Senjo No Valkyria (Valkyrie of the Battlefield) : Best Cell shading ever?

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The official site of Senjo No Valkyria (Valkyrie of the Battlefield) is now open with dozens of screenshots in conjunction with SEGA's press event today. Release: Spring 2008 in Japan for PS3.

The genre is "Active Simulation RPG". It's announced as a playable title at TGS.

http://valkyria.jp/
 
This is one to add to my list of stylized renderers! Rendered as sketched artwork, with flat colour fills , outlines and 'pencil sketch' shading. Static pictures look truly excellent!

The problem I have with this style (used in some cartoons before this) is the shading looks terribly artificial. Either the sketch lines are static, and it looks like masking for the colour, or they shimmer. To pull it if, I think you need to drop down to 12 fps and produce something that fits the style of 'The Snowman'.
 
I just watched the 1080p trailer.
Per frame, its the best cel shading I have ever seen. Seemingly great geometry too.

I too however have a problem with static shading of shadows. It should have been random and flickery, different each frame consistent with sketchy pencil shaded animation.

Still looks great. No idea what it is about though.
 
Thought I'd change the title to attract those interested in Cell shading who might otherwise overlook this game. The style deserves more attention.
 
betan said:
I just watched the 1080p trailer.
Per frame, its the best cel shading I have ever seen. Seemingly great geometry too.

I too however have a problem with static shading of shadows. It should have been random and flickery, different each frame consistent with sketchy pencil shaded animation.

Still looks great. No idea what it is about though.
Click to expand...


The first game ever where people are complaining the shadows aren't flickering enough!
 
Wow !

This is incredible art. @_@

The art style is awesome (!). It gives life to the top notch character and weapon designs. The animation and attention to detail is nice too. I want to see more !

Spring 2008 can't come soon enough.

EDIT:
Just finished watching the walkthrough. This game is like a long lost friend to me. When I saw the walkthru, I was thinking "Where have you been all these years ?" :LOL:
* Strategy game element (like wargames)
* Tactical and deep character-based combat
* Beautiful and stylish anime, not over the top

This game will work wonders on PSP too. The gameplay reminds me of MGS AC!D (except that it's not card based :) ).
 
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Good Reason

inefficient said:
The first game ever where people are complaining the shadows aren't flickering enough!
Click to expand...

When you look at large shadow areas you can notice this problem easily. Small areas it is fine. But for large areas it looks like shadow area of object is transparent and behind there is one fixed texture on the screen for all shadows. So where there is shadow it is transparent. This is how it looks. I dont know if this is how they do it. But, this is easy to fix. They only have to make noise function for shadow texture.
 
ihamoitc2005 said:
When you look at large shadow areas you can notice this problem easily. Small areas it is fine. But for large areas it looks like shadow area of object is transparent and behind there is one fixed texture on the screen for all shadows. So where there is shadow it is transparent. This is how it looks. I dont know if this is how they do it. But, this is easy to fix. They only have to make noise function for shadow texture.
Click to expand...

What kind of noise?
I don't think sketch marks are procedurally generated, hence noise that can preserve lines won't be computationally cheap and simple tricks like positional shift of bitmap will probably not look good either.
 
Various tricks could be used. Perhaps the easiest is multiple sketch textures and you just randomise them up. There's not a large texture requirement for the game relative to a traditional style, so resource wise it shouldn't be an issue to have a few different sketch textures and switch between them per frame with a randomized offset. However, that might just look like a terrible flicker. It works with hand-drawn animation but that's only 12 fps and the viewer has time to appreciate the shading for what it is, I think.

I don't really know the best solution for a hand-drawn look to shading in realtime. These static textures may actually be the better choice between that and very noisy shimmer.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Various tricks could be used. Perhaps the easiest is multiple sketch textures and you just randomise them up. There's not a large texture requirement for the game relative to a traditional style, so resource wise it shouldn't be an issue to have a few different sketch textures and switch between them per frame with a randomized offset. However, that might just look like a terrible flicker. It works with hand-drawn animation but that's only 12 fps and the viewer has time to appreciate the shading for what it is, I think.

I don't really know the best solution for a hand-drawn look to shading in realtime. These static textures may actually be the better choice between that and very noisy shimmer.
Click to expand...

In terms of visuals, I expect randomly selecting from multiple bitmaps to look better, more natural. In the worst case, they can can switch bitmap every 3 frames or so.

That said, authentic look may not be suitable for gameplay, possibly too distractive or even exhaustive.
 
They can probably translate the textures according to the moving objects. I am thinking about the same thing: If it's too "messy", it can be quite tiring to the eyes.
 
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I'm not a big fan of the anime genre in terms of story and even art a lot of the time, but I wish more games came out with varied styles like this. There are a lot of games that could benefit from something other than an attempt at pure realism. I'd like to see some gameplay on this one. I'm really into comic book art, and I've always preferred messy sketchy lines. The approach they've taken really gives the feel of a hand drawn comic, rather than a clean Disney style.
 
:D Now that all my targeted adventure/action games are out, I am now building a new list.

I don't know what to call "Valkyria of the Battlefield", but it's definitely top on my list:
http://www.jeux-france.com/news22788_valkyrie-of-the-battlefield-images-et-video.html

(Gameplay video)


EDIT: Ok, they call it "Active Simulation RPG". >_<
Still looks interesting to me though. It looks like the game is also suitable for Remote Play.
 
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