![]() Good example: Rocket Knight Adventures: Gras, dirt&trees,sky and mountains are almost fully unlinked, color changes are easy to do. Sometimes it might be unavoidable, but I think it's good to have dedicated palettes or at last part of palettes dedicated to a certain target area (say 8 colors for for the stuff close to the player, 7 colors for the stuff far away. I think this only uses 16 colors for characters, the others are for backgrounds, battle effects and airplanes, tanks, trains etc. Some games worked around this enormous color consumption per character by using dithering to reduce character colors, King of the Monsters is a good example. Maybe they could have worked around this by having special 4 player mode palettes, but they never bothered. I'm sure this is the reason why Saturday Night Slam Masters lacks a 4 player mode: Each character would require his own palette, leaving no colors for the background. Street Fighter 2, Fatal Fury Special, Saturday Night Slam Masters. These seem hard to do as most good looking fighting games have ~15 colors and 1 invisible color per character, e.g. There must also be reserves for projectiles somewhere. I remember a certain picture in a Street Fighter thread that showed the palette usage: 16 colors for player 1, 16 colors for player 2, 16 colors for the backgrounds, 16 colors shared for the floor the characters stand on and status bars. In a fighting game, these colors will have to be taken from another palette as the characters will be different each time. This can easily be seen in Vectorman for example. Status bars can be done with main character colors if he or she is on the screen all the time. Same goes for Story of Thor, the main character's colors are used for all villagers and many standard enemies e.g. So that is one palette for every possible main character combination and a bunch of standard enemies, giving you three 16 color palettes for more enemies, backgrounds and special effects. It also appears some standard enemies take colors from this palette (Galsia, Donovan, Y.Signal, Whip Lady.). ![]() I've copy&pasted Axel, Blaze, Max and Skate into one picture and looked for unique colors. You mentioned a pool of colors, and I think games like Streets of Rage 2 or Story of Thor/Beyond Oasis are a great example of the effective use of such colors pools. Still, for what they are worth, here are my semi-random thoughts on the topic: I'm neither a programmer nor a graphics artists, just to say so in advance. I kinda suspect that this is what generally gives Genesis games more of a high contrast look compared to SNES titles, where it seems that sprites and such generally use their own completely dedicated palettes and can afford to use more "soft" highlight and outlines that are closer to their specific color themes. Things like outlines and highlights on objects and sprites can all pull from the same pool of colors for that purpose. This would be stuff like a grayscale shade which all manner of things can pull from. So what are some good techniques to use? Using my absolutely nonexistent experience with retro 2D design, I've come to the conclusion that it's generally smart to reserve a chunk of general purpose colors that remain static through most of the game. ![]() Games with good color use, like IMO Sonic 2 generally look vivid and complete, and never really feel like they're starved of additional colors. This is something that really sets good artists apart from the rest in terms of efficiency. Since the Genesis has a pretty limited display of simultaneous colors, you have to be a lot more careful and plan things well to get the most out of it, compared to the SNES where people could generally afford to be more "wasteful" with things. ![]() Been pondering this a lot what with Pyron's hacks and the color-optimized screenshots in the MMX thread. ![]()
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