FrankenGraphics wrote:
If blarggs' tool is accurately showing these artifacts, i don't think the still image looks that bad? I'm a bit pleased it seems to smooth out the gradient a bit.
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Well, like I mentioned, those diagonal light shapes are strongly affected. You can see a lot of diagonal groups where it's discoloured, but it complements the texture nicely there, esp. because the angle of the artifacts is the same as that diagonal direction anyway.
The regular dither patterns above the flat stones, though, you can see how the varying emphasis the the regular shapes there produces strange grouping patterns. This will shimmer and stand out very strongly as soon as you start to scroll as well. (Especially note how about just below the middle of the image, there's lines of 4 pixels that are emphasized. That will change with scrolling, dimming and brightening every 3 pixels.)
If you want to try it out without using an emulator, you could make 3 images with the tool, each with 1 more column of pixels on it to adust the phase of the artifacts. (Note: the phase changes only when you scroll-- when standing in one place it will not shimmer, so it's going to be driven by player movement, rather than being a continual animating thing like this GIF.)
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tower3_shimmer.gif [ 368.48 KiB | Viewed 610 times ]
It's a subtle problem, though, not necessarily something you have to worry about. Unless you cover big parts of the screen with blocks of checkerboard, I think it's reasonable to just ignore, even.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
One last thing is in the way of making this scene work as a vertically scrolling room, and it's the 2D concaveness of the cross-section perspective (type B). Type A solves this but makes everything look oddly tilted. Two other options are stretching the vertical concaveness out over 2 screens height instead of one, or making the shape of the tower concave in only one dimension, which weakens the effect by some, but works endlessly.
Honestly, I think what we're looking at here is too subtle to communicate a curved back wall, and the prominent flat foreground blocks strongly contradict it anyway. The parallaxing hanging chain is a nice touch (but doesn't really have to do with the curve). The tilted window feels weird to me without already trying hard to imagine that it's curved, and similarly the curved dark background bricks feel more like random variation / uneven stonework than a suggestion of curve.
I like the attempt, but the effect isn't strong enough to unambiguously say "curved tower" to my brain. At the same time, though, I probably wouldn't want to spend as many extra tiles as it would take to imply that more strongly anyway-- as a square tower it already looks great. (...and I probably wouldn't even think twice anyway if there was an external long shot view showing that it was really curved from the outside. A square inside would be an acceptable fiction in this context?)