This has been bugging me for a while. I remember Sik mentioning awhile ago, that on the Genesis the sprites in back drop off first, as opposed to the front sprites dropping first on the SNES. I've been wondering what's more visually appealing, explosions behind with characters being more flicker prone, or explosions infront of characters with the explosions being more flicker prone.
There could be a sorting algorithm so that explosions are only behind other sprites when they overlap, but I don't know how much CPU power that will take. I might have to use a combination of small and large explosions in order to cut down on sprite tiles per line limitaions.
Even neglecting sprite dropout, explosions are very 3D and spready, so decent-sized ones would tend to engulf a character even if both were centered on the same plane, resulting in the explosion at least partially occluding the character. On the other hand, if the explosions are so large and plentiful that they end up obscuring the action and making the game harder, there may be a case for rethinking this.
Your game, IIRC, has a lot of explosion (meta?)sprites that start at a point and move outwards as part of a larger explosion. Perhaps some of them should be in front and some behind the characters, simulating the fact that in 3D some elements of the explosion would move toward the camera and some away.
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With sprite dropout being a factor, it strikes me that glitching in a transient effect like an explosion might be less offensive and immersion-breaking than glitching in a solid object like a person. I may be wrong as I haven't done any tests, and personal taste may come into this as well.
depends on the object and how big it is I guess.. having the explosion disappear is probably not a bad thing, explosions tend to flicker and do "random" stuff, while having the object disappear is probably a desirable outcome as it has exploded, but coming back not so much.
I would think that you would probably want explosions in front of the thing as that would give a sense of it "exploding in all directions" more, and cover up the fact the object in perfectly intact, than I can see the thing fine and things explode behind it. But if you are say doing a game like Wild guns where you are shooting into the screen then behind probably makes more sense as you have blasted through the object and hence it has an "exit" wound.
Okay, this makes sense. Most run'n'guns don't have roundhouse kicks, so I'll do big explosions while shooting in front, and little explosions in back while kicking.
Okay, I tried using 16x16 explosion sprites when kicking yesterday, and it looked pretty lame, so instead of doing that, I changed it to have explosions spawn every 3 frames instead of 2 after being kicked, and they blow up into 12 sprites instead of 16. This looks better regardless of being in front or back.
One more possibility I would like to test is, having all explosions infront, but using 24x24 explosions (but drawn on 32x32 sprites), so that only explosions flicker, but they don't block as much action.
Just to clarify: please don't take my hypotheticals as veiled criticisms. If you judge that the explosions are impeding the gameplay, maybe it needs fixing, but I am not making that claim.
Another game using flickery 24x24-pixel explosions is Thwaite for NES. I imagine they work better over a dark background than over bright sky blue.