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Messages - STE 86
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1
Pixel Art Feature Chest / Re: Pharaohs Return (C64)
« on: June 10, 2012, 10:01:52 pm »
trust me on this.

hires does not draw the eye when used with dark luma values like red, brown, dk blue and dk grey. it provides "background detail" like lineart in the the background of a cartoon.

you also have to remember that you are by definition looking at these graphics in isolation on an 21st century display. probably an lcd. once you put dark "hires" graphics on a real c64 or an emu running any kind of PAL emulation, they blur dramatically, so much so you would have trouble seeing individual pixels through all the chroma noise being generated.

The double pixels in contrast are less prone to chroma noise, show up clearer and and bolder and therefore hold your eye.

it worked for us 30 years ago. it still will. :)

Steve

2
Pixel Art Feature Chest / Re: Pharaohs Return (C64)
« on: June 09, 2012, 08:52:35 pm »
PypeBros, if you are referring to your deconstruction of the Soulless screenshot, then no, it doesn't use black colour ram to do what it does.

but your deconstruction is also errored. In soulless, the Multicolours on the screen you de constructed would be brown and white. the character colour would be predominantly the yellow areas and the hires lowlight areas and the background as black.

if you look at the 3rd screenshot of soulless it becomes clearer because there are multiple character colours (yellow, green and cyan colour ram) in conjunction with the same white and brown MC registers.

white is an unusual choice from an MC because its part of the lower 8 set and MC are usually picked from the upper 8 by artists.

Helm: the advantage of using hires chars is that you get fine colourful background detail for free. It can give the impression of depth and because its at a different resolution and can be much finer detail, is much less prone to "merging" with the sprites as they move over it and obscuring them than MC pixels.

Steve

3
Pixel Art Feature Chest / Re: Pharaohs Return (C64)
« on: June 09, 2012, 10:01:28 am »
ok that's a much better grip on it. The only thing I notice that you won't be able to to is the orange highlight on the brown background.

in a square with black in it, only the colours Brown, Green and Lt. Green can be used.

in a square with no black in it, only the first 8 colours of the 16 colour palette can be used to replace the black

However to complicate things further :) in the squares that ARE just brown and black (character colour and background) the graphics can be in 1:1 pixel mode (hires chars), as the OP has done in his version.

This is however much more of a pain in the arse to draw outside of a real c64 because its a hardware thing.

Steve

4
Pixel Art Feature Chest / Re: Pharaohs Return (C64)
« on: June 09, 2012, 01:08:13 am »
warning: this is going to get pretty complicated.

No, what you have done isn't possible under the method which the chap has chosen to create the screen.

in order to have full control over his colour set he has used Black as the overall $d800 character colour ram.

This has the effect of "reversing" out the background colour so instead of black being in the background colour register, he can have any of the 16 colours and thereby bypass the 8 colour limit on character colours.

because of this, you cannot have black and colour which ISN'T green, lt green or brown in the same square. so your blue is out. it would have to be brown (or green or lt green)

the yellow colour top and bottom is being provided by a colour raster split and therefore the yellow colour must extend uniformly across the screen like it does in his initial screenshot. you cannot step it down the blocks only on one side like your screenshot.

The white and the cyan details are being provided for by changing the $d800 colour ram in those squares from black to the required colours. as can be seen from the full red squares dotted around.

not sure exactly which way round the the chap envisages the the colour registers being but at a guess they would be:

Background: Brown
MC1: green
MC2: lt green
character colour ram: predominantly black with spot details colours in white,cyan and red.

you might think this is unnecessary, because green is a character colour, but using this method he can, on another screen have access to the entire range of greys to do stone blocks instead of compromising on white or cyan for stone highlights.

It does however take some getting your head round and curtails your ability to add spot colours significantly.

Steve

5
Pixel Art Feature Chest / Re: Pharaohs Return (C64)
« on: June 04, 2012, 10:43:57 pm »
being a graphic designer on any of the 8bits always meant knowing your machine at a technical level. They all require this.

the "reversed" character colour is a standard method of obtaining all your colours from any of the 16. it's also known as the "uridium" method because its what Andy Braybrook used to get his metallic bas relief fades for the game Uridium.

however this will restrict quite heavily the use of colour in the game and simply using horizontal bands of colour will more than likely resullt in something that looks like an atari vcs game. oh and you will also lose your background "lowlight" red tiles if you go this way.

These are shots from soulless which pretty well illustrate the effect you seem to want




6
Pixel Art Feature Chest / Re: Pharaohs Return (C64)
« on: June 03, 2012, 08:25:08 pm »
I think what the chap was trying to tell you about c64 multicolor char mode was that if you do use character colours above 8, what you actually get is a character coloured in colours 0-7 once again but in hires 320x200 pixel mode. so all your red background stonework detail would in fact be in hires 1:1 pixels rather than 2:1.

for a current example of pretty much the look you want to achieve you should check out the newly released c64 game "Soulless" from psytronik

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=k2H7GrZNRcA

Steve

7
Pixel Art / Re: Company logo 2011
« on: November 28, 2010, 07:14:34 pm »
ok.

yes it does look like an "a" to me.

the the style suggests its a company associated with "something digital" or "industrial" afterall 45 and 90 degree corners wouldn't suggest anything "natural".

logos these days don't really have to tell you anything about the company, its just a visual brand "sticker" so people speaking different languages can still recognise your brand at a glance. afterall Apple's logo these days doesnt say "computer" to you does it?.

it'll do what it says on the tin. but it will look similar to many other logos used by many other companies. however unless you spend shedloads of money on design and marketing, that will always be the case :)

my only real question is why you are pixelling this logo? hopefully its just a mockup, because if you are doing this for real then you shouldnt be pixelling it at all. logos done for real really must be done with vector drawing software like Illustrator, Freehand or Corel Draw.

pixelling does not allow you to scale the logo controllably, the logo has to be able to be accurately reproduced on a letterhead or blown up and stuck on the side of a building. and only vector based apps can do that.

regards,

Steve

8
Pixel Art / Re: C64 BlueJay
« on: October 24, 2010, 11:18:27 am »
if it was mine i think i would take the background base colour back to dark blue then add highlights with mid blue and dark blue dither. ut then will have the final option of going darker with dark blue/black dither. try to use the whites only on the bird and i think this will work better.

either way seeing as how your birds edges ar primarily in the highlight range, going darker in the background will immediately have the effect of making the bird "pop" on the screen.

also dont go mad with the background, you only need to "suggest" shapes. what they are doesnt really matter. could be vegetation clouds or mountains, just make them out of focus and the viewers brain will fit that bit in for you.

Steve

9
Pixel Art / Re: Sky for C64 game
« on: September 29, 2010, 11:50:59 pm »
well, what you have to do is referred to as "hi res sprite overlay" which basically means you overlay 2 or more hires sprites to create a composite multicolour one.

if you do straight hires then u need 1 sprite per colour OR you can use 1 multicolour sprite with 3 colours and then overlay 1 hires sprite black outline to "clean up" its blocky edges.

either way its do-able given the assumption you have only you and 1 or 2 nasties on the same level.

HOWEVER, this method requires raster interrupts for graphic changes and i cant see that happening in basic. plus contending with the sprite MSB point after 256 pixels across is definitely not for the novice coder.

Steve

10
Pixel Art / Re: Sky for C64 game
« on: September 27, 2010, 10:42:06 am »
if you want inspiration for clouds on the c64 got to CSDB and have a look at the entries for Jim Sachs and Wayne Schmidt.

if you want cutesy game clouds then have a look at games like Nobby the Aardvark and Mayhem in Monsterland on Lemon64.

Steve

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