AuthorTopic: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine  (Read 59406 times)

Offline Ryumaru

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Re: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine

Reply #10 on: March 29, 2006, 07:43:48 am
im more of the one that studies the the critiques made but id like to say that the almost over "sculpted" look in th tiles made from the highlights lends itself well to other things in pixelart and i think some people are too timid to go for such a look.

Offline crab2selout.png

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Re: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine

Reply #11 on: March 29, 2006, 08:51:14 pm
I notice that there is a pattern to how they use a 50/50 dither on the floors. It seems like they never place 50/50 dither floor tiles on the same floor level as flat color tiles. It's difficult to be sure as I haven't played this game, but I've only seen one instance where this wasn't true


-higher rocks are dithered, while lower level the palyer is on isn't

-water here has a 50/50 dither

-the main floor level is dithered here, while on the right you can see a lower floor level that is flat shaded


-two more examples


-the outlier

Provided I'm not wrong about this, it's a pretty interesting way to make the brain see a difference between separate height levels.

Offline goat

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Re: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine

Reply #12 on: March 29, 2006, 10:20:42 pm
good food for thought.  rock on.
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Offline Darien

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Re: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine

Reply #13 on: April 03, 2006, 09:38:37 pm
Perhaps the mostly flat ground tiles were chosen because the sprites shadows are non-transparent.  In the game as it is, if you walk over some rocks your shadow looks very fake because it completely covers up the ground that was once detailed.  The shadows look best against the flat ground. 

I'm glad that I got to see this game... the "hue bouncing" really astounds me.  I definately have to try to incorporate it into my stuff.

Offline initial_reality

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Re: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine

Reply #14 on: April 04, 2006, 12:33:32 pm
My guess is, they use flat color tiles or dithered tiles because they're faster to draw than textured tiles. For flat tiles, pixels are just set to a given color, whereas for textured tiles, we have to copy all the 256 pixels from RAM to video memory, wich takes longer. And this really matters for a scroller. At least, it's how it used to work in DOS. Seems to be same in the C64. Note that the trees may use flat tiles too.

Despite the speed issue, the game's rather slow in my computer (AMD 1.1)! Is it because the XP is emulating the DOS mode ? Other than that, excellent game (behind Gods off course).

Offline Mr.Modem

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Re: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine

Reply #15 on: April 04, 2006, 02:48:50 pm
I don't think you're right initial_reality. Commodore Amiga (the computer it was initially developed for) was powerful enough to scroll tiles like this. Since Amiga had a hardware scroll these kind of stuff didn't take any cpu time. I doubt it would be faster to render flat areas. Please correct me if I'm wrong though. I reccomend you to use an Amiga emulator to play this game if you're experiencing slowdowns with the dos version. You could also thry the snes or megadrive versions. And Chaos Engine is much better than Gods (imo).
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Offline goat

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Re: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine

Reply #16 on: April 04, 2006, 04:23:02 pm
Confirming the hardware scrolling, Amiga's OCS/ECS was head and shoulders above other chipsets of its time for video performance
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Offline Mr.Modem

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Re: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine

Reply #17 on: April 04, 2006, 05:11:09 pm
And even poor Atari ST (don't get me wrong, I love Atari ST but the hardware really sucked) could handle this game! It had almost no graphics hardware at all. No blitter, no hardware scroll. Again, feel free to correct me.
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Offline Helm

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Re: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine

Reply #18 on: April 04, 2006, 08:41:16 pm
No you are correct. But he does have a point in that if shadows overlapped with a lot of detail it would look strange. The shadows aren't of course, semi-transparent because you had to do a lot of wizardry to get tints and active transparencies in the Amiga, and it either took AGA chipset or master coder, or both. Look at Lionheart.

Offline Ryumaru

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Re: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine

Reply #19 on: May 01, 2006, 10:22:51 pm
somewhat off topic, but does anybody know of some sites with graphics from other bb games?
ive looked at there site, but all teh screenshots are jpeg
id like to look at more of there graphics and do some disecting of my own.