Beats of Fire

[leathered]

Actually the most pressing thing is to make transitions work within the stages - not the animating of them so much as getting other sections of stages on there and getting a good switch between them. I've come this far in making a game before but that's new to me. Everything I've done is just one stage demos, mostly in AMOS.

Re. Final Fight, there is a lot of work left to be done, but the greatest part of that is graphics + sonics. I'm going to post later as to how some of that is being done.

[vulture]

Great work so far!

[turrican3]

leilo continue on this way, just amazing !!!!!
how much time before a final version ?

[turrican3]

a little bit OT but do you think that xenon 2 256 coulours and a better framerate could be done ?????
it could be amazing !!!! no ???

[Djay]

Originally Posted by turrican3

a little bit OT but do you think that xenon 2 256 coulours and a better framerate could be done ?????
it could be amazing !!!! no ???

How about some old PC games that were never made for Amiga (but certainly could handle it), Eye of the Beholder 3 springs to mind?

[leathered]

@ turrican3, djay
I'm not sure about the spec you'd need for Xenon2, tbh I'm more used to stripping things down than anything - make it as fast as you can. EOB3 definitely

[dlfrsilver]

your latest final fight runs very well !!! wahhh very pleasant to look and watch !

[turrican3]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

your latest final fight runs very well !!! wahhh very pleasant to look and watch !

YES REALLY GREAT

[leathered]

First I use Final Fight on MAME, and a screen grabber, I use Greenshot.

1. Play/record the game and take screenhots. Some of the background will be obscured by other objects, scrolling in small increments and taking shots as necessary (and after a bit of guesswork and close editing) a complete picture is gradually made up. This one is a current wip


Using paint shop pro 7, the screen dimensions are shrunk by 77w by 89y percent and recoloured to the games palette. The recolouring is done by reducing to 256 colours, and then reducing by as much as possible down to 32 or less colours. The first stage uses 24 for the background. I fine tune it by making similar colours match to edit out some colours as I go and keep the shades I want in there. Eventually ending up with something like this:


If I can get help doing just some of that, it would save me at least a week in total per stage, and I can concentrate on making it go.

2. If the backgrounds are small (less than 2 screens width like above) they can probably be left at this stage. Otherwise they are mapped.
The background is made into tiles of 16 * 16...


...and processed by order into a small image for ripping into the game.



This is the most time consuming process.


@turrican3 and all: The answer to how long this will take to complete depends on the time it takes to do this in a big way.
Bobs are slightly more simple. Usually there is a good resource out there with most of the original frames ripped already. The resizing is the same, and the re-colouring process is the same. There is no need for mapping.

I'll put all the graphics I've got into a file for downloading a bit later

[fishyfish]

Good stuff so far

Im not promising anything, but mind giving an overview in regards to how many colors you're using, and how you're using them please? Also, are the graphics downscaled in size?

Basically Im just after whatever info a person would need to know if they were to have a try at helpng with some graphics?

I've got a fair bit of experience with downscaling color depth. The following is an (incomplete) attempt at a mock up of SF2 I did a while back. Uses 30 colors, but 16 are "locked in" for the character "sprtes", so only 16 unique colors per backdrop (still have 1 undefined in this mockup).

http://oi43.tinypic.com/2quoqae.jpg

As I mentioned I wont promise anything, but currently Im interested in having a play to see what sort of results I can get, I just need to know what restrictions are in place.

[dlfrsilver]

interesting !!! your color reduced image looks very good to me !!!!

[fishyfish]

Oh, also, if you havent yet maybe check out Winkawaks. It's an emulator of cps1/2, and neogeo games with the ability to turn off different graphics layers and/or sprites. Makes ripping graphics a lot easier.

http://www.kawaks.net/winkawaks_down.html

[leathered]

@ dlfrsilver: There's a lot of wastage in the original graphics! It almost looks as if different people where working on different elements with different palette's.

@ fishyfish: Thanks for the links, I'm hopefull this CPS1 emulator will help!

For the colour reduction:
There is only one palette now of 32 colours. Obviously it's a good idea to have separate palette's for your characters/backgrounds but they are one and the same here. I wanted to have all/most colours available for both.

The first stage BKG uses 24 colours, the characters are made using similar tones for the flesh and some key colours for their outfits. This palette is the starting point.

The palette changes from stage to stage, but the change so far has not been drastic. It does not matter too much if a character's clothing has to change from pastel blue to pastel green in order to make a larger section of the background appear nicer. This is not the best way of creating clear guidelines as to the colour reduction, there is plenty of room for artistic freedom here! I think that after re-colouring several stages the palette will become more finalised, and I think it will be worth it in the end.

The goal is to reduce the colours to the 32 colour 'stock' palette while retaining as much depth and detail as possible.
I start by trying a reduction to 64 colours. Usually it doesn't work, so I edit out some of the obvious colours by hand, by matching close colour hues, checking the detail has not reduced (significantly - you can't always help it as you get nearer to 32) counting the colours used on screen, and reducing again to that amount.

As the amount colours becomes reduced, I start matching the colours of the image to those of the stock palette. Here is where compromises may have to be made, either to the palette or the image. At this stage I check the image against those of the characters by pasting them in (- it's safer if you don't put them over the background unless you're careful with saving).

[Retro1234]

Great work dude :-) I think I read you worked out some of the routines in Amos before moving to Blit, how many Bobs were you getting with that on screen;-)

Your screen is 16*16?
The phone box is just one large tile?

Sorry for all the questions :-)

[leathered]

http://lostinthefens.com/FF AGA mods.zip

These are the current mod files, there are 2. Both could be improved to have a nicer lead instrument, to say the least I'm sure, feel free to have a go
I think we can have some artistic license with the music, not all the original tunes are that great, some Amiga originals would be awesome.

I'm getting help with the rips, we're going to put up a quick demo, hopefully by next week. Don't expect miracles from the code, I've still got a lot of tidying to do. It will feature new graphics and simple AI at best.

If anyone (fishyfish?) wants to get involved, get in contact and we'll go from there - I can send what I've got to help, and support via email. You can give it a try, no strings attached.
I want to put together a pack but I hope the info in this thread is enough to see the basic premise of the work.

But any help is useful. How about an AI researcher? That would be great.

[Reido]

Great work on FinalFight!

[leathered]

Originally Posted by Boo Boo

Great work dude :-) I think I read you worked out some of the routines in Amos before moving to Blit, how many Bobs were you getting with that on screen;-)

Your screen is 16*16?
The phone box is just one large tile?

Sorry for all the questions :-)

Lol, I can send you the AMOS version! It's all based on an A500 beat -em up demo I made called Fighters Tendency, over a decade ago.

The trouble I had with AMOS was the speed, with no way to regulate it. It went from 50 fps with no-one around to suddenly 25 when you shared the screen with anything. The background was from the SNES version, and I had a parallax layer of Peterborough (my home town - I don't know what to say about that) in the background.

If I'd known about AMCAF, I might have carried on with it. The AMOS editor environment is nice and stable. I think there could be quite a lot happening, at least 4 bobs, maybe it slowed down even more then - but I remember I was blitting absolutely everything, including the parallax. Blitz was a little slower at blitting 2 backgrounds like that as I recall.
I'll gradually get around to putting up the source for the AMOS stuff, it's mostly garbage, but might be of benefit to someone.

The tiles are 16 *16, they might end up being up to 64*64. All the objects are rendered in multiples of 16, and block pasted as single images - one large tile. For most of them this means no transparencies as blocking obliterates everything but the sprite layer beneath, but the telephone box has part of the background included in the image - so revealing the rest of the background beneath it is possible. It just means I need more frames of the telephone box in other stages, but it doesn't appear that often.
These are the objects - I tried putting in a UK telephone box, but the colours are bad and it looks a little weird

[Retro1234]

Thanks for the info yes would be great to look at your Amos stuff :-) So I guess your not blitting the parallax and using AGA 16*16 dualplayfield.

[leathered]

Ah, by 16*16 you meant the playfields, sorry mate (that should have been painfully obvious). It's actually a single playfield of 32 colours, with a 16 colour sprite background. I was using 16*16 but was still using sprites for the parallax background.

Everything in the players area is in a single 32 colour pallete, the sprites in the background are separate. I'm grateful for such small mercies

[Retro1234]

Thanks again for the info - probably over my head as im still on Amos but ive read about using sprites for the parallax can I ask what size the background sprite is and how does the sprite appear beneath the tiles rather than on top

I belive there are some screens/levels/rooms without any parallax could more colours be used on these screens?