Incoherent Ramblings of Jay Pavlina - 8/29/2011

Be patient people! Jay's already at 100%, and if we go over 100%, is like overclocking a CPU too much, and you know what happens when we overclock too much...
Do it at your own pace, Jay. Too much of anything, good or bad, is harmful.

you say that we love you in your videos, Jay, but that is actually truth... you just made me your fan after seeing your let's play Mario hack hahah, good luck man, and thank you for being this funny guy no matter what...

I was watching this at, like, 1:30 AM.
So you have no idea how much this made my day.

Well, I didn't watch the whole video but I can say the following thing: Take it easy with the game and get well soon.

Sweet vid. I think SNES characters could work if you were to make a 16-bit skin, and those Snes characters can only be used on that skin. IMO, mixing SNES and NES would look weird.

It just won't work. SNES sprites has more animations and would require more work.

Not really; you're using them in place of the NES ones. You don't have to use every sprite, just that minimum of what is on the original SMBC sheet. It would be just as easy to replace Ryu with Earthworm Jim was it would to replace him with Bub (both would have size issues and just be stupid, but hopefully I got my point across >_>)

Actually it would be allot more work. Just the way the sprite tiles are handled and the 8-16 color palette per tile instead of 4. You would have to swap out more or less the entire rendering engine to make sure you didn't break something. And that is before even trying to put the SNES characters onto a screen rendered in NES proportions. Its hard to find ones that weren't in RPG's that wouldn't look relatively giant.

From what I understand, what the game does is reads some kind of image file to determine what sprites to use. As long as the sprites you put in fit within the boundaries, it will work. So you WOULD have to resize them to fit most likely, but the palette and proportion problems are non-existent.

Depends on how much they are relying on the NES emulation that is at least handling the music if not more. When it comes to the sprites the real question becomes what size tiles are implemented? Every sprite is animated in tiles that are on that graphics sheet.

I am about 90% positive it's straight up flash except the music. The music thing was added in one of the earlier updates to make it sound more like the NES, but since everything was reverse engineered in Flash I am fairly certain that it isn't emulating anything else.

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean here about the tiles :s
Would you mind terribly clarifying?

Have you used MS Paint? If you have you know that pixels are squares. Tiles are preset areas of X squares by Y Squares that describes the surface area that the animation engine can grab as a single frame for either an environment or a sprite or whatever you see depending on the game.

Oh, I see.
Yeah, each skin has a bunch of tiles for each sprite. When I said

It was a really bad way of saying that if it fit on the tile (or as I understood it at the time, within the outline on the skin sheet) It'll work.

Exactly. And depending on what the graphics engine has enabled they could work, then again they might not. But to get SNES and NES on the same screen you might need to get something involved to scale it. Most SNES tiles are larger than most NES tiles. Even for character sprites that fit in the smallest tile of the respective system.

Right, right. I see where you're coming from now.
Technically, you are correct; many of them would be too large. But when the skins are out, templates will be released that will show the boundaries for each tile. So it would be a simple matter to just resize them to fit. Of course, this raises the problem of blurring and other graphical problems, but that is the skin maker's problem :V

I did a little comparison a day or two ago between NES Castlevania Sprites and SNES. If you magnify the NES sprite 3 times and the SNES 2 times they end up close enough to the same height to not be a big deal. Its still a problem though because the resized sprites will also need to be in a 3 X larger than currently skinned NES environment to fit into.

I think shrunking the SNES sprites would be enough. I just tested. I made Simon from Super Castlevania IV to be 70% of its original size and it fits!

(zoom 4x) (don't pay attention of those 2 pixels on 8-bit Simon's leg which make him looks like he's been hurt (there should be something similar with 16-bit Simon but it's got more colors so you cannot know! ))

And I'm pretty confident the skin sheets won't allow your "original x3 and SNES 2x" technique, Spo...kavriel (I should find a nickname). It'll be skin sheets after all.

I've been called Spok for a long time as a nickname. And I know its unlikely. Really the main way to make that work would be in wasting 75% - 89% of the space oversize tile sheets would would take up. 75% on 2x, 89 on 3x

No matter how nice the enlargements look together.