[chb]

Originally Posted by Master484

But as mentioned before, 16 color sprites may not be possible to do in Blitz, or with the normal Blitz commands at least. So I can only use 4 color sprites.

That's very unfortunate, as in 4-color mode the sprite colors are very limited. Every sprite pair gets its own palette from the upper sixteen colors, sprite 0/1 have color 17,18,19, sprite 2/3 color 21,22,23, 4/5 have 25,26,27, 6/7 have 29,30,31. So you'd have probably quite a bit of redundant colors.

Maybe fiddling around with CustomString could help, but I guess it would be very cumbersome. I do not have any experience with Blitz, does it allow to include also custom assembler/object code?

Originally Posted by Master484

So I think I'll use the following system: One of the characters will always be a 100% BOB created with Blits. And the other character will always be a BOB + Sprite combination, and it will get 6 four color sprites which are used to reduce the size of the BOB as much as possible.

By putting 2 four color sprites on top of each other to the same XY, I can use 6 sprites to create three 16*Unlimited Y "sprite zones" into the character, and 6 colors from the BOB palette will be available for these zones (because 4 color sprites are 3 colors + transparent, and even numbered sprites use one set of 3 colors and odd numbered another 3 colors).

So all 4 skin tones + white and black can be used for these sprite zones. I looked through the characters, and these 6 colors work fine for most of them; the entire characters can't be drawn with these colors, but it's enough to make them smaller, and BOB blits handle the rest.

With ECS, you cannot have only two 3-color palettes for odd and even sprites without setting the 16-color mode (and use non-overlapping sprite pairs). I'm also a bit surprised that Blitz does not allow you to have full eight sprites - there's probably no need to make the screen full 320 pix in width?

Originally Posted by Master484

And before each fight, there would be a logic system that chooses which one of the two characters gets to be a sprite + BOB combination, and the best case is always chosen.

This system means that every character needs to have 2 versions: a "100% BOB version" and a "sprite + BOB combination" version. This is easy to make, although time consuming...but I have time.

With some luck this should be enough to make most fighter combinations run at 50 FPS even on ECS.

It's surely a lot of work to get it implemented well, preferably without storing two complete sets on disk but setting up sprites/bobs at level loading time, but could give optimal results indeed.

Originally Posted by Master484

Unfortunately this is not possible in Blitz Basic. Although display modes can be changed mid-screen, Blitz requires that there are at least 2 "empty" Y lines before a new display mode starts. These 2 lines can't display any graphics and will appear as two lines of Color 0. So display mode changing mid-frame in Blitz can be mainly used only for status panels and such.

Ah, ok, that's a pity. You could still try to insert custom copperlist commands with customString, but it's maybe not worth the hassle.

Originally Posted by Master484

And 3D scrolling of the floor would be cool, but I would only consider adding it if I first get two of biggest characters to run firmly at 50 FPS with plenty of steam left.

Yep, sensible approach - it's just icing on the cake.

All the best for your project, I'm curious to see its progress.