It's amazing, the Sonic 1 style special stages actually look fun!? (to be quite honest I think I hated them less than most people, but still!)
Amazing. A pity about it not working properly, but I'd assume it's because the orbs themselves are individual objects rather than sub-sprites of the same one, with the main orbinaut disappearing it ruins the rest.. but that's an assumption. :P Let's go and look through some VRAM, shall we? We can optimise this a lot with what you want to do.. Here's an entire VRAM dump of the Special Stage in action in vanilla Sonic 1. The background is at the top, followed by the single wall block with all frames for the animation, followed by the bumper, the goal block, and the up/down blocks. Then we get the remaining ones interspersed by plane information; the R block, the unused life, emerald sparkles, the jump block, the one-way gate, the unused W block, and the breakable diamonds. Then we get another large lump of data, followed at the end by the 3 different emerald frames for each colour and a flash frame, Sonic's DMA'd sprites, the Zone 1-3 blocks and the ring and life counter. At first glance there doesn't appear to be any room for change, but let's break down that very top section alone for now: Outlined in yellow is the background and outlined in green is the wall block frames. In the green outline section you'll see I've highlighted one whole $200 byte line in red. If you decide to use DMA for the wall block frames, this is the only space in VRAM you need for it. The remainder is all yours to play with as you wish; new blocks, the HUD, etc. Additionally, in the yellow outline section, I've highlighted a segment in magenta. This is the maximum amount of space you'd need for that background of yours, even if you broke it down into two layers for scrolling animation. Now, on to your palette issues. Let's take a look at the palette: The area outlined in red is what is generally used for the wall blocks, the breakable diamonds, emeralds (for one frame of the three; the others are for the red and grey as they can't be made usually by changing palette line), etc. However, considering you are changing the background entirely, the area in yellow now becomes completely open for you to use. This is usually entirely for the background, and changes according to whether you're on the birds or fishes. But with your changed background this is now unnecessary. You could place the palette entries you want to use for one of the blocks and the emerald colour here, and use the line below for the other colour you want to use. This way you keep the art the same and just change the palette slightly every Special Stage instead. The palette for your background will fit easily in here too. Incidentally, for those looking to keep every virtually the same with the palette, the three greys on the second palette line I've highlighted in green go completely unused, meaning you could use them however you wish. I make use of them myself to give each Chaos Emerald its own properly-defined palette and not have to worry about changing the way other objects look. So.. yeah. All the VRAM space you'll ever need, and even palette space to make it even easier. :U
I laughed far too hard at this. This has Hacking Contest Entry written all over it. I wonder how many other simple edit like this could be done to existing badniks to make them as insane? Maybe the version of this that slings the projectiles having an infinite reload of them?
This is what I plan to do with the Zone 4, 5, and 6 blocks, assuming they are programmable: - Ring 2x Multiplier block - Makes rings worth double its original value; e.g. nabbing a 10-ring icon nets the player 20 rings. This effect lasts for only 15 seconds. - Red timer block - Avoid these! They deduct 30 seconds off the timer - Gold Star Medal - Collect all of them to earn a Continue As for the checkpoint block, I think the design and color scheme fits well, So I'm gonna leave it as-is. EDIT: BG design update This is edited from the Knuckles Chaotix bonus stage BG. EDIT 2: These are all mockups -- just to show what the SS would look like with the BG in place (I may further alter the BG design if it's possible for it have its own palette) Like the original, I want the BG to have its own palette, separate from the main SS palette, with palette cycling since it's gonna be animated.
Only thing I don't get is the shading on those up/down and... "umbrella" blocks (never understood what they were supposed to be). It's like they're being lit from the back, while everything else is lit from the front - I think you can do better
Those "peppermint", "umbrella"-looking blocks are solid jump blocks in which the player jumps off them. The UP and DOWN blocks control the maze's rotation speed. About the shading, I was intending for the blocks to kinda fade into the background to make them look nearly blended with the background from its contrast transitions. And you're right, there is always room for improvement. It's just that I feel comfortable with this design concept, but I am open to any and all suggestions. EDIT: New and improved emeralds plus some touchups on the mine and gold star blocks Had a little change of mind on the BG colors because I didn't want to give away the emerald color through the BG or anything else. So, this is what I came up with instead: SS 1 SS 2 SS 3 SS 4 SS 5 SS 6 SS 7
That special stage mockup looks absolutely gorgeous. Ristar-level shading with a really lovely and vibrant choice of colors that's making me feel extremely nostalgiac. If you find yourself unwilling/unable to spend time revamping the whole game in this style, I may just try to sweep you up for our indie game. :specialed:
Special stages are my specialty, and sometime in the future, I may consider making a hack based solely on special stages. Were you gonna ask that I do special stages/SS art for your hack?
Cool! I'm not sure, but if you have an original idea for a special stage or minigame I could probably bring it to life. Also, it's not a Sonic hack but for a commercial game based heavily off of Sonic's physics.
An idea for your backgrounds, if you haven't already thought of it: Doesn't use any additional colours, just needs the colours all to be independent of any object, which I am assuming you are doing after that long post from before. Just simple palette cycling.
That's trippy as hell! I'm all in for flashing colors, but some reason I get distracted by trippy colors to a point where I can't even play the game properly. But I like the concept. It just needs some consistency with the overall light level.
Hmm...that's a really odd result from palette cycling. I was really trying to achieve exactly how the BG was animated in Knuckles Chaotix. I ripped all 12 frames out. Go to 3:39 of this video and look closely at the circles in the BG. You'll see exactly what I mean.
I was actually going for something different, and a bit more trippy, than just constant movement; but that could most likely be done without too much difficulty too. (Too lazy to do it now, though :P)
@Cinossu: If you have time to show me, I would like to find out exactly how I would code the animations for 12 frames. The example frame shown is my starting frame. Before I do all that, I need to see exactly how to port a custom BG into the special stage. Megamix and S1HL are the only two hacks I know whose special stages have custom BGs. And also, I want the BG palette to be separate from the main SS palette unless it's possible to make each SS load its own palette file.
If you have all 12 frames ripped, you can make each one a mapping_frame, then use an animation script to keep changing between each frame. Although, this will take quite a bit of space I would have imagined. Just a suggestion.
For an animated background similar to this with 12 frames you'd basically use 12 different colours (any set of colours works), and draw an inner circle in colour 0, one around it in colour 1, and so on, and once you've reached colour 11 you start with the colour 0 again and so on until your screen is filled with concentric circles that look rainbowish. (You might want the outer circles become increasingly thicker.) Then you write a rotating palette, which is actually 12 different palettes to cycle through. Say you want a yellowish background. Then in the first palette, you'd have colour 0 be black, colour 6 yellow, and the colours inbetween going from black to yellow and back. In the next palette, colour 1 is black, colour 7 yellow, and the other colours interpolated between black and yellow again. Next palette colour 2 is black, colour 8 yellow, and so on. If you want to use different colours schemes for each of the special stages, you can use the same background, but just replace yellow in your palette with something else, and load the rotating palette depending on special stage. To import a new background, use some tool to get the art and plane mappings (or just rip it from Chaotix, probably via a savestate as Regen doesn't support 32X it seems), and then load your background (art and plane mappings) instead of the original S1 background and disable the animated tiles in the background and other shenanigans the S1 special stage code might do. For importing planes, MainMemory suggested GetArt/PlaneEd a few pages ago, though a few days ago I noticed this which might be worth exploring too.
I finalized each of the seven special stage palettes and the only major difference is the fourth palette line where the BG palette lies at. Each palette is configured to where Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles' palettes are all included at the same time with each of the emerald colors using four shades. The BG will still be animated, but no palette cycling will be used since Cinossu's rendition produced a weird, eye-searing result and the BG lies on a single plane. I named each of the palette files "special_1", "special_2", "special_3", etc. Now I need to just simply find out how to make each SS load its own palette instead of each of them using the same palette. Each palette is listed in the correct order from top to bottom. SS1 SS2 SS3 SS4 SS5 SS6 SS7
