copyright plant zone

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Myask
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by Myask »

Seems like something that would be better solved from hardware, either MMC2-style (CHR-bank-on-X-tile) or MMC5-style (vertical scroll split...but requiring two).

You could just do it with a scanline-counter and banking, provided you don't mind going eight pixels up at a time. It's not like the game's running most of the physics while you're running on that spiral....though I suppose you might want to spoof the BG by the sides with sprites so you DON'T have to update attribute tables either...
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Alp
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by Alp »

An alternative to that ugly brown attribute clash would be just using black in that palette entry. There would be little/no loss of detail. Plus then you've have an empty color for something else. Possibly sky color for the loops in that stage.
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tokumaru
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by tokumaru »

That's too much trouble for one little stupid gimmick, IMO.

Depending on the angle and thickness of the platform, it could possibly be made with sprites without going over the sprite limit. Honestly though, if we're going by Team Somari's standards, they'd probably just make those stationary, or replace the whole thing with zig-zag ramps or something.

It is a stupid gimmick that doesn't add much to the gameplay anyway, there's no point in jumping through hoops to get it implemented exactly like the original.
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rainwarrior
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by rainwarrior »

Rather than having attribute blocks in conflict with your slopes, maybe you can find a convenient way to make space around it in the background?
make_space.png
make_space.png (8.42 KiB) Viewed 11639 times
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tokumaru
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by tokumaru »

I'd make the platform thinner and use sprites, arranged like this:
fbz-platform.png
fbz-platform.png (1022 Bytes) Viewed 11629 times
The sprites are arranged so that at most 8 of them will share the same scanlines. There will be some flicker when the player is standing beside the platforms, but little to none when standing on them.

With this you won't have to worry about color clashes, empty backgrounds or gigantic VRAM updates. I'd say a little flickering and thinner platforms are a small price to pay to keep things simple and functional.

If you reeeeally want to keep the original dimensions, at least make the sides using sprites, so you don't have to blank out the background, and there are less background tiles to animate. You'd need compatible palettes for this, though.
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Alp
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by Alp »

tokumaru wrote:That's too much trouble for one little stupid gimmick, IMO..
That wasn't my point. All the slanted surfaces would be easier to implement that way, with less clashing. The loops would just be a nice bonus.
tokumaru wrote:I'd make the platform thinner and use sprites, arranged like this:
fbz-platform.png
The sprites are arranged so that at most 8 of them will share the same scanlines. There will be some flicker when the player is standing beside the platforms, but little to none when standing on them.

With this you won't have to worry about color clashes, empty backgrounds or gigantic VRAM updates. I'd say a little flickering and thinner platforms are a small price to pay to keep things simple and functional.

If you reeeeally want to keep the original dimensions, at least make the sides using sprites, so you don't have to blank out the background, and there are less background tiles to animate. You'd need compatible palettes for this, though.
That's not a bad suggestion! But, charting it out better, would be more helpful:
Image
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Estlib
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by Estlib »

Holy-Moly! I go to sleep for 15 hours and then this happens! Yikes.

What i was originally thinking of, when i made that image, was bankswitching.

edit: if the black bars arent too distracting, then this might be one option aswell...
Image
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rainwarrior
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by rainwarrior »

tokumaru wrote:I'd make the platform thinner and use sprites... keep things simple and functional.
Ah, I just realized that these things move in the original game. Yeah, I would do it with sprites too, then.
tokumaru wrote:The sprites are arranged so that at most 8 of them will share the same scanlines. There will be some flicker when the player is standing beside the platforms, but little to none when standing on them.
That has a few caveats, like depending on how you do flicker, you may need to break it into multiple metasprites so that the flicker isn't always knocking out the same sprite tiles. Personally I'd probably give up on the original thickness, and just do a platform 7-pixels thick, which at the given slope of 1/4 pixels would have a lot of headroom against flickering.
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Estlib
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by Estlib »

Any other requests, tepples?
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ptoing
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by ptoing »

Gave it a shot. Also edited quite a few other things, some of which save tiles, some which add some new ones, and things like moving the bolts to get rid of that ugly char clash in the bottom right. Also on the background tiles there was one colour too many, a very dark teal.

And I switched to the Joel Y NTSC palette.

Image
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tokumaru
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by tokumaru »

Looks great, ptoing, but it's still not very "animatable".
ptoing
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by ptoing »

Oh, derp. How is this supposed to animate? they go up and down when you run?
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dougeff
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by dougeff »

This would be doable with CHRAM and a very clever programming. I wouldn't want to program it. Basically, you'd have to recreate every tile as a combination of background and foreground tiles, every frame, on the fly.

Also, would be 1000x easier, if done on SNES.
nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES
ptoing
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by ptoing »

Haha, I see what you did there :P

And yeah, would be trivial on the SNES, what with multiple background layers.
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tokumaru
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Re: copyright plant zone

Post by tokumaru »

ptoing wrote:Oh, derp. How is this supposed to animate? they go up and down when you run?
It's always moving: https://youtu.be/qN3V-dlF36o?t=2m39s
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