I completely agree with Tweaker. I'll make the animations for Sonic fluid but I'll also try to make them simple enough to break down if the game becomes too large.
I'd say that 2-8 MB ought to be a good limit for graphical data, really (1 more or less was the case for the Saturn; the second for the DC).
I'm usually in favor of heavy optimizations so I bet that most of you are expecting a "let's use only 1MB of RAM for the entire game" kind of post, but this is not the case. Optimizations have to be done while being realistic, and I think that 8, or even 16 megabytes, can be useful, if not necessary, to produce a cool game. I'm starting to see computers with 8GB of RAM these days, I think 8MB don't hurt that much. It's not important how much RAM you take per se, it's important how well you're using it. Say, let's not pull a Vista, and take 1GB of RAM when you're just being idle. Take the RAM that you need, only that, and use it up to the last bit without useless wastes.
I believe the animation should be as fluid as possible. In an old issue of Game Players, they had an interview with Dave Perry, the guy in charge of Shiny Entertainment, the company behind Earthworm Jim. He said that Sega had approached them about doing Sonic 4, but they turned it down. It might be Dave Perry just talking out his ass, but the idea of a Shiny-created Sonic game has been a nerd fantasy of mine ever since.
If the original games used only around 16kb of RAM (as Tweaker said)... then I, personally, think we should use around 16mb. Animations ten times as fluid!
Oh, I agree 100MB is overkill. My overly-exaggerated point was that you don't need to sacrifice the game quality to keep it down to a handful of MB. =P
Right, a question about palettes just popped into my mind. Are we going to use Genesis-like colors (in the $X0X0X0 form where X is an even number), or any color from the 16777216 colorspace? I'd recommend the latter.
I'm pretty sure E02 lets you use the entire colorspace when defining a palette. Not sure why it wouldn't.
Uhm.... I'd guess the latter, seeing as we aren't limited in a colour selection by hardware. The palette does all the necessary limiting (though feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, engine writers...)
I wasn't asking about a technical restriction, I know E02 is flexible. I was asking about an arbitrary restricion, in case Chimpo wanted to preserve the retro feel even more. But as I said I hope that's not the case.
Monitors hanging from objects. Actually quite handy- for example, maybe you need a bubble shield; the underwater area is too long and has too few bubbles. So, you do a puzzle, and a section of the ceiling with one of these descends. Or, maybe, it's an invincibility monitor to cross a bed of spikes. Art-wise, it's just an edit of Cinossu's.
Insanity, I don't really get it. It's an extended upsidedown monitor? Why not regular upsidedown? That worked before :/ Also, tossing in some ideas. First one slows you down, but it just looks awesome. Speedrunners are able to jump over them. The second is based on later Sonic games. Why 3D Sonic games never used a magnetizing technique combined with idea 1 when passing a lamp-post, remains a mystery to me.
Eh... I dunno. I don't like the symetrical starshape on the base, which should always be on the.... ball(?) on top.
<!--quoteo(post=276093:date=Feb 4 2009, 08:26 AM:name=Phoebius)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Phoebius @ Feb 4 2009, 08:26 AM) [/quote] No
<!--quoteo(post=276093:date=Feb 4 2009, 11:26 AM:name=Phoebius)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Phoebius @ Feb 4 2009, 11:26 AM) [/quote] Seriously dude, have you heard of a palette?
Oh wow, I didn't even notice the color count. How did you manage to use 27 colors for a signpost? Seriously Phoebius, if you want to contribute to the project at all, manage your palette better. Jesus Christ.
