NES Palette(s)

A place for your artistic side. Discuss techniques and tools for pixel art on the NES, GBC, or similar platforms.

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lidnariq
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Post by lidnariq »

Carnivac wrote:I was wondering if I could flicker the fire objects between the palettes 5 and 6 for a subtle firey flicker look.
Absolutely; also you're allowed to change palette entries every vsync.
Also regarding projectiles. How did various shooters on the NES that fired horizontally deal with the 8 sprites on a row limit?
Flicker gets you to 16 (and uncomfortably higher) -- I've seen at least one game where the bullets always flicker, making it less obvious when the limitation's been hit; making the projectiles move so fast as to never exceed the limitation; placing the projectiles into the background tiles; and raster effects allow you to replace any number of scanlines with a different valid background.

Still looks awesome! (but I kinda miss the C64-like appearance of the earlier previews ;p)
tepples
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Post by tepples »

lidnariq wrote:I've seen at least one game where the bullets always flicker, making it less obvious when the limitation's been hit
For examples the explosions and smoke particles in my game Thwaite.
making the projectiles move so fast as to never exceed the limitation
Let me guess: Recca. It flickers, but it's not as noticeable because everything's so dang fast.
placing the projectiles into the background tiles
How does that get rendered fast enough?


Anyway, about the latest mock-up, here's what it might look like through an NES PPU. Notice the jagged edges at the sides of the trees and the somewhat broken appearance of the empty hearts in the status bar.

Image

And about palette changes to reflect power-ups: Super Mario Bros. 3 shows the hero's tailed form by changing the shape with the same palette. Super Mario Land 2 and the Wario Land series show powerups as hats.
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tokumaru
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Post by tokumaru »

I'm not a big fan of the fire/ice thing. The powers are OK, it's the palettes that I don't like.

The orange palette is too similar to the fire palette, so the overall impression is that you gave up on a lot of collors just for this effect. Also, because of the subtle difference, it will be hard to tell whether the orange dragon has the fire power-up or not.

Another problem with this color scheme is that when both dragons have the same power-up it will be really hard to tell them apart, since they aren't that different from each other.
tepples wrote:And about palette changes to reflect power-ups: Super Mario Bros. 3 shows the hero's tailed form by changing the shape with the same palette. Super Mario Land 2 and the Wario Land series show powerups as hats.
I believe these are better options to indicate power-ups. Or icons in the status bar, like in Kirby's Adventure.
Carnivac
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Post by Carnivac »

Still looks awesome! (but I kinda miss the C64-like appearance of the earlier previews ;p)
Ugh, C64-like? I sure hope not. Was one of the few 8 bits I never could stand the graphics of mainly due to the drab palette.
tokumaru wrote:I'm not a big fan of the fire/ice thing. The powers are OK, it's the palettes that I don't like.

The orange palette is too similar to the fire palette, so the overall impression is that you gave up on a lot of collors just for this effect. Also, because of the subtle difference, it will be hard to tell whether the orange dragon has the fire power-up or not.
I was knackered and didn't explain properly before (and the image is a bit misleading with the dragons rendered in all three palettes). The green dragon would turn blue and use ice and the orange one would turn deep red to use fire. They would be selectable at the start as to which one Player 1 would want to be. If both are playing then, like LittleBigPlanet, there would be small areas that both players have to co-operate to gain access to and often do it by combining their abilities. Such as setting fire to a particular obstacle and then using ice to put out the flames and clear the path. So niether dragon would ever be the same color as each other. And I didn't waste colors like you say, I needed a sort of orange range for sprites that could be 'woody' or 'rocky' but still needed the red/yellow for fire effects and to me they certainly look different enough to be clearly recognisible while being just similar enough that I can flicker between the two for the flames to give them a nice effect.
tepples wrote:And about palette changes to reflect power-ups: Super Mario Bros. 3 shows the hero's tailed form by changing the shape with the same palette. Super Mario Land 2 and the Wario Land series show powerups as hats.
I believe these are better options to indicate power-ups. Or icons in the status bar, like in Kirby's Adventure.[/quote]

I always found the hats to just look tacky and icons in the status panel is boring (in Kirby I only liked the power ups that gave him something fun to use such as the sword). As for 'changing the shape' there isn't much room in a 16x16 sprite to do a lot to it and I've no idea what fire or ice powers would do to a dragon's shape that could work in that small an area or make any sense.

I'll have to think about it but I'm pretty busy with training and rehearsals for the next week or two so won't be about much. By the way that TV-like filtered image seems alright. I prefer sharp clean pixels (with or without scanlines) but yeah it's nice to see how it might have looked on a real NES plugged into TV.

Anyways seeya sometime :) Thanks for all the help.
Carnivac
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Post by Carnivac »

Just a lil post before I head off to say I've tinkered more with the Player 2 palette and after using light brown (which worked fine on wood but made the dragon look like a turd) I've gone a different route and used pink which seems fitting for a girl dragon and looks significantly different to the fire palette so she clearly upgrades. Also it gives a bit more color to the levels too with the pink gems and flowers and enemies.

Because of the new pink some of the things had to be removed from that palette such as the chicken but then it hit me that because of the use of black added from using those dark faraway trees I can swap more things from sprites to background tiles. For example the chicken is now a tile using the wood/rock browns and has a solid black background which means I can put it anywhere which would be black or mostly black anyways. Can do the same when I want to add lots of coins as background tiles.

Ok I'm gone. Seeya soon, folks :D
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BMF54123
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Post by BMF54123 »

Just FYI, if you're ever worried about the status bar tiles taking up valuable CHR space, most decent memory mappers will allow you to swap CHR banks mid-screen. Super Mario Bros. 3 (MMC3) does this with its status bar, as do many RPGs. :)

You can also change some palette colors, but AFAIK this can cause glitches if not done properly.
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Dwedit
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Post by Dwedit »

Here's a minor suggestion, you don't need to take it...

In Super Mario 1, if Luigi gets a fire flower, he is indistinguishable from firey Mario. I always thought that was annoying to no end.

So if you are going to change which palette a character is using, I would suggest that you make it blink between their normal colors and the "I have fire" palette, so you can still tell which character is which.
Here come the fortune cookies! Here come the fortune cookies! They're wearing paper hats!
psycopathicteen
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Post by psycopathicteen »

Image

Here is how it looks like with a resolution of 341x224, which is 2 pixels for every color cycle.
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sonder
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Re:

Post by sonder »

Dwedit wrote:Here's a minor suggestion, you don't need to take it...

In Super Mario 1, if Luigi gets a fire flower, he is indistinguishable from firey Mario. I always thought that was annoying to no end.

So if you are going to change which palette a character is using, I would suggest that you make it blink between their normal colors and the "I have fire" palette, so you can still tell which character is which.
Just discovered this neat old thread.

I know it probably doesn't matter in a concrete sense now, but alternatively he could have switched palettes on the boxes around the dragon statuses at the top to show "Has Fire Power". That would be highly visible and yet not detrimental to identifying and locating the dragons on the playfield.
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Sik
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Re: NES Palette(s)

Post by Sik »

Old thread is old o_o

But since the topic has been brought up, maybe a better idea would be to just give Luigi his current colors (basically green Mario) and then leave his old ones as the fire version.
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