Friday, August 24, 2012

Roses are Red, Violets are Blue ...

And my books should be allowed to have whatever color I think fit. Or at least let me put it in a different way: that would be a waste of tiles if I could only have *red* books in the school zone, right ? (and only green binders). It's much more interesting if I can select an alternate palette when I want a blue-tinted book or a darker wood block.

The DS hardware allows all this (I mean, even the NES had it :P), extending the '256 colors' mode of the GBA to some fancy '16x256' colors. Granted, I *could* very likely work in 16x16 colors mode for the school zone, but I'm not yet a sufficiently good pixel artist to handle that.

I've took a first step yesterday by allowing some 4 palette slot selection in SEDS' palette editor. Before I give you a rainbow bookself, I still have to:

  • [done] store all this in the SPR file (SpriteSet classes)
  • [done] make sure SEDS has a palette large enough advertised to SpriteSet.
  • [done] adjust the game engine so that it works in extended palette mode
  • [done] provide palette set toggling in LEDS (only for the BG layer: the FG uses it to encode tile properties). That would be better to have it on the bottom screen, and not part of the "tileset" screen as depicted on the mock-up
  • [done] provide palette setting in AnimEDS as well (so that dumblador and Bilou (and pendats) can share feet tiles. Being able to define it when the sprite' skeletton is created should be a good first step
Oh, and don't worry: there will be an polish on the transanims and a schooldemo.nds by the end of august. I just need to recover a DS lite for that, so I'm messing up with other parts of the summer-todo-list.

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