This is most likely at the fault of the mock ups, and not the actual artwork in general. Get me the base art of the background and the foreground and you'll probably end up with fewer colors than stated. Also, let's be clear on the palette restrictions here. I know we're trying (or at least I'm trying) to conserve on the amount of colors here, but I also know that with the quality of work most of us want to do, sticking to the Genesis' shitty 64 colors isn't going to cut it. The way I pictured it is that the main character sprite should have its own palette line. Enemies should have their own shared palette line. Objects should have their own shared palette line. Backgrounds should have two palette lines reserved for it, 2 for foreground, 2 for background. So that's 16 - Main Character 16 - Shared Enemies 16 - Shared Objects 32 - Foreground Level Art 32 - Background Level Art --- 112 colors in total to work with. This also includes palette cycles if we're going to use any. "WHAT ARE YOU INSANE?!" No, fuck you, I'm being reasonable. I am well aware that we're trying to maintain true to the spirit of the original games, but we don't have to be total dicks about the amount of colors. We have all the colors we need, but we can still restrain ourselves and still have some room to do some really colorful fucked up levels without worrying too much about limits.
Those color limits sound perfectly reasonable—I can't imagine us needing any more than that. What say you, lads? Is this a fair proposal?
I think so. I doubt that we'd need 64 colors for either foreground or background. In any case Chaotix's art managed to be colorful and seemed to use very similar restrictions to those, so I think it should be fine.
I'm not saying that we're going to use all 64 colors for the stage art, but the colors will be there. And who said it all had to go for just plain old static background? An entire palette line could be used for palette cycles for some real trippy shit.
Make them 128 anyway, since you'll need 16 more if you're going to play as Sonic + Tails, Sonic + Knuckes, or Tails + Knuckles. I like 128, it's a nice round number.
I think that color setup is entirely reasonable. I'm wondering, though, if you're also proposing that each tile is still restricted to one palette line, though (to maintain the possibility of 4bpp storage, and things like multiple color variations of the same tile by just switching the palette row setting), since you allocated two rows to both the foreground and background. I would be in favor of that, personally, and whether or not that's part of the color restrictions is something else that it'd be important to clarify (For everyone else's reference, level-specific objects and enemies would still be able to use the level color rows, as long as they were still drawn with colors from only one palette row) I was under the impression that that background was already planned to have several different scrolling sections (Similarly to the GHZ background, the upper mountains would move slower, the lower mountains would move a little faster, and each row of water would move even faster, and the clouds at the top would scroll separately). This is all done with one layer, just with different scroll settings per line. The Genesis only has two tile planes, and even though each of them has two priority settings for tiles, tiles of each priority scroll together - they can't be made to scroll as if there were four. The Genesis has a table of scroll offsets in VRAM that correspond with each row (in either tiled or line scroll mode. It can also scroll in column mode, but only in colum width of 2 tiles) that it uses for the depth effect in scrolling backgrounds, and some other effects. Two examples where it APPEARS that there has to be more than one scrolling background layer are the clouds behind the mountains in Hilltop Zone, and the farther area of the cave you can see through a sort of window in Icecap Zone, but those effects are done by using dynamic tile art that updates when the screen scrolls. The GBA and DS have four tile layers, but no per-tile priority setting. They don't use a scroll table, but the scroll offsets can be updated for each line during the HBLANK interrupt to get the same effect (horizontally, you can't get vertical parallax that way). If we aren't using any of those systems, then we don't necessarily have a limit on the number of tile planes that can be displayed at once, but it would still be a good idea not to overdo it. We can still use the same tricks to get better performance. Also note that trying to render vertical parallax is a whole lot slower, so it would be best to keep to an absolute minimum if used at all, and even then kept simple in design and by using two flat scrolling planes and/or animated tiles
That's not what I meant -- I meant that using 64 colors on the foreground AND another 64 on the background is too much. I agree that 128 is a very good number for this (Sonic and Tails, yeah).
Also, keep in mind that if we decide to use E02, we have up to 256 colors available for use at any given time—this should allow us a bit of leeway to modify those color amounts as we need to. Maybe 64 colors instead for both foreground and background, or even more for general Zone objects? The possibilities are out there, if nothing else.
If there's such a chance, probably level objects should benefit from the additional colors, this way there can be more different objects on the screen at a said time. But I'm not an artist, so I think we all should listen to Chimpo since he's good at this.
That's not entirely true. Remember that while E02 uses a 256-color palette, 128 of them are reserved for water effect whenever that's meant to be used (and that's the on-screen, the palette can be switched mid-level). The level tiles and (bitmap, not tiled) sprites are 8bpp (no palette row restriction), but you have to think about whether or not you're just shooting yourself in the foot for later by taking advantage of that now. There's nothing stopping you from using it with things that can easily be converted to 4bpp tiled graphics later. But, yeah, I seem to be the only one talking about anything like that
Considering Chimpo's estimate (112 colors, which I later raised to 128) and Stealth's post (128 colors + 128 reserved for underwater), I think we have a winner here. Everybody agrees on using 128 colors?
I feel bad about doing this after everything has started getting back on track but the problem of picking a tile set for this zone has got to be done at some point. I thinking that maybe both could be used in seperate acts. Act 1 - Crisp clean designs, uncomplicated patterns, simple design and set nearer the beach. Act 2 - Things get a bit rough round the edges, slightly more overgrown and more detaile in the titles as things get a bit more detailed. (ignore the crappyness of the vegetation I borrowed from S3, thats just to show you what it could be like) Im aware that this makes Act 2 a bit too similar to some of the ideas being thrown around for the Rainforest zone but its just an idea to get both styles in as they both have something to give. Also if we follow the idea throughout the game it gives us a good chance to get more creative with each Act whilst still maintaining the same basic design and art giving us more diversity with less work.
I think that's a bit too much overgrowth but I guess I'd be okay with it. How many colors are the foreground and background using anyway?
Having a zone that looks like another zone isn't necessarily a bad thing. Think at the snow at the beginning of LBZ1. Maybe the environment can gradually change near the end of a zone and at the beginning of the next one, as a sort of smooth zone transition.
That was kind of what I was thinking with the level changing as you progress rather then just a brief nod to the previous stage at the start of the next. Although that would mean that Act 2 would have to slowly get cut back as robotnik makes room for his Circus.
