I just had a thought: what if super flashing was made with highlight mode? Sure, white entry would have to moved to color 15 (if I understood your explanation correctly) and it may be just a little epileptic non-friendly, but it could allow you to use the two lines without enemies flashing problems. Spoiler Super flashing isn't nice for epileptics anyway, so... EDIT: spoilered by covarr's request, and maybe for humanity's safety.
Please oh please spoiler that. By your own admission, it's not epileptic friendly, and it's even making my eyes hurt and I'm not epileptic.
Sprites can't be highlighted, only planes can. Also, every single level would have to be redone to appear correct, and this would further screw up plane priorities: for example, there would be no way to have characters moving in front of some palmtrees but behind others in GHZ and EHZ.
Okay, then I completly mis-understood everything you said about highlight/shadow mode. I thought it affected sprites, not planes. Sorry, my bad. Thank you for the explanation.
Sprites can be shadowed by an appropriate arrangement of priorities on it and on the planes; but the highlight operator is a color in a sprite (on the last palette line), and it works as any other non-transparent sprite: it masks sprites under it. The end result is that the underlying plane pixels will show up highlighted. Same goes for the shadow operator. Hm, I need to write a tutorial on shadow/highlight; might be useful for someone.
Well, that would be really nice. I for example took interest when you mentioned shadow/highlight mode because I wanted to use it as some sort of ¿bloom? -when you're used to light and then it get's turned off and vice versa-, and also to indicate character swapping/availability in the hack I have in mind that will never actually make it. But for those people who can do it, it would be awesome to have a tuto for it. EDIT: check that out, that what you said now shows me that one of the intended uses are not possible.
I'd be more for it if they flashed more slowly, perhaps a Super Tails/Super Knuckles speed. Even Super Sonic speed would be better. + - At least it's not like Porygon...
That is such an obvious (and obviouly good) idea I don't know why I didn't do it before. Of course, Hyper Tails' super flickies will still use the same palette line as the characters because they are supposed to flash.
I think I got all objects that use palette lines 0 or 1: (direct link) Slight tweak in player palette, and two options for second palette, based on Black Squirrel's. I don't know which of them I prefer: for some things, the top one is clearly better, for other things the bottom one wins. I tried JcFerggy's idea, and I think I like it. It might be better by removing another step, but I didn't try it. Spoiler (direct link) Two random things:
I think on balance the top one is better - there are more grey things than orange ones. It is unfortunate that Sonic 2 decided to add that extra shade of grey - kinda ruins everything.
I thought of the SCD animals (and the S3&K seagul, yeah). The problem they have is the lack of a facing-forward pose, so they can't be used in most places. Except, maybe, for the S1->S2 transition in SCH. That cat is very interesting, please do more :v:
NP It'll be easy to make forward facing sprites for the SCD animals. I may edit the SCD penguin to look like the regular penguin. I'll try to come up with more animals.
Great idea. Seems like they use the same animals from Sonic Adventure. That's good because I was already planing on converting some of them anyway.
Couldn't help but notice those critter sprites. So you need front-facing sprites of the SCD ones? Have no worry, as I made them on this item & object spritesheet I put back in August last year. [Items & Object spritesheet] It also includes the Seagull, Tiger & Iggy from the Flicky game, and my takes on the Sonic 3D Blast Flickies. Please excuse the names for the unamed animals, I had trouble with the theme. Hopefully people will find a use for some of the other sprites featured in the sheet. I did show this off at the Pixelart thread, but it was in a spoiler tag and they do tend to play up on here sometimes. Have fun tweaking the sprites for them.
