Ob Iter

Self motivation is always a bit of a constant inner struggle while i plod along with this project. The old phrase 'best game ever' is generally not something to aspire to, if only because the claim itself doesn't work. Still, i expect of myself a certain level of overall quality that i cannot compromise on. Certainly this game would have been finished by now if i wasn't constantly asking the question, 'how can i make this better'?

There is an abundance of content on this site. So much so that it is almost i think, even too much to expect to stand out. No, i think it would be a mistake for me to compare my work to others directly in an apples to oranges kind of way. Rather, i want to ask myself, 'Am i satisfied'?

Well, 8-bit color depth is something that always has irked me a little about my chosen platform. Finding ways of maximizing the colors is one part of the graphical presentation i must do my best with. I always admired the Saga series for its world immersion, and graphically, the point at which i am satisfied is when i feel that my game can be looked at also as an artistic experience.

So long as i hold on to Rm2k3, so far as i know, there are no 24-bit options. But what i do have is a virtually limitless array of content storage. The 256 color limit is per map and per layer.

So i did at first apply this to mixing pre-rendered backgrounds and chipsets. A bryce floor texture is less repetitive and works on its own 256 palette. It also takes some strain off the map chipset since i can effectively erase the floor tiles. Adding a transparent glow through pictures on lights or for any shading purposes is also its own layer. Each picture is its own. To the best of my knowledge, there is no way for the picture to be beneath the chip set graphics and character graphics, and this presents a very real limitation.

Ultimately, i have come to that point once again, where a very time consuming task simply has to be done because i don't want to settle for less. That is simply, to turn the vast majority of my entire chip set graphics into object files. Object files are each on their own 256 color palette, and so in theory, each and every tile in the game could be its own 256 colors. Of course, this isn't entirely necessary, but it does mean that i could display thousands of colors on each and every 20 x 15 map (which the vast majority of my currently 1000+ maps are).

I figured that since objects are events, i would have to leave a few things on the chip set, like tables and chairs. If i want to place a beer bottle object on a table, i cannot have two different events graphics on the same tile unless i move one event on top of the other during map transitions, which ... maybe is just taking it a little to far. But for most anything else, like bookshelves and walls or carpets when they don't have something on them, or lights and shrubs and plants and barrels and just about anything else, they can be object events.

Better yet, any of the objects can be used freely on any map, like having one giant chip set file instead of being restricted to a map specific tile set.

I suppose again, if one wanted to make a custom graphic of the table or the wall with every imaginable combination of objects pre-placed onto it (or use pictures instead of objects), then there would be almost no further need for the chip set whatsoever, except for animation tiles. I have decided not to go quite that far. This simply because for a marginal chip set, 256 colors still goes a long way, and i can change them with every 20 x 15 map.