Amiga GFX noob questions

[malko]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

[...] Meet our first enemy: Malko
(before apocalypse he was a talented lawyer, but with terrible marriage experience. The nukes leaves so bad looking scars on him, that some people thought that he is a zombie. The burning of his body outside, releases his inner rage, and he is now a machine of robbing and raping survivors. He start chasing our heroine)

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

[...] Well.. it might be my subconquestnes that I picked the name that I read here. We can change it easely.
If Malko is bothered, I will change it to... hmm... Doran? Quisky? El-something? Damien? :P

No need to change. It's kind of consecration !
Only hope he cannot be defeated too easily (I have a reputation to maintain ).
Next step : a star in the walk of fame in Hollywood

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

You must see that with Malko. I'll keep it Malko, until Malko disagree.
I have a back-story pretty much completed, and long story short "our heroine daughter is kidnapped", she goes to rescue her. I never thought of daughter name.
Interested? :P
Like... Damien-a... or something

Is she's blond/dark haired ? Anyway, we don't care. Most important she is beautiful as bad guys only kidnap beautiful girls. Bad guys are ???? .

Edit: Damn, I such dislike this new non-UNICODE display !! Replace the ???? with "ero oyaji"

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Great work so far. But to me those sprites look a bit odd on that background. I really think you'd be much better off finding someone to recreate those sprites instead of trying to convert them from a high resolution 3D model.

Thanks.
Yeah, well, I agree, it still don't look good.
The trouble is that 3ds max renders semi transparent pixels on the edges, that causes troubles when converting to 32 colors, and if I turn that off, then the edges are really rough (you can see big pixels).
Still need to practise this, and I guess, at the end, I'll render without antialias, then carefully in PPaint try to sort out jagged edges (like hand drawn antialias).

But this doesn't bother me right now, it can wait, because I am in the process of thinking on how to do basic fight with character and enemies, collisions, energy... and these sort of stuff.
I think that will be the hardest part, and there's not too many tutorials on RedPill. There are some great tutorials on youtube that lasts for hours, but they are all in Spanish, that I don't understand.
However, I am watching parts, slowly, and trying to figure out as much as I can.
--------

@Malko
Great man!
Actually, this character is weakest (but most often )
But maybe, I'll use your name for the first boss, and we will change name of this character to something else.

No, kidnapped girl is not hot, she is like 4 or 5 years old.
Our heroine is supposed to be hot (that you can't see with this sprite ), but I'll try to draw her in some intro screen, and mid level screen.
She is dark haired.

[malko]

Edit: Regarding the following post I have an idea : the villain Malko can entrust the little girl to his henchman: Damien (who, to Malko's great despair, is a real father with all prisoners)

Originally Posted by DamienD

[...] You can use my name; Damien is apparently the devil so...
...but maybe save me for a boss for something; hahahahaha

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Hah.... here you go:

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1992542

But man, even if they aren't free, do you know how character looks when you change a texture and render in so small res?
Even if I took Schwarzenegger 3D model, and rendered it in 32x32 px, nobody would recognize him.

Besides, this is for learning purpose, and I'd gladly give whole project to anyone that likes to look at it.



Not only that. It will be playable on Atari 2600, and Odisey consoles! :P

Joke aside. , I've already made my goal (and that is: making character walk), and this is all bonus I am doing for fun.
However it would be so cool if I can make whole 1st level as demo, with 3-4 enemies and boss at the end.

RedPill is (so far), only ECS, AGA based, but I am making whole graphics like it is OCS. If I ever finish this one, and if any programmer like it, and want to remake it in some of the coder languages, I'd gladly give him all assets.

As I see it, these game makers apps (like RedPill and Backbone) are amazing for testing purposes. I would use them, even if I am an asm programmer to test my assets, because you can quickly see how something looks and feels, before throwing bunch of codes.

Thank goodness, I couldn't sleep last night worrying about the IP of your graphics, it sounds like you have it all covered though. And not limiting your applications to require rare and expensive expansions to run. Sounds and looks great.

[Ricardo]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

1) Do you think (with today technology) is better that I keep both background and character sprite on one image (16 million colors), and then to convert it to 32 colors

Case by case. The best way to create something pretty on the Amiga (or any machine) is to design everything, game type, number of sprites, background movement and all graphics using the limitations or features of the machine in question.

It all depends on a complex balance of graphic design, storage and performance. If you use a 32 colour palette for both sprites and backgrounds and don't limit which colours are used where then you have 5 bit planes of background and 5 bit planes of sprites. Compared with two 16 colour palettes (4 bit planes of background and 4 bit planes of sprites) that means you need 25% more storage and physically displaying the sprites will take 25% more processing time. Storage limits mean less frames or smaller sprites, processing time could mean running at 50 hertz (smooth 1 frame update) or dropping to 25 hertz (2 frame update). I'm not sure how you are displaying the sprites but the Amiga is REALLY easy to have 3 changing palettes for the background and your background looks very bland compared with the sprites. As I mentioned previously that would give you a 48 colour background. Keeping the palette separate means the sprites can move about the background without changing colour if you are changing the palette dynamically (with a copper list that just writes a new 16 word palette into the colour registers each 3rd of screen display). To draw the background you would have to cut it into 3 images, and reduce each one to 16 colours.

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

I am not sure how much you are aware, but Final Fight conversion (by Richard Aplin) for the Amiga is considered by many (maybe 80-90%), a very bad port.

I've not seen Final Fight so I can't really comment. MK1 & 2 and Primal Rage used the game logic (slightly modified) directly from the arcade machine because it used a 68k family processor (68020 I recall). Golden Axe was coded from scratch by just playing the coin-op, even the graphics were hand drawn pixel by pixel by pausing a video of the game.

A lot of people commented on how my Atari ST & Amiga Gauntlet II was much better than the jerky horrible Gauntlet. There were 2 reasons for that, main reason was Gauntlet used 24 pixel square sprites as per the arcade machine. I knew that 24 pixels was a crazy choice for the hardware and screen format of both the ST and Amiga. So I didnt even consider 24 pixels and started with 16 pixel square character sprites and background tiles. That helped massively, but it meant all the graphics had to be custom drawn by hand to make them look good. The 2nd reason was that Gauntlet had also been partly written in C. My games were all 100% 68k assembler.

You also have to remember that there is a lot of reference material on the Amiga now. Back then, there were new machines appearing every few months with completely different hardware, different operating systems, different everything and the hardware reference information didn't usually arrive with the machines so it was a very uphill learning curve and as soon as you got used to one machine you had to learn another. It was very messy. Whilst I coded games over a 10 year period I went from VIC 20 to C16 to BBC Micro to Atari ST, bit of C64, Amiga and somewhere in the middle Psion Organisers! Even with the Amiga, at first the ST was the big market so ST games got ported to the Amiga and ran slower because of the slower CPU. Then the blitter was used to speed things up but it was still an ST port. Then finally a dedicated Amiga version was written using the extra colours etc which meant the ST couldn't compete, MK1/2 and Primal Rage on the ST would have looked more like 8-bit titles - the ST just couldn't cope with those games.

[d4rk3lf]

Thanks man.
Yes, I understand that in early 90's it was almost impossible to gather references, assets, tutorials, and pretty much everything. Without internet, learning and working curve were much much more limited.
I've followed your advice, and this time I used 16 color palette for the sprites, and 16 colors for the BG.
(it's actually easier, because I don't need to convert BG every time I change something on the sprite ).
As for the graphics overall look... yeah.. it still looks like crap. But this is basically my first pixel art attempt, and my plan is to make iterations, iterations, iterations...
But first - the gameplay
-------------------------

@Everyone.... update:
[ Show youtube player ]

- enemy now stops and hits character
- character can now hit
- character can now jump, and kick, and jump kick
- this time I rendered without anti-aliasing, so we don't have that black border, but the character edges looks very harsh.
----------------------

The goal:
Right now, I'll leave graphics as it is, and my primary objective is to make gameplay (fight between character and first enemy) as best as I can.
No point of having great graphics, if I can't do that, or if gameplay sucks.

That being said I struggled very much on how to create jump movement. But thanks to Zener (creator of RedPill), and his enormous help, I was able to do it.
You can view his tutorial here:
http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=...&postcount=392

Now i's time to do collisions between player and enemy, and I am thinking now, where to start actually. Anyone has some suggestions, are most welcome and appreciated.
This will be the hardest part, I imagine (making proper gameplay).

Cheers to all

[d4rk3lf]

And just for my friend Malko, I draw one of that last intro screens!
(he wanted to know how our heroine looks).
and in 32 colors!


(I basically drew all, except a girl basic contures (I am not very good in anathomy), so I "borrowed" few lines from some fashion photo)
(converted in PS to 32 colors)

[malko]

With the help of g@@gle translate :

???????? (prilicno)

[Ricardo]

Another point, back in the day the display was a CRT which effectively provided its own anti-aliasing (bluring) to smooth edges. Modern hi-res LCD's don't do low resolution any favours in that respect which makes it harder for an artist to replicate the quality from back then.

If you can, adjust the movement step sizes to match you animation so they don't look like they are moon dancing, it connects them to the background rather than having them float above it so to speak.

But great first effort, well done.

p.s. Final Fight does look a bit bad, its probably because they maybe used the graphics from the arcade machine when really they needed to re-draw them as its all too bland / too many same colour shades. Not sure about gameplay but update speed looks OK (good programming).

[Hewitson]

In my opinion the graphics on Final Fight are great. It's the actual gameplay which let it down.

[Samurai_Crow]

I agree about the gameplay of the Final Fight. Ruined the whole thing for me.

[d4rk3lf]

@Malko
Thanks!
I'll try to refine that image further, probably re-drawing some parts in DPaint....

Originally Posted by Ricardo

Another point, back in the day the display was a CRT which effectively provided its own anti-aliasing (bluring) to smooth edges. Modern hi-res LCD's don't do low resolution any favours in that respect which makes it harder for an artist to replicate the quality from back then.

Yeah, but then again, some jems like Ruff'n'Tumble looks amazing, even on todays sharp monitors (your's MK2 and Golden Axe too).
But I got what you're saying, and I'll try to make some sort of hand/drawn antialias at the end of the project.

Originally Posted by Ricardo

If you can, adjust the movement step sizes to match you animation so they don't look like they are moon dancing, it connects them to the background rather than having them float above it so to speak.

Yeah, it can be done very easily in RedPill app I am using.
I am not yet doing it thou, because I constantly trying different numbers of sprite walk. For example, I recently made change in the main character walk cycle from 10 frames to 5 frames. I'll probably try some different numbers and poses, and then I'll try to tune it carefully, so speed of the character matches the ground.

Originally Posted by Ricardo

But great first effort, well done.
.

Thanks, but we both know it needs a loots adjustments.
I'll keep trying.

Originally Posted by Ricardo

p.s. Final Fight does look a bit bad, its probably because they maybe used the graphics from the arcade machine when really they needed to re-draw them as its all too bland / too many same colour shades. Not sure about gameplay but update speed looks OK (good programming).

As Hewitson and Samurai_Crow pointed, we could live with that graphics as long as the gameplay was correct. But it was really awful. It feels bad in every way (punching, jumping, enemy AI...).
If you don't believe me, try Final Fight arcade (Mame), then try Amiga port.

We could also live with one bad port of the beat 'em up game, but the weird thing is, no one attempted to make some great beat' em up for Amiga at all.
Except Golden Axe (imho, that wasn't really great in original arcade), there is NOT ONE even average beat em up for Amiga.
And we are all positive, that capatibilites of even A500 1MB is more then enough.
We have great platformers, great 1VS1 fighting games, great adventures, great sims, but somehow even Team 17, or Psyhogonics or similar companies, never attempted to make some cool beat em up.

Enough of my crying.

Can you please (if you remember) describe how you did fighting collisions between player and enemies in Golden Axe? Did you used more then two sprite/object (so, besides enemy and player), do you, for example had another object spawn, at position, where the sword is, that collides with enemy, and triggers enemy pain?
If you can explain it in non-programmers words, it would be awesome.
If it's too complicated, then - nevermind... I'll try to figure out something myself

Thanks for following this thread.

[Ricardo]

Collisions are normally done with "hit rectangles". For each frame you have a rectangle that defines where the weapon is, offset from the frames origin. If that rectangle overlaps another sprite then there is a hit.

Although I think Golden Axe was even simpler. Just the two sprites had to be close in the Y direction (up the screen) and for each frame they had to be "in range" in x using a minimum and maximum.

For Hotrod I Xor'd the sprites masks with the background to get pixel accurate collisions. But everything else worked on rectangles of some sort because pixel comparisons were so CPU intensive.

[Ricardo]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

I agree about the gameplay of the Final Fight. Ruined the whole thing for me.

Interesting as the Capcom arcade machine used a 68000 so the original game logic code would have worked on the Amiga. Suggests it was either too large, or more likely Capcom didnt supply the source code from the arcade machine.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by Ricardo

Collisions are normally done with "hit rectangles"....

Thanks.
Great to know.

Originally Posted by Ricardo

Interesting as the Capcom arcade machine used a 68000 so the original game logic code would have worked on the Amiga. Suggests it was either too large, or more likely Capcom didnt supply the source code from the arcade machine.

I think Capcom didn't provided him with anything, as he stated i this interview:
http://retroasylum.com/an-interview-with-richard-aplin/

It's a funny read, but he admitted he didn't like Final Fight game at the first place, and that explains why he couldn't (or cared (or didn't had enough time)) to make proper gameplay.

No one doubt he is a great programmer, but he seems a pretty bitter because of reactions of FF

Anyway the haters / “Amiga experts” are more than welcome to do a better conversion if they think I did such a bad job ; I genuinely look forward to seeing it.

[Ricardo]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

think Capcom didn't provided him with anything, as he stated i this interview:
http://retroasylum.com/an-interview-with-richard-aplin/

Good interview, he's right. MK1 was the first game that we had source support from the arcade machine people and that was 1993. Mind you the game logic was only of any use within a small window in time when the CPU in the home system was the same as the one in the arcade machine.