LASEReyes

[rainwarrior]

I did. ...you don't have a backdoor to my computer now, do you?

[calima]

Oh, one more thing I noticed in the gifs: the player going under the 24px pillars. With smooth movement, and four players, and non-plain ground tiles, that's not possible on the NES either.

The "behind bg" flag is per-sprite, so if you enable it when one player pixel is under, the other 7 pixels would go under the non-plain bg tile and look glitchy. Using sprite priority to hide it instead would count against the 8 per line limit.

So that's another point against non-16x16-aligned bg. (or alternatively, the game with its original design could be done on some other console - Genesis or SNES would be able to do the original design).

[Jedi QuestMaster]

Oh, one more thing I noticed in the gifs: the player going under the 24px pillars. With smooth movement, and four players, and non-plain ground tiles, that's not possible on the NES either.

Are you talking about this?


Can't we just do this (assuming we're still using sprites, not bg):

I know it's not ideal.

Okay, everyone. Would it be better working with this height?

(I know the player looks weird, but it's just a placeholder. )

And with this character height, I may even be able to lower the pillar/wall height. (but I think this looks good)

[calima]

Yes, the latter gif is possible, but looks glitchy.

For the lower pic, is that just a shrunk player? The player's height hasn't been any issue, the big one was the bg not being 16x16-aligned.

[tokumaru]

Are you talking about this?

Just to clarify: this IS possible on the NES - you need to cover the pillar with pillar-shaped sprites of higher priority than the player's sprites and set them to be behind the background - but the problem is that each player with masked legs will then use 4 sprites (half of a scanline's total) for some scanlines, instead of 2, greatly increasing the chances of flicker. It might be worth it, though.

[Jedi QuestMaster]

For the lower pic, is that just a shrunk player? The player's height hasn't been any issue, the big one was the bg not being 16x16-aligned.

But now the laser is perfectly centered and if I make the ground tiles one color the laser can be made using bg tiles. It's just an issue with the color, right?

[Jedi QuestMaster]

Here's a pseudo-isometric perspective I'm already regretting, but I feel like working something along the lines of this is the way to go. I think the side angle would be a bit too annoying. Also, the outer wall has to be adjusted.

[calima]

But now the laser is perfectly centered and if I make the ground tiles one color the laser can be made using bg tiles. It's just an issue with the color, right?

The ground can still have the black specks, the number of tile combinations is not that large. Yes, getting four different lasers would hit palette limits.

[Pokun]

It does look a bit glitchy in that second GIF but if we are to compare with commercial games of the NES-era it isn't so bad. I think FF3 is doing something almost exactly like that (though metasprites only uses 4 hardware sprites), and FF3 is a late Famicom-era game and considered quite advanced.

Just wondering, has anyone actually downloaded the EXE? Just curious is all.

Sorry I forgot about that one! I did try it now, I can see that the laser is already very flickery.

[Jedi QuestMaster]

Wow - busy week!

Anyway, I've been working on making everything fit in 16x16 tiles and realized its difficult making things look tall.



So I've been experimenting with psuedo perspective. I kinda like the bricks on the bottom right, but they had to be one less color (than the rest of the bricks) because I realized by that time they needed to be animated breaking and the floor/ground color would be used when nothing's left.


Also, I just realised I can use one less color for the pillars, and have a floor/ground color:


Also, just for reference, the 8 directions of the player (the diagonals will only be used mid-turn):

I'm calling him "Reyes." Get it? LASEReyes

Let me know if everything looks jarring.

[Drag]

I agree, the tilted angle on the bottom-right looks nice. I don't mean to backseat-art, but just for fun, I tried seeing if it's possible to reduce the palette even down to just one attribute:

brickhelp.png (1.98 KiB) Viewed 1125 times

[Jedi QuestMaster]

Ooh! I like how yours are more square-like.

So these all share the same four colors? That's cool. That frees up a slot.

I'm going to work backwards, starting with the laser palettes to see if I can manage four different colored lasers all at once. Wish me luck! (I know, I'm stubborn)

[Dwedit]

You probably don't need all 4 colors for a laser, you could easily fit two different laser colors onto the same palette.

[calima]

Reyes keeps reminding me of this dude. Can't unsee (sorry, no relation to anything).

[Pokun]

Haha that's Alfons Åberg!