copyright plant zone

did this and now dont know what do now.

You could frame it and hang it on your wall.

it would be quite tiny.

Or blocky. Anyway, nice mock-up! It does a decent job of capturing the essence of the original.

I like it. You might be trying to mimic the work of Hummer Team, but both the picture and the song are more polished than their typical stuff was.

:C

you still doing that sonic thing from years ago?

Not exactly.

*sigh* i wish i wasnt so limited.

What do you mean? Limited by the Somari engine?

Wow, that's a really good demake of Metropolis Zone!

The black void around the rings is really weird though... It would look much better if you reserved black areas in the background for the rings, which's what Somari did in Labyrinth Zone, if I'm not mistaken.

Another thing I'm not a big fan of is the dithering on the ends of the big pipes... Alternating orange and white stripes vertically would probably look better. Not to mention that checkerboard patterns in general look like crap on the NES. My experience with the NES is that you can use dithering to create textures, not flat colors.

I'm really impressed though!

liek dis (the pipes)?

i would do more of these (even original shit) if someone would have a practical use for them

edit: compromised with the rings.
edit2: added the screenshot of origin for comparison.
edit3: darkened the grills a bit

Actually I meant the lines would alternate colors vertically, the lines themselves would be horizontal. I think it would go well with the shading you have above and below.


I can't speak for everyone, but I personally don't have any interest in creating games using copyrighted stuff. I do like to see your versions of the levels, though! =)


This is better. If this was an original engine, that didn't inherit the flaws and limitations of Somari, the best thing to do would be to use sprites for those rings. Longer runs of rings should definitely be rendered on the background, but small runs of up to 3 rings would surely make things look more dynamic.

Alternating stripes should be horizontal, not vertical. Vertical stripes suffer from the same shimmering deficiencies that checkerboard patterns do. (Edit: tokumaru already answered.)

Also, if you want a wider looking horizontal highlight on your pipe, I'd suggest an additional horizontal white line above and below it, with a 1 line gap of light brown. (Kind of stands in as 2 extra lines of 50% horizontal-stripe dither.)

Now I'm thinking about slopes... Those will be impossible to pull off with such a busy background. You'll have to find a way to create more black (or maybe dark green?) areas in it.

it could be done in a similiar manner like they did with starlight zone. everything kinda dissapeared into black. OR. the background is filled with a dark green mesh to fill the block and ignore the odd transition. The second method would force all those curly loops to be constructed out of angled slopes, rather than a true loop (which might actually be more beneficial because metropolis zone has ALOT of slopes anyway and would only spare the sparse memory).

Visual explanation:

bloody hell, that went right over my head. I often confuse x and y directionals in english.

error corrected

*waves his magic wand at oil ocean zone*

I've made NES covers of music from a couple Sonic levels. How would they look?

• Emerald Hill Zone (STH2): nsf | ogg
• Flying Battery Zone (S&K): nsf and ogg

no idea, grass is definately going to be a problem in emerald hill (which ill get right on)
but some guy a long time ago, actually did do flying battery zone in a place called sonic vegemite. I saved it, now cant find it >_>...

but meanwhile i try to master EHZ, have some tunes:

oh, i did this last year too, incase you were wondering why mystic cave was in the nsf:

i did what i could. had to reinvent most of the grass and shaded grass blocks but i think it was worth it.

Edit: filtered all of the images so far, click on this word to go to the album.

Yeah, the overall feel is there, and there are many nice things about these images, but you really can't go "fuck it" and ignore those gigantic attribute clashes. You seem to be going with black as the background color even when that color is hardly present. Oil Ocean would probably look much better if you used orange as the background color, so you could draw all the little ornaments without all the attribute clash.

As for Emerald Hill, the black under the grass can almost be overlooked, but the light blue going into the sky is unacceptable. I'd much rather have the sky and the water use the same color, and be separated only by the surface of the water.

The emerald hill one was an easy fix:


however with the oil ocean... ill have to see. (brb)
edit: i took a look, and while three palettes would be okay when black is swapped for orange, the purple palette wouldnt be, it just wouldnt look ok at all. there might be a possible compromise here, but that would mean that the background will turn light yellow, not orange.
looking into the yellow themed now.
edit2: this is what it would look like when black is switched with orange in all palettes:

edit3: instead i propose this solution:

in the yellow-green palette, the dark blueish color gets to be orange, and existing black takes over where dark blueish previously was.
edit4: made a better-looking gem/s

This topic now has more flying battery:

Personally, I'd much rather see something use a different palette than see a big miscolored rectangle.

Same here! You can even make more use of the lighter end of the palette for some objects and the darker end for others, so they don't look completely the same. In this Flying Battery shot, for instance, the pillar barely has any white, so you could use tons of it in the angled platform to make it stand out.

This section is actually more complicated than it looks, since those angled platforms move up and down, and moving huge background sections on the NES is very prohibitive. This is one gimmick that would probably have to be rethought for an NES version.

Yeah, although those move relatively fast so maybe the tile-sized steps are not as bad as it sounds. I'd give the pillar section a completely black background though to avoid the background clash (I'd assume there isn't parallax here anyway, so it shouldn't look that odd).

It's not just about how it'd look, but about each platform being a huge 12x6 tiles monster. Moving 2 of those by 8 pixels would mean updating 168 name table bytes, which would consume the entire VRAM bandwidth for a frame.


Definitely.

Seems like something that would be better solved from hardware, either MMC2-style (CHR-bank-on-X-tile) or MMC5-style (vertical scroll split...but requiring two).

You could just do it with a scanline-counter and banking, provided you don't mind going eight pixels up at a time. It's not like the game's running most of the physics while you're running on that spiral....though I suppose you might want to spoof the BG by the sides with sprites so you DON'T have to update attribute tables either...

An alternative to that ugly brown attribute clash would be just using black in that palette entry. There would be little/no loss of detail. Plus then you've have an empty color for something else. Possibly sky color for the loops in that stage.

That's too much trouble for one little stupid gimmick, IMO.

Depending on the angle and thickness of the platform, it could possibly be made with sprites without going over the sprite limit. Honestly though, if we're going by Team Somari's standards, they'd probably just make those stationary, or replace the whole thing with zig-zag ramps or something.

It is a stupid gimmick that doesn't add much to the gameplay anyway, there's no point in jumping through hoops to get it implemented exactly like the original.

Rather than having attribute blocks in conflict with your slopes, maybe you can find a convenient way to make space around it in the background?

I'd make the platform thinner and use sprites, arranged like this:


The sprites are arranged so that at most 8 of them will share the same scanlines. There will be some flicker when the player is standing beside the platforms, but little to none when standing on them.

With this you won't have to worry about color clashes, empty backgrounds or gigantic VRAM updates. I'd say a little flickering and thinner platforms are a small price to pay to keep things simple and functional.

If you reeeeally want to keep the original dimensions, at least make the sides using sprites, so you don't have to blank out the background, and there are less background tiles to animate. You'd need compatible palettes for this, though.

That wasn't my point. All the slanted surfaces would be easier to implement that way, with less clashing. The loops would just be a nice bonus.



That's not a bad suggestion! But, charting it out better, would be more helpful:

Holy-Moly! I go to sleep for 15 hours and then this happens! Yikes.

What i was originally thinking of, when i made that image, was bankswitching.

edit: if the black bars arent too distracting, then this might be one option aswell...

Ah, I just realized that these things move in the original game. Yeah, I would do it with sprites too, then.


That has a few caveats, like depending on how you do flicker, you may need to break it into multiple metasprites so that the flicker isn't always knocking out the same sprite tiles. Personally I'd probably give up on the original thickness, and just do a platform 7-pixels thick, which at the given slope of 1/4 pixels would have a lot of headroom against flickering.

Any other requests, tepples?

Gave it a shot. Also edited quite a few other things, some of which save tiles, some which add some new ones, and things like moving the bolts to get rid of that ugly char clash in the bottom right. Also on the background tiles there was one colour too many, a very dark teal.

And I switched to the Joel Y NTSC palette.

Looks great, ptoing, but it's still not very "animatable".

Oh, derp. How is this supposed to animate? they go up and down when you run?

This would be doable with CHRAM and a very clever programming. I wouldn't want to program it. Basically, you'd have to recreate every tile as a combination of background and foreground tiles, every frame, on the fly.

Also, would be 1000x easier, if done on SNES.

Haha, I see what you did there

And yeah, would be trivial on the SNES, what with multiple background layers.

It's always moving: https://youtu.be/qN3V-dlF36o?t=2m39s

Could make for some good static platforms though :v (assuming you make them not block you from below)

This is great what you did, I would love it to be a reality to play it, on the other hand although it is somewhat complex to bring the game to reality if it is able to display all the graphics you want, the Somari Engine uses a pirate variant of mmc3 , this makes it possible to move a large graphical load without flinching, but in this case it should be used in the background to avoid multiple overlapping, something similar can be seen in the Final Zone, another problem that you will have to deal with is the reduced space you have for the tileset (128x128), because although the game is able to change it dynamically this must be set in the programming of each type of object (I'm not 100% sure of that), but in case you do not want To complicate yourself so much by adapting existing resources you can create something decent enough.
 
Commenting a little more about the benefits of this Engine, all objects are made up of blocks of 16x16 to which you can easily assign any palette or existing physics, in the same way enemies can be called at any level, but they will be the graphs of the objset assigned to the level, although this is easily modifiable, finally the levels are conformed by approximately 63 blocks of 256x240 per Zone, excepting the special stage and the final Zone, these can be called indefinitely at the level of the level (Objects use another table to be loaded). If you are interested in all these things I will explain them in more detail in this post .

I also pass this application always helps me to adapt graphics Color Quantizer (sometimes it is advisable to load your own palette instead of using the one that calculates the application).

Luck!

dude, dont necrobump. not cool.

As I see it, most of us have little if any problem with bumps in good faith with substantial new information or critique for a couple reasons. It's not quite as disruptive as creating a duplicate topic just to add a reply, and it shows that a user is at least using the search button. See "Posting and You" (SWF or YouTube).

I'm perfectly OK with bumps that contain relevant information, like in this case. The annoying kind of bump is the one with nothing but a pointless reaction that adds nothing to the discussion (e.g. "Cool!").

And Estlib, nearly a month had passed since Terwilf's one-and-only post, so - since your post did nothing but scold a user who doesn't seem to be interested in posting here - if anything I'd accuse you of the problematic necrobump

I want to express my sincere apologies and clarify that I fully understand his reaction, at the same time I would like to clarify that the only reason that led me to comment on his publication is that the work he did seemed exceptional, I do not know how to explain it, but when I saw it I immediately felt as if it emanated the official aesthetics of the game