General Project Thread & Feedback

Well... Unicode Big Endian is the standard on the web, so you might want to fix that =P

But yeah I like the stuff on there, it's not "overbaked" so it would still fit nicely in the background of the game.

 

There are a few of them I'm not too keen on though. I'm not going to offer crits on all of them just now, but Chemical Plant zone for example doesn't sound industrial enough for me. I'm not sure the saxaphone should be used for it - I think that instrument is much more suited to Casino Night which is why I particularly like that one.

 

This project lacks coordination.

Drawing frame by frame as well as doing the gradients right away is a bad idea.

The better idea would be to draw black and white characters.
And then go back and then fill the gradients.
This allows other artists to jump in without having to worry about the colors used or shading details (which can be sorted out later)
Plus - some may not be able to draw whilst they may be swell color technicians. This will allow more people to help in, etc.

Although another way to go at it -- the Capcom approach -- is to make a 3D model replica of classic Sonic, and then trace the 3D model
But as Taxman has told me, "no one's ever made a 3D sonic model that could compare to the classic animations"


All in all - I am seduced by the HD art you guys have done, as well as Trunks's GHZ tiles

 

For those wanting to upsize Emerald Hill, here's all the 16x16 tiles

View attachment 2253

It's probably easiest to work with 16x16 (64x64 HD), since we can either keep this way if something like the Retro-Sonic engine was used, or just convert them back to 8x8 via a program that could be whipped up.

 

I've just noticed that some of the 16x16 include both solid and transparent stuff, like happens with the palmtrees, which have translucent palms but with solid branches...

How are we gonna handle this? Making two separate tile sets (one for solid, one for translucent) that will then be overlapped by software? I don't know if the HD emu or the Retro Sonic engine can do this, and it seems to be a needed feature.

 

The simple idea would be to use PNG's for the alpha transparency. =P

 

Oh, but you don't want to see my final boss theme?

(just finished that =P)

 

Taxman, thanks for the tiles.

ICEknight, it seems to me there are two ways to do this. One is to draw holes in the palms as in the original art, but this seems rather shoddy and tedious in HD I'd think. The other option is that, presumably, we can modify the alpha channel on all the art to change the opacity. For instance, my spikes are on a transparent background (alpha = 0) while the spikes themselves have alpha = 255 (no opacity). However, the pixels on the slanted edges have a mixed opacity so that the edges blend with the background (whatever that may be) and look smoother.

Anyway, this is a call to whomever is coding the emulator for this. Please make sure you code support for not just RGB, but an alpha channel as well! I guarantee things will look better and we'll have much more flexibility with the alpha channel supported.

 

It sounds very cool, but I feel the timpanis aren't strong enough...


EDIT: TIMPANIS.

 

Or, you know, plain regular 8-bit indexed PNGs with a transparent color, which would be one fourth in size compared to a 32-bit PNG file, without a great loss. Don't tell me that you're likely to use more than 255 colors within the same tile.

 

...there are no cymbals. What are you talking about? o_O

If you mean the Timpanis, I didn't make those too loud because when I did, they were extremely overbearing to the rest of the song. If you're referring to something else, then I have no idea what you mean.

 

My god, that's what happens when typing inbetween online Mario Kart races.

Yeah, that's what I meant... I think they add "epicness" to the final boss music, but they can be barely heard.

 

I've just returned to Retro, and I thought I'd stop in on this topic. Personally, I'm amazed with the art, and the idea. I'd love to see Sonic 2 reimagined. I'll help in any way I can (as soon as I figure out what I can do).

 

Nineko, because each tile is now 64x64 I think that 8-bit color depth is probably not sufficient and that we need 16-bit color depth. I assume we'll want to make good use of gradients given that we now have the resolution for that, but a maximum of eight shades of blue (say for the waterfall tiles) is just not going to cut it at this resolution.

EDIT: In case it wasn't obvious, my spikes use 16 bits of gray shades.

EDIT: Okay, nevermind, I misunderstood what you meant when you said 8-bit color (it can mean two things). You meant the number of colors in use at one time, but not the total number of possible colors. Two-hundred fifty-six may be sufficient for a 64x64 tile, but we certainly need to have a 32-bit space of possible color values. Also, my spikes technically need 8 bits of color data since they have hues and saturations of zero (and nonzero luminosities) as well as 8 bits of alpha values. That's what I meant (although it was confusing because I didn't mean RGB values).

 

While we're discussing music, though, should I keep working on this or give it up?

http://www.sendspace.com/file/banzs4

 

I think I might try my hand at the emerald hill tiles over the next week.

Completely unrelated, but if I edited this image, could it simply be imported into a tile layer as is? And would anyone be willing to help me do it?

 

Both of your versions (Tweaker and Cinossu's) final boss themes are lacking in a certain "epicness".

This is the final boss, you're fighting in space against a giant super robot. Kick it up a notch guys. This sounds like what should lead up to the actual theme.

I still give this round to Tweaker though.