tepples wrote:
Perhaps someone intends to use TurboGrafx parallax, the kind used in the second level of Battletoads and throughout MetalStorm. Or the vignetting could be done by blanking out tiles far from the center, with sprites to cover the transition area, like the third screen of World 8's map in SMB3 but on a bigger scale.
lidnariq wrote:
Is it preferable to keep the vignetting over losing parallax? They (naively) both seem to be primarily aesthetic...
I've been completely torn on which I'd like to keep. The mask doesn't (entirely) affect gameplay, except that it limits how much of the playfield is visible. If the far backdrop layer is kept, I will still have to substantially nerf the animation for it, as I definitely can't afford the CPU time to do software rotation of the huge 256x256 gear graphic. Probably I would simplify the art for it, and pre-render 3 or 4 "frames" that don't look too bad. Definitely a lot of tiles can be re-used in such a situation, and I won't have to update the entire graphic each frame. Probably I'd do the animation entirely with DMA to VRAM so I don't have to update a lot of the tilemap at once, and that way it can be one long continuous write instead of a few broken ones.
Unfortunately raster-effect-like parallax won't work for this game, as there are a lot of situations where the walls will span large vertical segments, and I'm not creating different far-backdrop mappings for each level. I was hoping to take advantage of the shadow-highlight mode to do the mask using a lot of sprites, but I would sacrifice the ability to have the player sprite look good behind some of the foreground tiles, and by the time I've created the mask with sprites the scanline sprite limit will be reached very quickly.
As the vignette effect is strongly, er,
reduced from the original game (even though it matches our very-earliest design) I am not sure which I would rather keep. I'm working off of the 32x32 cell plane size, so it also masks the artifacts of the column writes as well. I may use a few tall sprites to accomplish the same thing, or move to a 64x32 plane size and be a little craftier about it.
I feel like the level art is somewhat dependent on having the parallax backdrop behind it to give it the depth and detail it needs. Without it, the black tiles might as well be transparent. If you lose the backdrop *and* the mask, the game is suitable for the SMS or NES even!
The collisions are going to have to be very precise, as I'm hoping I can get the gameplay nearly identical to the PC game. The classic ray-based collision won't cut it for backdrops here, so I'll probably be sampling collisions at a few points on the player's side.
Fortunately at this point it's not hard to snip out the mask and switch planes for the level graphics, so I'm not settled yet on which direction I'd like to take that tradeoff.