AuthorTopic: Official Off-Topic Thread  (Read 1004130 times)

Offline Mathias

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread

Reply #480 on: February 25, 2009, 10:35:18 pm
Does anyone here play Quadradius? Hopefully you've never experienced a misfortunate encounter with the one known as OrBLIVION. See that you never do.

If you haven't tried it yet, I urge you to do so. If you do, what's your moniker?

Offline big brother

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread

Reply #481 on: February 26, 2009, 12:02:55 am
This is the anti-game. It is a collection of game-like elements, but somehow manages to botch them all. It doesn't just leave fun out of the recipe, it leaves it unsold on the store shelf. The game seems to hinge on powerups (with long-winded, obfuscated rules) that appear at random times in random places. To top it off, its appearance is insipid and unimaginative.

Basically, it's like the fat girl at the party who looks like she fell out of the ugly tree, hitting every branch on the way down. After landing on her face, someone shoots makeup onto her with a shotgun. Inner beauty be damned; she advertises her grating personality in a screeching falsetto, warding off those who might accidentally come closer than ten feet of her gaping maw. God have mercy on anyone who interrupts her from feasting on birthday cake and jungle juice.

Pass. Run, don't walk.

Offline Ai

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread

Reply #482 on: February 26, 2009, 12:49:14 am
Duke Nukem 2 and Fire & Ice are two 16-color DOS games that I can think of off the top of my head... I think they were 16-color VGA though, not EGA. (And Duke Nukem 2 is a textbook example of how to make a 16-color palette that's almost as useless as EGA  :crazy:)
(IIRC, Fire & Ice used 32 colors, as it was an Amiga port)
The sad thing about DN2 was that VGA actually doesn't have a 320x200x16 mode (only the EGA compatibility does), so basically, they totally ignored the added potential of 256 colors.
EGA isn't as bad as that, though. Remember that at that point, the idea of games on PCs was still not taken very seriously, so realism in games really wasn't even worth considering. The ultra-saturated palette of EGA actually lends itself quite well to comic/cartoon-style art, and you can see a lot of that kind of art in the best games of the time. Amstrad CPC mode 0 games, with the somewhat larger 16-of-27 color palette, can demonstrate the effectiveness of this kind of palette.

Quote from: surt
Can anybody point me in the direction of some EGA games which use a custom 16 colour palette rather than the standard EGA palette?

The only game I can ever recall seeing with one is the first Warlords game, and even then I'm not certain that it isn't just a 16 colour VGA palette.
Is that game high resolution (640x350, 640x400)? Custom EGA palette for 320x200x16 == not supported in hardware at all. 640x350 == high res EGA, 16 colors from a 64-color (4*4*4) colorcube. 640x400 == high res VGA.

I think that 16-of-64 colors was only available on EGA cards with 256k memory, which were a minority. (ditto for 640x350).
However, Wikipedia contradicts me on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_Adapter
It's possible it was only a limitation of QBasic that prevented me from customizing the palette in 320x200 mode,
anyway I've never seen anything that customized the palette in 320x200 mode.

Quote
Also any ideas why custom EGA palettes are so rare? Not well supported in hardware? Harder to code for? Fewer available features? Or is it just that VGA came along before anyone learned to fully exploit EGA?
640x350 is harder to code for. Most highres EGA games are not action games, cause of the lack of special tricks we can do to get better scrolling/faster screen updates.
With standard 320x200x16, similar tricks to VGA ModeX were available for smooth scrolling, fast blitting, etc.


Quote
If I can summon up sufficient motivation I want to try exploring the quality difference a custom EGA palette can provide over standard, so any examples you can point me toward could come in useful.
http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=3225.msg40939#msg40939
is really the only EGA64 resource I know of. We have no EGA64 pics posted here, nor any in PixelJoint, AFAIK, and Google doesn't help much.

I did find out something interesting though -- PGC/PGA adaptors were Amiga-like, in that they allowed 256 onscreen colors from a 4096-color master palette. Kind of like a mix of OCS and AGA.
http://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/pgc.html
If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.

Offline surt

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread

Reply #483 on: February 26, 2009, 01:28:35 am
Is that game high resolution (640x350, 640x400)? Custom EGA palette for 320x200x16 == not supported in hardware at all. 640x350 == high res EGA, 16 colors from a 64-color (4*4*4) colorcube. 640x400 == high res VGA.
Warlords is 640x200.

640x350 is harder to code for. Most highres EGA games are not action games, cause of the lack of special tricks we can do to get better scrolling/faster screen updates.
With standard 320x200x16, similar tricks to VGA ModeX were available for smooth scrolling, fast blitting, etc.
Thought as much.

This page says that the custom palette were only available at 640x350 so I guess that would make Warlords VGA after all.

Thanks for the info.

And talking of Duke Nukem, this is just shameful.

Offline Froli

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread

Reply #484 on: February 26, 2009, 09:08:39 am

Offline Dusty

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread

Reply #485 on: February 26, 2009, 07:33:13 pm
So I'm working on a project for the DS, and I'm wondering... is there any restrictions I should bother with? I don't imagine color is much of an issue, and I'm pretty sure tiles are either 8x8 or 16x16.

What about tile capacity? I'm just throwing together a mock-up and I'm not really to concerned with making things tile, so I might have a lot of huge chunks of tiles to use rather than any 'smart' tiling. Is that going to be a problem?

Anything else I should know? We plan to have a large amount of sprites on the screen at once, can it handle that?
« Last Edit: February 26, 2009, 07:42:13 pm by Dusty »

Offline crab2selout.png

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread

Reply #486 on: February 26, 2009, 08:00:33 pm
And talking of Duke Nukem, this is just shameful.

OMG! I had the shareware version of Duke Nuk'em 2 and absolutely loved it. VGs often parrot other games styles, but this is quite blatant copying. I wonder if any of the turrican people worked on DN2. At the very leaast, they did a pretty good job of inserting the stolen graphics into their game. They don't looks out of place like most ripped graphcis do.

Offline Helm

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread

Reply #487 on: February 26, 2009, 08:08:23 pm
Indeed, shameful! Using some graphics as placeholders in some freeware game is one thing, but Apogee made money out of DN2 and that's just not right to swipe that hard.

Offline ptoing

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread

Reply #488 on: February 26, 2009, 08:24:09 pm
So I'm working on a project for the DS, and I'm wondering... is there any restrictions I should bother with? I don't imagine color is much of an issue, and I'm pretty sure tiles are either 8x8 or 16x16.

What about tile capacity? I'm just throwing together a mock-up and I'm not really to concerned with making things tile, so I might have a lot of huge chunks of tiles to use rather than any 'smart' tiling. Is that going to be a problem?

Anything else I should know? We plan to have a large amount of sprites on the screen at once, can it handle that?

The DS has a 2D engine which actually is less powerful than the GBA one relatively speaking (they are the same but GBA has smaller screen so you can buffer the scrolling easier in memory). But then the DS has a 3D engine. Now lets look at some stats.

In the 2D engine i think you get 256 sprites at any one time and you can only rotate and scale 32 at the same time I think (also big sprites which you want to rotate need to be flagged doublesize and I think that makes them cost 2 sprites.

In the 3D engine you can have 2k polygons (quads count as one if they are planar) per frame at 60fps. So now you can just map all your background and sprites onto flat 3D polygons and you also get scaling and rotation FOR FREE! 2D engine has a max of 4 background tile layers. In 3D you can go as deep as you want I think and if you have transparent stuff I think the Zsorting goes something like 9 polygons in depth (not too sure about this stuff)

Fact is that you should use the 3D engine to do 2D stuff, that it is 3D will not be visible at all. The stuff can be mapped so that it is flat on and it will looks just like 2D. There still is a 16 colour per texture restriction (you can have 256 colour texture too tho) but this should not be an issue, you just make the background sheets of textures you can cobble together, I think just using 256 colour ones would be fine anyway. But this kinda stuff has to be checked when actually coding. How much ram is free and whatnot.

But yeh, tell your coder to go 3D. I think you can even combine the 3D and 2D stuff, so you could use a 2D layer for the hud or the far background.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline Dusty

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread

Reply #489 on: February 26, 2009, 10:26:23 pm
nice info
Thanks a ton for the useful info. So if we go 3D limitations is not really much of a concern? Tile-wise I don't think we'll have much problem, but we want to have as many sprites possible on the screen at once(like 50+ zombies on the screen at once, possibly more).