of stuff that's ready to post. So, I'm taking a break from Star Fox and Krystal for today. Instead, how are you guys liking the new Zelda? For me, it's a fantastic game! Basically, one of the best games of all time. Seriously! The only complaint I have is it has no Krystal in it (at least, so far). :D

So, how about this for post content? Ever want to make games? Ever wonder what goes into the design process of making your favorite games? Well, Nintendo has put out an epic series of videos talking about the design and building process with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I highly recommend these videos. Check them out!

• The Beginning (embedded above)
• Open-Air Concept
• Story and Characters

A lot of the content shown in these videos is summarized from Nintendo's presentation at this year's Game Developer's Conference, which has been posted in full!

[Gore Warning] - Relatively mild (and low poly) gore in a couple of places towards the end of the video.

Today, The Nostalgic Gamer posted his 10th episode in his continuing chronicling of Rareware's history. This episode, he covers the development of Dinosaur Planet, and the game's transition to become Star Fox Adventures. This is a really great summary of what happened, showing lots of footage from the original Dinosaur Planet. He even concludes what I do about Star Fox Adventures: It's a pretty good game, but not utterly fantastic the way some of Rareware and Star Fox's other previous hits were. The purchase by Microsoft was touched on, but those details will be saved for the next episode.

Continuing to add original cosplay photos to the Krystal Cosplay Group, I have finally uploaded my (admittedly small quantity of) photos from Further Confusion 2013, which was both FJ McCloud and my first meeting with Ayano. You can view that gallery here.

I've also got some video footage that I don't think was ever uploaded, so I'm going to work on that.

[Language Warning] - Some of the speedrun has strong language.

Speedrunner JubJub62 has been working on speed runs for Star Fox Adventures for quite a while. As of two weeks ago, he posted this world record for Star Fox Adventures, completing the game in only 4 hours 32 minutes and 47 seconds. This run uses glitches. He also did a glitchless run in only 5:11:06. He continues to try and improve the time, working on a 4 hour, 31 minute run. You can follow his streams on Twitch.

Using existing lineart, Matt Colvin shows a timelapse of his coloring of this Krystal commission using traditional media. Here's the finished artwork.

Here's a simple glitch that Fenrik found in the Krazoa Palace, when playing Krystal's part. The video shows Krystal being able to walk on the slant of a wall that you shouldn't be able to walk on. I tried to do this myself, but was unable to figure out how to do it. Can you do it?

This is an experiment in 8K rendering on GameCube via the Dolphin emulator. I managed to record a cutscene from Star Fox Adventures at full quality, using maximum available settings on the emulator, at a higher resolution than 8K.

What is 8K? Well, it's 7680×4320 resolution, 4 times larger than 4K, or 16 times larger than 1080p Full HD. It means over 33 million pixels per frame. But what do all those numbers mean? Here, this image should help. Click the image to see its full resolution, which is at actual 8K size.

Pretty cool, eh?

Anyway, this is my first 8K video on YouTube, and probably the last one for a while. You see, there are only two or three displays in the world capable of showing this video. Some movie theaters might be able to, but it'll be at least a year before your average consumer will begin to start purchasing these screens. I only just upgraded to 4K monitors and TVs myself.

If you are interested in the technical details of the process, read below!

Technical Details

I used a hidden EFBScale=12 setting to get the Dolphin to render the game at an astounding 7942x4752 pixels. This was recorded via the Dolphin's frame dump feature at 60fps. I used the maximum possible settings for anti-aliasing (8xSSAA) and anisotopic filtering (16x). The encoding was done via the FFV1 Lossless Video codec, resulting in no lost data due to compression. These are the highest possible settings for their respective categories without modifying the source code of the Dolphin. Note that at these resolutions and settings, I had to change my desktop resolution to 1080p to prevent the GPU from crashing when trying to render 8K footage. Even then, enabling 8xSSAA often caused the emulator to crash. I had to carefully re-enable it during the gameplay.

At these massive settings, the game only rendered at about 10-20fps. When recording frame dumps, however, the emulation slowed down to less than 2fps. Thus, it took over an hour to record this video.

The resulting video file, just over 1 minute and 20 seconds long, created a 28.6 gigabyte file. Since I do not have a player capable of viewing video at this size, I had to to down-convert the video to a lower resolution just to preview it. All of my work with the video had to be done via FFMPEG, the command line tool, rather than a non-linear video editor.

After several false starts and glitches, I managed to correctly cut the video to remove unwanted portions of the beginning and end of the video. I also removed unneeded portions of the audio dump wav file, so that it would be shorter and synced with the now-cut video. In the final step, I did several operations in a single conversion: I merged the audio and video, resized the resolution down to 8K's horizontal width (7680), then cropped the top and bottom to give a perfect 8K resolution (7680x 4320), and converted it to the low-compression, highest-possible-quality version of ProRes ("prores_ks -profile v:4 yuv444p10"). Cropping didn't delete any data, because this cutscene has black bars on the top and bottom.

Most encoding, especially at full resolution, took anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour and a half to perform on my computer (Intel i7 with GeForce GTX 760 and 32 GB of RAM).

The resulting ProRes file was 63.1 gigabytes! YouTube recommends uploads using the H.264 codec. However, H.264 only supports resolutions up to 4K. As a result, after some recommendations I found online, I went ahead and uploaded the 63 GB video directly to YouTube. Thanks to my amazing Google Fiber connection, it only took 30 minutes to upload! YouTube took about an hour to get 1080p 60fps footage available, and another 4 or 5 hours to make 4K 60fps and 8K 60fps available.

I hope that this will be instructive to people wishing to do their own game recordings, and to recognize how powerful the Dolphin and GameCube games truly are.

A company called CosplayHouse has several Krystal cosplay products available for purchase and customization, right now. While it's anyone's guess about the quality of these offerings, the fact that Krystal is available at all, as a character, is pretty cool.

Here's what they have on offer:

• Krystal Adventures Costume - $280.50; Comes with:
  • Top
  • Bottom
  • Arm and Leg Armor
  • Shoulder Armor
  • Neck Piece
  • Head Piece
• Krystal Assault Costume - $176.80; Comes with:
  • Body Suit
  • Shoulder Pads
  • Belt
  • Gloves
  • Tail
• Krystal's Staff - $140.00
• Krystal Assault Boots - $51.16

It looks like none of these come with a wig or headband, while the Adventures costume doesn't include the tail, jewelry, or shoes. However, it looks like this company is more than willing to customize and adapt costumes to requests. They certainly tailor to all sizes.

On a related note, they also have Fox McCloud/Captain Falcon boots, a full-head Falco mask, Falco boots, and Falco headgear (the scouter thing all Star Fox members wear).

Here's a fun little 3D scene by Nicholas Kary. He posted his 3D model on SketchFab, a place for 3D artists to upload their 3D models where they can be viewed and interacted with, like a YouTube video, but for 3D models. You can orbit all around this scene, change the angle, even change the textures. Give it a try right here, in your browser.

Here's a quick Krystal speedpaint from TheMoonfall. This was the first time that TheMoonfall did a digital piece without lines to work from. You can view the finished artwork in her gallery.

On an unrelated note, this posting-once-a-day thing is starting to get difficult. I'm beginning to run out of readily available material. Oh sure, I have stuff that needs to be posted, but it is going to take a bit of work before it's ready. If you guys know of anything that you think should be featured here, please email me with your ideas. Even if you already submitted it to me, send me a reminder email! Thanks everyone!