Wow CJ, it looks like you've put some real effort into your graphics engine. Thanks for giving everyone the details of it, exciting stuff From the sounds of things it could serve the project very well indeed.
I believe SDL supports video playback, but I've never really used it. looking it up real quick, it seems there are ways to play video using SDL, but they're all kinda wonky. Like, I can create an SDL_Layer as a YUV Overlay and then play video in the background using ffmpeg, but that's kinda run about. I guess I could let opengl handle video, but I'm not sure how openGL handles video. Why would we need video, by the by.
I asked this just for the curiosity of having a possible animated "ending" sequence with NeedleMouse. There is no priority to implement it now, as this sequence will be drawn later on.
Well, I'm sure I can do full video eventually, but the NeedleMouseImage (the editor) can create small scripted cutscenes. You just link animations together. It'd be totally possible, and in fact extremely easy, to make something like Sonic 2's ending using nothing but the NeedleMouseImage. For a long time, I've planned on including a tutorial with my graphics engine that'd teach people how to make various sega genesis logos using the editor.
Since I didn't read all the pages of the old long topic, did anyone figure out a good way to achieve Super Sonic's rotating palette?
I thought the best idea was to tint the sprite white and vary the opacity. Other people suggested other ideas.
With my graphics engine, that's not necessary. You can simply change the palette entry for Sonic, just like you could with the genesis.
I could contribute to the project, but my time is quite limited right now to say the least.. I was actually planning about going open source with what I have, but well, I'd need quite some time to document it entirely to be honest. I'm gonna suggest to let this project start open source from the very beginning - that way everyone will be able to add their part and eventually it might even get finished and everything.
I'm quite happy to change the project plan to that, although before a final decision is made I wish first to see more advice or feedback on this issue from other programmers (Cooljerk and Jman in particular)
There's pretty much no chance the code will be open-source while it's being worked on. After completion I want to make the code available, but letting anyone add to it at will is just going to complicate things and waste time.
Yeah, and not to be a dick or anything, but I've been working on my NeedleMouse engine for a while, and while it might go open source one day, I'm not ready to let it out of my protective wing. Like jman2050 said, maybe later down the road but for right now, I'd prefer not to. Which isn't to say people can't help, I just don't want the code being spread around just yet.
I'm cool with things being closed source as long as the programmers are able to meet the needs of the project with their own skills.
The thing is, the goal of this project is to produce a port of the game, not emulate it with dynamic recompilation. Why not go with FLAC, instead of Ogg? FLAC is lossless, free, open source and royalty-free. It also offers a good compression ratio. Surely, for a HD port, you'd want to best quality possible?
I dunno. I can't really tell the difference past 192k anyway. I also have less than 20 gigs on my HD (I can probably free up some, but not a lot).
If we deem that space isn't an issue, then certainly lossless compression should be used, although Slaituk is right and the reduction in quality is pretty much transparent to human ears past 192 kbps.
Using the same logic, we could use JPG as the container for graphics, with 97% quality. I mean, it's almost the same, right? If the project is going to be HD (high definition), it would be nice if someone with a good audio setup could listen to the music without the "mp3 feel". It doesn't really make a big difference size-wise, but it adds a nice touch. After all, shouldn't we go for the best quality?
I completely agree with DRX about that. Why aiming low? We need to have the best audio possible on Sonic 2 HD.
I was under the impression that we were rendering the tiles as PNGs, and then the color data from those was being programmed directly into the engine somehow, making the format for graphics storage ultimately proprietary. While we're debating quality though, I'd like to point out that Blu-ray uses both lossy video and audio codecs, as does HD quality TV. So we should optimize both quality and space.