AuthorTopic: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine  (Read 59417 times)

Offline Ai

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Re: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine

Reply #30 on: November 24, 2006, 11:51:19 am
Holy crap, it's like having two Neota/AIs and I'm comprehending only half their discussion! It's pretty interesting to see that a game would have to do so many tricks, just to squeeze in transparencies (I think that's what they were talking about).

I feel sorry for the poor bastards that had to brainstorm the process by which they'd create a game with such constraints. It was after the time when games were relatively simple and before the time games were relatively simple to make.

Saimo was talking about a single-color transparency (choosing a single color, and then being able to mix that in a fixed proportion with any of the normal 16 colors)

What I was talking about was using a single palette index exclusively for drawing shadows, so that shadows can be enabled/disabled on any particular set of scanlines.
(roughly. You may not be able to get it accurate to 1 scanline.. but accurate to 4 would be okay)

With what saimo is talking about, you'd be able to blit a shadow mask onto the 5th bitplane, and that would be all that is needed to make an object cast a shadow.

With what I'm talking about, you'd be able to vary the depth of the shadows across the Y axis.

If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.

Offline saimo

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Re: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine

Reply #31 on: November 24, 2006, 12:00:16 pm
It's pretty interesting to see that a game would have to do so many tricks, just to squeeze in transparencies (I think that's what they were talking about).

I feel sorry for the poor bastards that had to brainstorm the process by which they'd create a game with such constraints. It was after the time when games were relatively simple and before the time games were relatively simple to make.
Don't be: it was tough, but also very creative and stimulating. Nowadays there are other problems... but I prefer the oldskool ones ;)
BTW: actually on low-power platforms there are still those kind of challenges...

saimo

Offline saimo

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Re: Commercial Critique: The Chaos Engine

Reply #32 on: November 24, 2006, 12:40:53 pm
AI, I hope you don't mind if I de-interleave your post ;)

Saimo was talking about a single-color transparency (choosing a single color, and then being able to mix that in a fixed proportion with any of the normal 16 colors)

With what saimo is talking about, you'd be able to blit a shadow mask onto the 5th bitplane, and that would be all that is needed to make an object cast a shadow.
100% correct.
Note to others: this method can be used to do more than just projecting shadows (f.ex. lighting and glass effects).

Quote
What I was talking about was using a single palette index exclusively for drawing shadows, so that shadows can be enabled/disabled on any particular set of scanlines.
(roughly. You may not be able to get it accurate to 1 scanline.. but accurate to 4 would be okay)

With what I'm talking about, you'd be able to vary the depth of the shadows across the Y axis.
If the figure "4" comes from the "4" I mentioned myself, please note that I was talking about horizontal constraits. The vertical ones are a lot easier to deal with, so your method could be easily mixed with mine in order to have horizontally pixel-perfect shadows with varying depth across the Y axis.

saimo