Bregalad wrote:
I'd use horizontal mirroring (or possibly 1-screen) in order to get the game level being displayed in color in one nametable, and in blue on the other nametable, and just switch nametables with $2000 (if possible also do a horizontal waving effect via $2005).
That is a very interesting idea! However, there is the huge price of drawing everything (tiles/metatiles and attributes) twice, which can take too much time if you need fast scrolling. Also, you get a lot of limitations on the colors you can use, because you must have palettes to handle the blue as well as the regular level, while in Noah's Ark, the water effect still leaves all the palettes avaliable.
In my game, in water levels, the level of the water will mostly never change, so I'll just have a palette to use for everything underwater (meaning I'll have to deal with the palette limitations I mentioned above). One of the sprite palettes will also have the similar tones, for underwater sprites. Everything does look a bit monochrome, except that the palette used for the background and the one used for sprites are slightly different, so it doesn't look so dull.
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(By the way water is transparent, not blue, but it looks blue because that's the sky's color).
Heh, not every water is transparent... You certainly haven't seen how dirty the water in Copacabana beach can be! >_< Just kidding, but yeah, there are rivers that have brownish water, and they are not poluted or anything, it's possibly just mud I guess.
I also remember that in a city named "Rio das Ostras" I've been to a few times, there is a pond called "Lagoa da Coca-Cola", which has this name because the color of the water is really close to that of Coca-Cola (duh). I don't know why, there's probably some chemistry involved, and I'm really not good at it. But the water is quite clean, as far as I remember.