Are pixel shaders a possibility in the future? For example, Sonic's shield could have a pulsating effect that adds a subtle warp around it. Also, stuff like the underwater raster effect could be easily simulated with shaders. Heat haze off fire is another neat idea. Also, a particle system may be worth looking into for explosions, water splashes and smoke puffs.
what WHAT WHAT No fancy graphical effects, please! The original game didn't need them, and neither do we.
Haha, just a suggestion. However, I do have to say that since a lot of the original artwork was made for 320x224 output via composite, there are some irregularities that you may have to find workarounds for. For example, the sheild pulsating effect discussed earlier would look poor if upscaled and shown on a progressive display. Explosions can look like paper cutouts when upscaled too. However, emulating Raster effects with pixel shaders wouldn't be too far fetched would it? EDIT: Waterfalls take advantage of that striped translucency effect that the genesis video encoder causes. Do we use straight translucency or something more complex?
<!--quoteo(post=191388:date=Apr 28 2008, 06:24 AM:name=ICEknight)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (ICEknight @ Apr 28 2008, 06:24 AM) Bad idea? Good idea? I accept any kind of answer with no trouble.[/quote] Every other thing in the game uses vertical empty lines to do the semi-transparencies, so I guess they were just going for a different looking thing for the shield. But either way, I'm sure many of us here can notice the difference between 50 and 60Hz... so we must be mutants or something. [/quote] ICE is right. Besides, try playing Sonic 1 on a 50 Hz system.
I think the point to that one post is that such a transparency effect will only work at a rate of 48Hz or greater. Anything lower will just look like blinking rather than transparent.
Personally, I feel a very big difference when playing S1 at 50fps (even with a hack to keep the music at normal speeds), a smaller difference when playing S2 at 50fps, and interestingly enough, I don't feel any difference at all when playing S3&K at 50fps.
Heh I know exactly what you mean, it's probably because S3&K has the least amount of speed capping on the player.
<!--quoteo(post=190515:date=Apr 25 2008, 07:16 AM:name=Quickman)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Quickman @ Apr 25 2008, 07:16 AM) This would allow for the transformation fades from/to blue, as well as allowing many of the rotating palettes without having to draw each different frame for the pulsating lights, etc.
they could be. Keep in mind that, in my engine, color is separate from the art. So you could draw him green if you'd wish, because it's all the same to my engine.
Yeah, but the buckles share some of the yellow colors, which would also glow with him. Making his body blue would avoid this kind of stuff. EDIT: Something like this.
A 256 palette might be a bit limiting, specially if objects, hud, character, etc are supposed to have their borders antialiased. I would suggest to work on a framebuffer based system rather than using a palette - that's it, to work using pixels rather than palettes. That would complicate things for animated palettes but there's still the possibility to do color search and replace to achieve a similar effect. Well, heck, one could actually even emulate a real 32bit virtually endless palette. And yeah, that might be slower, but the good part is that palette animation effects could be performed using a 32bit color output. Just my opinion, I guess it's a matter of testing both methods, but I'm not seeing it with a palette limited to 256 colors.
