Levels & Items Art

I counted them one by one. Took me over 15 hours.










...Just kidding, I used a Photoshop filter XD

 

Don't you =P me!!! X_X

 

just a question - at any one point in sonic 2, how many different enemies are on screen? Like, is there any point where there are more than 2 different types of enemies?

As I said, I'm thinking of making the palette for the game be 256 x 10 palettes. We could devote 1 palette to sonic, 1 to foreground level art, one to one background layer, one to another, one to objects like lamp posts and rings and such, and then leave the remaining 5 for badniks. When a badnik is loaded, it could load a palette, essentially making each badnik have 256 colors to choose from.

 

I'd like to point out that 256 colors is definitely not sufficient then. As Athelstone said, my spikes alone have 190 colors (I assumed they'd get their own palette) and if you add other items to that palette it's definitely way too much. Similarly, I don't see how the entirely of the level art will be limited to 256 colors. I'm must misunderstand how color data is going to be handled though, because I don't see why it isn't just directly stored in the mapping data and the engine renders whatever color is stored there. Is that too inefficient somehow?

 

I don't understand why there has to be a color limit. Isn't this going to be for PC?

 

I guess you meant the bolt connecting the jetpack to the body. I put two smaller bolts there, but I don't think it looks right.
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Well done for an enemy, can't wait to see the rest. Need any help with them?

 

Yeah, when you're drawing that many tiles at once, and you're aiming for 60 fps, you try to make everything go as fast as possible by having every bit of data be as small as possible.

What you're talking about is simply blitting bmp files which would be pretty big. The palette stays.

And trust me, 256 colors x 10 palettes will be sufficient. That's 2560 simultaneous colors. The original sonic 2 was made using 64. Just stick with the original color schemes and stop with the gradients and we'll be fine.

 

you could increase the colours able to be used if there was a set palette to begin with, so there is one grand palette of colours, which everyone downloads and then just colour picks from.

I think this would help the game have a coherent colour set.

 

Pallets... seriously? Blitting "bmp files"? There is no good reason to write a modern game engine with those kinds of restrictions. Even low end cards these days have at least 96 megs of VRAM on them, which is plenty for a 2d sprite-based game. If for some reason you need more memory you can compress textures on the video card.

This is supposed to be a modern makeover of an old game, you should be using modern rendering techniques. It is much easier/faster to leverage Direct3D/OpenGL to quickly render textures without compromises. Alpha-blending, and distortions (scaling, etc) come practically free.

 

There is absolutely good reason to place restrictions upon an engine. First and foremost being that hyper accuracy is desirable. As we've said before, we want to be able to read the original graphics from the actual game and have it all behave in exactly the same fashion. Second, working without restriction can grant almost TOO MUCH freedom - for a project like this, I'd want a very cohesive art style, and such restrictions helps. Finally, I don't want this to run on a modern PC, I want this to run on ANYTHING.

I test my engine routinely on an 880 mhz PC with a TNT2 graphics card to make sure it's not too taxing. My graphics engine is supposed to be scalable and portable - I'd like for the same engine to be able to run on a nintendo DS and an Xbox 360.

 

In that case I'd argue that your graphics engine is inappropriate for a "High Definition" style game. We don't need this to run on a Pentium Pro. We need this to look good at high-resolutions afforded by modern displays.

I think a common work flow would be more beneficial to visual cohesiveness than placing hard color restrictions on art. Stating that access to the full color gamut being "too much freedom" is simply weak. I thought the whole idea of going HD would be to maximize visual fidelity.

 

For the purposes of this project, my graphics engine is very appropriate.

 

Excellent point. This is HD afterall. 2560 colors of whatever really isn't an impressive amount :/
I don't think the "HD" aspect of the project should be compromised like that.

I'm not saying this should be superdetailed, but if those spikes took up nearly 200 colors itself, then we're gonna need more than 2560 colors max.

 

I'm not trying to shoot your engine down, but I'd like to at least discuss the different options we have.
Is there a demonstration of you're work available?

 

Yes, on this very board.

This is exactly why I told tweaker to lock this board to non-trial members because this is the 3rd or 4th example of someone speaking before they've read up on the topic. For the purposes of a sonic fangame, my engine is adequate. It's built to accommodate the needs of the the game engine, not just look pretty. It's been built from the ground up to tie into the game engine and has several hooks which will make the development of the game engine much smoother and more accurate.

EDIT: Also, please don't misinterpret my post as a flame or anything. I'm not upset with you nor the discussion. Text online is toneless so you might misinterpret that as being angry, when it's not supposed to be.

 

Well, give me a link then. I've read previous discussion on NeedleMouse and must have missed it.

Also, please don't accuse me of not researching your previous posts.

Edit2: You can accuse me of being a horrible typist.

 

Link!

I'm not saying you're not researching my work, I'm saying you're unfamiliar with this board. The sonic community has been working together for a long time.

 

Thanks, I'll check it out tomorrow when I'm not so sleepy.

 

No prob. You sound like a smart enough guy that we can disagree without getting all huffy and puffy.

I still maintain that this project should use a palette - I honestly believe it's the best for what we're trying to do. I'm not as knowledgeable on the sonic engine as, say, Taxman or Tweaker, but I still know quite a bit (mainly derived from going over disassembly, and lots of research, in addition to speaking with them directly) and I believe that for the purposes of this project, it'd be advantageous to maintain a palette as well as used tiled sprites.