thefox wrote:
Speaking of optical illusions, just yesterday I was playing a bit of Skate or Die! (the first one), and it's funny how the title screen logo looks like it's being pushed up/down (like a button) even though only the palette is changing.
I just saw it on YouTube. I would never have thought those tiles weren't changing! Very interesting.
Bregalad wrote:
1) The NES has only 1 background layer. This means that you'd need sprites for either the scrolling black bar, or the drawing itself. As you said, the only way to fix that is to use vertical bars, and to use the BG enable ability in order to make bigger animations.
I think it'd be better to use blanked out scanlines for this reason. Plus you have more freedom to do cooler effects, since you're resetting the scroll (you could even repeat the row of pixels instead of blanking them out). But this greatly increases the complexity of the code.
Bregalad wrote:
2) Those bars does not reduce the quantity of information of the animation in any way. They just move temporal information (frames) on the X direction, or Y direction if horizontal black bars were to be used. You sacrifice resolution for more frames. In terms of quantity of information, that's the same as extending the visible sprites to the whole black stripe, effectively avoiding the black bars, but sacrifying resolution. FMVs of very large pixels has already been done on the NES.
Exactly; you are simply reducing the resolution to be able to squeeze more images in. It's a sacrifice, but it might be a sacrifice you're willing to take, if it's the right application. I also think, if you're going with black bars made out of sprites, it's an easy way to implement interleaving images. The code behind this is not complex at all. If you found a use for the concept during gameplay, you could easily implement it. The same can't really be said for doing complex raster effects.
shao wrote:
I'm not sure I understand the concept but ¿could you show who is the image that is in the background?.
The image below breaks it down:

The image in the top left is what is in the background. The vertical bars are made of sprites and are moved over the image. The result looks like what is shown on the bottom. You can even try it yourself; take the image in an image editor, and drag the black bars over the image on the top left. You should see how it works once you do
