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Posted: Thu Aug 19, 2021 2:13 pm |
There is probably a reason this wasn't done in the first place by Tectoy, but would it be possible to add small shadows under each character object when they are standing by directly adding them to the sprites?
By which I mean manually add a small darkened section under each of the frames they touch the floor on? It wouldn't be there when the characters jumped, but it would give just a hint of having a shadow when in contact with the ground. |
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Posted: Thu Aug 19, 2021 6:52 pm |
Another idea. All the grey may be a bit bland, but it looks clean and it frees up a color, which i used in the sky.
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Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2021 10:24 am |
I have a feeling you'll have to do something like this for Sagat's stage, have the statue mostly in shadow.
I'm not sure of the tile count here, as I've just basically stolen the Game Boy background, but it must be close to your 70 limit. |
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Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2021 11:23 am |
I will look into getting those incorporated. I would love to bring in more of the stage. Most of what makes the jet fit are the black tiles. I'm sure it would be difficult regardless. For now, I'm mostly happy with the results.
I said basically this same thing earlier, and I think I'm going to try it out. Have the shadow with the graphic, and when the character jumps, enable the shadow code during that time, then turn it off again. Or something to that effect.
Thanks, any options are good ones.
This is the stage I'm dreading the most (Going to keep it for last) They reduced the graphics so much. This most likely will require expanding the data, and updating where the game points to things. Good news is it's towards the end of the rom data. Working on Ken's stage next, I still have to figure out the last of Chun Li's stage. Thank you all for the feedback. |
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Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2021 12:28 pm |
Using what you have you could add some asymmetry to the fence, make one side have 3 posts and shorter panels. it might make it look less mirrored, I know you wanted a warning sign but this might help instead.
Looking forward to see that, It makes you wonder if there is a reason it wasn't done this way.
Is there much padding at the end of the Rom? Can't wait to see kens stage, I do wonder if you are going to have the old Steam ship or the motorboat. |
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Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2021 12:50 pm |
You can also put one plain tile in the fence so it looks like a hole in the fence, like in the Zangief stage. I wonder, did you manage to fit the plane? How many tiles do you need to free up, or how many tiles do you have to spare now? |
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Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2021 1:21 pm |
Very true, my main concern was getting it to fit close to what the mockup was. I'll definitely change it up a bit, along with looking into possibly bringing in more of the original stage elements.
Looks like there's a fair amount. I'm going with the steam ship atm.
I managed to get the tiles that I deemed necessary in. Which is the graphic previously attached with color palette swap example with it. Any time I post a pic shown in Emulicious, that means I got it into the game successfully. |
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Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2021 1:35 pm |
I did not notice any difference so i presumed you were still working on it (!!!). Excellent work once again. | |
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Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2021 2:06 pm |
My apologies, I probably didn't mention it, and thank you |
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Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2021 2:25 pm |
No need to apologise. I added the exclamation marks because not seeing any difference is a huge compliment for your work. | |
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Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2021 9:16 am |
I worked on Ken's Stage a bit, got a bunch of it done, but then I didn't like how the Capcom boat was looking, so I took a break from it, and went on to do Chun Li's sprites further. I figured I might as well try putting the shadows with the sprite for the time being. It was more of a pain than I would of liked. I had to update SMS Editor again to finish the tile id replacement feature. Which came in handy for this scenario.
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Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2021 12:13 pm |
The meat on Chun li's stage is a much better colour now. Shadows are much better than the original ones which had the characters float above them, I think it's worth the extra work. Out of curiosity if one of those two identical guys on Balrog's stage were coloured with the sprite palette, to break the symmetry a little would his clothes be purple? |
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Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2021 1:15 pm |
Yeah, I think it looks better as well. I had to change Chun Li's idle frames a bit to be able to fit in the extra shadow tile. Thankfully, the walking ones weren't as finicky, but it still took some working to get them not to overflow.
Depends on who's palette was loaded into the sprite palette. Again, this would be on a per tile basis. So all the colors would have to be present on the palette, not just specific colors. In most cases I can see calculating a decent result, except when Blanka's palette gets loaded, perhaps. There are about 2 blank colors on the sprite palette, after the character palette, that so far, don't seem to be used by anything. (2 colors before the 4 hud ones at the end: black, yellow, orange, and red colors) I'm planning on possibly shaving off one color from every character's palette, which COULD mean 3 guaranteed colors on the sprite side. All this is speculation atm, as I haven't tested every scenario. But here's my thing. Currently every character's projectile and special damage injuries (Flame damage, electric damage) are based on what they have on their character palette. I wanted to use those extra color entries for a blue range, and use the hud for a red/orange range, so that these colors are uniform for these graphics throughout. At the moment, P2 Chun Li spits out a pink Kikoken. Which is pretty cool looking, tbh, but I want to try and keep it consistent, by entering and using those static colors. So, after my long winded statement. We'll have to see what shakes. But it still won't break up the symmetry all that much, just bring in some other colors. |
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Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2021 2:35 pm |
I think I've missunderstood how the palettes worked, I assumed they would have to both be almost identical with the colour placements, and each Pallete would be similar across all the stages so any fighter could be loaded in.
Is this not how they work? |
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Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2021 4:05 pm |
I think your assessment is correct. You would definitely need to align the palettes correctly to reference the correct color indexes. As some general information, this is what I believe the general method is: There are three palettes associated with any given character: Stage palette, which is P1 palette + extra stage colors P1 Palette, when the character is comprised of sprites P2 Palette, always a sprite palette So in single player mode, against the computer, P1 is made of sprites, their palette gets loaded into the sprite palette. The computer is made of BG tiles, using whatever the method is called when 2 tiles are drawn on top of each other. That stage palette is static, and will always contain the P1 colors for the character that belongs to that stage. In two player mode, P1 is now made up of BG tiles, using the aforementioned blend method and static stage palette. P2 is now made up of sprites, and uses liquid sprite palette. The fight will always be on P1's character stage, using the stage palette. Funny enough, if P2 wins the match, they will play in single player mode on the right side, and their palette will revert to P1 palette. |
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Posted: Sun Aug 22, 2021 9:58 pm Last edited by Emrabt on Mon Aug 23, 2021 5:15 pm; edited 2 times in total |
Thank you for explaining, sorry for all the questions.
So In one player mode when a fighter vs their self the player is made of background tiles and uses the background palette for that stage, the computer is using the sprite palette which has loaded an alternative color scheme? In the other matches the player is sprites and uses the standard color scheme loaded in the sprite palette. I had misunderstood, I had worked it out in my head that each stage must contain the colours for every character in both palettes (so because Balrog is blue / purple I thought in his stage the sprite palette had purples where the blues were placed in the background palette). Samgukji 3 does this I think, 1 uniform sprite palette used by every fighter. But now I get it, as characters are fixed to their stages It doesn't need to happen this way. The drawback is you can never have two characters fight outside their stage, for example Guile and Ryu in Blanka's stage, because the colours would screw up the fighter drawn with background tiles. Thank you.
That's a brilliant idea, but wouldn't you also need a white for the bones in the shock graphic? |
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Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2021 4:39 am |
Nice Work | |
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Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2021 1:35 pm |
You're right, but I had a strategic layout in mind for that. Not that it matters much in the end, however. I went and tested the idea, and it worked up until shooting a projectile on 2 player mode, using player 1. It looks like it throws off the tile "merging". Every tile the projectile overlapped, used the the background color index from the where the projectile color index was on the sprite palette. So the colors were off. Bummer. Maybe there's a fix for that, but it's beyond my skillset. I haven't done much in the way of actual hacking content. I got a few more sprites done for Chun Li. I noticed that the original kick animation is a bit jerky, as it seems the sprite moves forward in the animation, instead of a fluid animation from the start position. I partially resolved it by changing the offset X values for each tilemap. Which looked great, after I altered the idle animation. The problem is the sprite based version ignores these value changes, so I'll have to hunt those values down at some point. I primarily spent time changing SMS Editor. I originally was just entering the resource definitions through code (Constructor overrides), I was going to it by external xml file, eventually. Then I realized, why not just make a UI for it, and get results in real time, duh? So I did that just that. I also refined everything, optimized various areas. Mainly rendering and importing features. Added some new things, like pixel editing, tile swapping, ROM image, and Hex reader. I got about 7 more things on my to do list, but it has been so much easier to get definitions together through the UI, and then edit them, all in one place. Finally, I put together quite a bit of graphic assets together for a Zelda type game, maybe to push out during one of SMS coding events. As I really need to get my self rolling in that aspect. It's nothing tremendously bleeding edge or anything, but it'll be a good start for me. I've nailed down a basic story and overall design. Palette management and the such, for the most part. The player will be able to choose from 4 female protagonists. With their own unique graphics, abilities, and story endings. Well, that about wraps up my update, till next time. Thanks for viewing. |
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Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2021 2:08 pm |
Forcing all projectiles to be drawn with sprites would probably be the easiest get around for this. At least it'll probably be far easier than trying to re-write the software sprite routine. How you would actually do that is anyone's guess. It's all coming along really nicely. That RPG looks pretty good. |
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Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2021 7:27 pm |
Both sound pretty tough. lol Defining those tile resources into the sprite portion of vram, and the 8 sprites per scanline limitation are ones that come to mind of the top of my head. |
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Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2021 7:52 pm |
The sprite limit shouldn't be too bad as it would only come close when 2 projectiles were on screen together. That said, the bigger issue would be the other graphics you were planning on doing this way, like the shock graphic. So it wouldn't work anyway. At least we now know why it wasn't done this way by TecToy, looks like you'll need to put similar colors into each stage palette too, or at least ones that look acceptable. You won't need every stage to have the same colors only those with projectiles need the colors matching in their stages. (Guile will need the yellow in the same spot in his stage and both his sprite palettes, Ryu only needs the blue and so on, same for Ken's stage and Sagats). Are you able to put a VS option on the title screen that forces you into two player mode? |
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Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2021 10:35 pm |
[quote="Emrabt"]
I don't know what the scope of that would entail atm. Something I could look at later though. |
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Posted: Mon Sep 13, 2021 1:41 pm |
I like the screenshot of your Zelda-like. Is that a mockup or a working proof of concept?
Be aware that the outermost columns at the left and right edges of the screen are in danger of disappearing outside the visible area when played on a CRT. That's not really a problem on the left side of the screen shown here, but there might be a problem with the status bars on the right, especially the dynamite counter. I have yet to see a CRT that makes the rightmost column disappear, though. So far, I've only seen it happening on the left, but Sega's documentation recommends not putting anything importand there on either side, and who am I to argue that? Of course, if you anticipate that your game will most likely be played on modern displays or on emulators anyway, you can safely ignore all of that. |
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Posted: Mon Sep 13, 2021 3:34 pm |
Oh wow, didn't know that was an issue. I couldn't really afford an SMS when I was a kid. I would go to friends houses to play. Eventually my one friend moved on, and sold me his SMS for dirt cheap. The only TV I could get a hold of was a black and white one. When I played Phantasy Star on it, it still had the left side intact. For some reason I always remember that column being blank. Never knew why till I came to this site. Thanks, good information. To solve it, I'll squish everything in, or I may move the hub to the right. If the HP text or Magic icon gets cut off a columns worth, it shouldn't be too bad. I don't plan on doing any scrolling, it will be all static screens. Edit: It's currently a mock-up. I have quite a lot of other things done, graphically, but I think I'll show more once I got some actual game play together. |
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Posted: Tue Sep 14, 2021 6:55 pm |
Is columns disappearing on CRTs something more prevalent to NTSC than PAL? I thought 16 pixels was a better safe distance guide. I've probably seen close to that (on NTSC) in overscan loss.
Like I hear games would often have bigger borders on PAL as a result of devs not caring too much about converting their games. |
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Posted: Tue Sep 14, 2021 8:31 pm |
I've seen PAL tv's with huge overscan. Of course vertically it is never an issue because PAL indeed has (bigger) bars at top and bottom.
This is due to higher resolution, where the extra lines must be filled with something. It's not easy to fix that issue. Actually there is an easy solution :). Most PAL tv's also support NTSC so they only had to add a PAL/NTSC switch on the console, like many hardware mods (which were also available in the past). |
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Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2021 12:15 am |
My understanding is that overscan was worse on older TVs. A 1986 video game might have been played on a 1970s TV set with a much rounder tube and more of the picture hidden.
For the SMS, the left 8 pixels is very often hidden even on 1990s TVs. To be safe you should always avoid needing to see them, but also avoid the next 8px after that. The top and bottom are less of an issue, especially for PAL regions where the borders were far bigger than any overscan. |
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Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2021 10:06 am |
I know this has been posted on a wiki about some other 8-bit console, but I think it's quite accurate: http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php?title=File:Safe_areas.png. It even mentions the Master System VDP in the associated page. | |
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Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2021 11:29 am |
The leftmost at least 4 pixels are hidden even in my 2000s CRT. |
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Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2021 3:08 pm |
We need to write our own wiki page to explain overscan and pixel aspect ratio for Sega 8-bit systems… it might also be nice to have a mode in popular homebrew testers to draw user-controllable lines on four sides (requiring some tricky tile generation!) and display the numbers so people can give real world examples. | |
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Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2021 3:30 pm |
a vertical line could be drawn using sprites and could be moved left and right freely with the pad... | |
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Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2021 7:33 pm |
But a horizontal one would only be 64px wide. I was thinking of drawing a full width line at both the top and bottom, and a full height line on each side, and then letting you move them all somehow (maybe UDLR to move two lines and a button to swap which two are active). This would require drawing into 8 tiles and managing which tilemap entries show those generated tiles. | |
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Posted: Fri Sep 17, 2021 4:21 pm |
a single horizontal line could be drawn using the BG tiles and moved up and down changing v-scroll register, so you have both X and Y | |
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Rom demo download
Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2021 9:39 pm
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Amazing project!!! Rom demo download? |
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Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2021 11:39 pm |
I want to thank everyone for the CRT screen conversation/information, I don't have much knowledge on the subject to comment on it, but it's all very interesting.
No rom patch yet. Currently working to get the editor I'm using, and golden axe finished up. I keep adding things to the editor, and there are still some things to fix. So I've switched gears and focused on getting Golden Axe completed. Crash coursing myself through ASM atm. My internal to do list: // Testing Test changing an edit tilemap's size (cols and rows) Test removing assets Removed padding (Replaced with offset), check asm output and sprite import methods: Tileset.SetTilePixels() BitmapUtility.GetPixelTiles() // Features Add scroll increments for rom image panel Finish rom image control Finish hex view control Add compression validation Rename compression options // Bugs Fix graphics import when using one tileset for many tilemaps Optimize tilemap render when the attribute information is displayed Check compression when compressing tilemap data using planar method // Golden Axe todo list Add screens to end of ROM (Needed logic as well, it seems) Create append data method for positions out of the original rom size (Checksum fix?) |
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Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2021 6:23 pm |
Thanks for keeping us updated. Good luck with learning assembly, I can just about manage with fully dissembled and commented code, anything other than that is way too complicated for my understanding. | |
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Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 12:51 am |
Happy New Year all, got derailed by life, but I think everything is in order now. So, my battle plan is to shelf anything to do with SMS Editor, as it needs quite a bit of work to support other games that I'm not currently hacking.
If I said I was going to look at certain things for several of the members here, I apologize, but I'm going to solely work on getting SFII and Golden Axe wrapped up. I keep dabbling in other things that interest me, and I need to be more focused. That being said. I have been busy with SFII exclusively. I'm going to focus on getting the stages all done. Creating a SFII: The World Warrior and a SFII: Turbo (SNES versions) variant for each. Mainly the focus is on the color schemes. I have been finalizing these changes to the existing stages, as well as current stages I'm working on. Till next time. |
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Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2022 5:42 pm |
Looking really good! Hope see a patch of this at some stage! | |
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Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2022 9:09 am |
Well done. The Bison stage looks absolutely fantastic. I like your idea to create a Sf2 and Sf2 turbo version of stages. | |
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Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2022 3:03 pm |
Thank you, I have worked out the SFII: WW palette out. I also have most of Blanka's stage done, I just need to edit the floor tiles as I used Ryu's as a place holder. |
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Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2022 11:10 pm |
This is gonna be the best looking game on the Sms! | |
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Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2022 12:32 pm |
It's looking absolutely amazing! | |
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Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2022 11:12 am |
Thank you for the comments. I believe I have Ken's stage done (Except for Ryu's placeholder floor), however it's not what I envisioned. I've played with it a bit, but I can't have the NPCs in the background and the Capcom boat at the same time. I'm debating on maybe keeping the NPCs, and just replacing the Capcom boat with a sea bouy, that would have the benefit of horizontal mirroring. If I do that, I have about 21 tiles to create it with. That would deviate from the game original art though. The NPCs are 48 tiles, and the Capcom boat is 69 tiles. For now, I have it without the NPCs.
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Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2022 1:21 pm |
The other option is to is to redraw the people, for example have the woman and the man in the trench coat half mirrored and simplify the Capcom boat down to whatever tiles are left. Whatever you choose to do will be better than what was there, so even if the constraints don't quite fit with your vision it will still look better than before. |
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Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2022 4:03 pm |
Thanks for the feedback! The problem is simplifying the Capcom boat. I have messed with it in several ways, and it just looks like butt. Redesigning something from scratch would be simpler. Either a new boat altogether, or some sort of other object to fill the space with. What I think I may do (As I've had time to sleep on it), is redesign the front of the steam boat into something less tile intensive. As that uses quite a lot of tiles. It's a bit of a shame, because I like how it turned out. |
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Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2022 7:09 pm |
Throwing an idea out there, If you mirrored the bow of the steamer you'd have a fair few tiles that could be used to make a row boat on the right. Then you would just have to add a flag and put Capcom on it, you'd then have tiles left over to make it look like it's own thing. It wouldn't be a white cruise ship but it would be something. |
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Posted: Sun Jan 16, 2022 1:58 am |
I'll give it a try. I have made a little more progress, but need about 13 more tiles lol. |
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Posted: Mon Jan 17, 2022 9:24 am |
You could try putting the floor in and seeing what you have left after. |
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Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2022 2:55 am |
Not expecting too much from that, but a good suggestion. I managed to get it to 11 tiles. I put Ken's stage on hold for now. I started Sagat's stage, as well as investigating how I'm going to tack Sagat's stage to the end of the rom. I plan on using the max tiles I can, which is around 192 tiles or so. |
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Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2022 10:06 am |
Chun Li's stage is looking fabulous, you've retained far more than I ever imagined.
I'm assuming pointing you in the direction of the game boy version was the correct thing to do to solve the issue with the distant buildings. I can't work out how you gained the extra tiles for the barbers pole and second window, I can see you've redrawn the curb and textured the walls but nothing else seems to be missing, what did you remove? It's looking great. |
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