|
Post by trumisery on Dec 27, 2021 22:53:24 GMT
Hello everyone. I see some familiar faces here and lots of new people...
I want to learn how to make graphics and sprites for the good ole pc engine. What do I need to know as far as size, number of colors per graphic/sprite (is there a limit?) and is there a good program that is used by any of you that have developed games, that makes the making of the graphics easier? For everything graphical I have ever made I have used adobe photoshop.
I have looked at a lot of documents on romhacking, but figure since I want to learn more on the pce, come to the source.
Any help you can provide to me would be appreciated.
|
|
|
Post by gredler on Dec 28, 2021 0:43:07 GMT
Hello everyone. I see some familiar faces here and lots of new people... I want to learn how to make graphics and sprites for the good ole pc engine. What do I need to know as far as size, number of colors per graphic/sprite (is there a limit?) and is there a good program that is used by any of you that have developed games, that makes the making of the graphics easier? For everything graphical I have ever made I have used adobe photoshop. I have looked at a lot of documents on romhacking, but figure since I want to learn more on the pce, come to the source. Any help you can provide to me would be appreciated. For pc engine using huc 3.21 you have to use .pcx file format, and if you use 3.99 you can use png. When saving the image you must use indexed color format. The first 16 colors will be available for a sprite and the first color will be transparent. Tiles are limited to one palette each, the first color is uniform across all palettes in addition to 15 colors per palette, and you must only use one palette per tile without using colors from multiple palettes in a single tile. A total of up to 16 different color palettes can be simultaneously loaded for tiles. Palettes are defined in groups of 16 colors, palette 0 is colors 0-15, palette 1 is colors 16-31, etc. Using photoshop is difficult because the palette order is reversed so you need to manually reorder the palette after saving the image. I used gimp to fix the palettes when I was using photoshop because palette management in photoshop is such a pain. While not exactly accurate it's a safe bet to use 36 increments for color channels. So 0, 36, 72, 108, 144, 180, 216, 255 is the value range for red green and blue. The console will pick the nearest neighbor color, so you can really use whatever, but the 36 increment will give you a closer estimate than in between. It can be surprising to make a green using 0 60 0 and it looks closer to 72 than 36, so for predictability I stick to the above range. A tip to clamping color values in photoshop is using the posterize adjustment. It is predictable in HuC it rounds down, so 35 would load as 0 but 37 would load as 36, etc. Image scale need to be non square power of 2 divisible by 8x8, typically 16x16 is the smallest size used in huc, but you can use meta sizes for 8x8 tiles and sprites. So a sprite can be 32x16, or 96x32, but not 24x10 (that would need to be 32x16) etc This is what I use to make tilesets and sprites: Promotion www.cosmigo.comPromotion has excellent palette management tools and is designed to create low resolution small color palette images. It can export png or pcx, and stm for tilemaps that load in huc 3.99 easily.
|
|
|
Post by ccovell on Dec 28, 2021 0:57:44 GMT
I'd like to add in that the PCE can have up to 241 colours for background tiles. Don't limit yourself mentally to only 16.
It's not the case that *only* the first 16 colours in a PNG/PCX are available, but each 8x8 tile can use only 16 colours at a time. You can choose any 16-colour cluster, but aligned at 16-colour boundaries out of the 256 of a normal PCX/PNG file.
If you do plan to use more than 16 colours for background data, you'll need to think of it as each 8x8 tile having a choice of only one 16-colour-aligned palette among 16 palette groups.
This is the same for the SNES, Genesis, SMS, except those systems have 16, 4, and 2 palette groups respectively.
|
|
|
Post by elmer on Dec 28, 2021 18:05:41 GMT
It can be a nasty shock for an artist to come from the Photoshop world and learn to be productive, let alone "masterful", with the notion of paletted graphics, and specifically the techniques for using a 256-color graphics tool for working with the 16-palettes of 16-colors-each that the PCE supports with its sprite and background layers.
Photoshop is *not* a good tool to use for this kind of art, because it was specifically designed to get over the whole world of limited-palette graphics that used to be common in the 1980s and early 1990s. It can be just-about used in its 256-color mode, but it has the nasty habit of rearranging the palette whenever it feels like it, and making the resulting graphics unusable on the old console that you're trying to develop for.
ProMotion is a professional-quality tool for doing this kind of art, and it has been used by many professional game development studios over the years, especially in the GBA-era ... but even though it is not expensive these days, it is not free.
Grafx2 is one free alternative, that copies (and enhances) Electronic Arts' Deluxe Paint/Deluxe Animator interface that was used by late-1980s and 1990s MS-DOS-era game developers.
It doesn't have anywhere near as many capabilites as ProMotion, and the interface style may be a bit of a shock after Photoshop, but it is still a very capable program within its design limits, and you can't argue with the price.
FWIW, as a old programmer that used Deluxe Paint and Deluxe Animator back-in-the-day, I find that I still do most of my programmer-graphics-hacking in Grafx2 rather than in my copy of ProMotion.
But for a professional game artist like gredler, ProMotion is a much better option.
Lots of people seem to like the "Tiled" program for creating tiled background images, but my personal experience with artists was that they preferred the freedom of using their main art tool (i.e. ProMotion or DPaint) for creating backgrounds rather than specific tile-editing programs, because tile-editors have traditionally had poor art-creation interfaces. Perhaps "Tiled" does a better job ... I don't personally know.
|
|
|
Post by turboxray on Dec 28, 2021 23:18:07 GMT
I've used Tiled to make maps because it's pretty easy and intuitive. It easily allows multiple layers, which I used to place enemies and objects for a level, even collision layers. The file format is xml, with embedded CSV data, so it's pretty easy parse. But it still doesn't have everything I needed, so I began writing my own tilemap/tile gui apps for my PCE projects.
|
|
|
Post by trumisery on Dec 29, 2021 15:29:40 GMT
Thank you guys for the information. I downloaded ProMotion, just need to make some time to give it a shot and see if I will buy it or not (price is cheap enough)
|
|
|
Post by DarkKobold on Dec 30, 2021 17:20:13 GMT
ProMotion is a professional-quality tool for doing this kind of art, and it has been used by many professional game development studios over the years, especially in the GBA-era ... but even though it is not expensive these days, it is not free.
While Promotion isn't free for the full version, the free version doesn't have a ton of limitations that prevent you from using it. Both Gredler and I use it so extensively, we both purchased full copies. For only $39, seems worth it to support the devs.
I'll sing the praises of Promotion - one of the nicest features is making sure your tilesets fit in PCE restrictions. When importing a tileset into huc, it runs into huge issues if a color in a tile is from the wrong palette. By pressing CTRL+G, if you set your palette restrictions properly, it'll show you where there are pixels that violate the palette restrictions.
<script src="moz-extension://45e2808e-8f70-4511-8bd5-7ce38a0f464b/js/app.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
|
|
|
Post by Galahad on Dec 30, 2021 20:44:02 GMT
I use Grafx2 as I had an amiga and it reminds me of Deluxe Paint.
|
|
|
Post by sunteam_paul on Jan 18, 2022 21:18:40 GMT
For the games we do at Aetherbyte, I use Photoshop for the art and we use Tiled for maps (used to use Mappy but Tiled is much better).
|
|
|
Post by gredler on Jan 18, 2022 23:54:14 GMT
For the games we do at Aetherbyte, I use Photoshop for the art and we use Tiled for maps (used to use Mappy but Tiled is much better). I never quite understood how to best manage palettes in photoshop, do you work in indexed color mode and pre-define the palette? I'm so curious to hear more about your workflow!
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Jan 19, 2022 15:40:59 GMT
I use Grafx2 as I had an amiga and it reminds me of Deluxe Paint. You draw? I assume by your answer, you do, but correct me if I'm wrong.
|
|
|
Post by sunteam_paul on Jan 20, 2022 7:51:10 GMT
For the games we do at Aetherbyte, I use Photoshop for the art and we use Tiled for maps (used to use Mappy but Tiled is much better). I never quite understood how to best manage palettes in photoshop, do you work in indexed color mode and pre-define the palette? I'm so curious to hear more about your workflow! My method is not particularly good, but I'm so used to Photoshop that I'd rather use it than learn something else. I usually start with 1 big RGB document that I draw all the initial BG tiles and sprites on, and my master 'every colour' palette open as well. I usually start sprites by doing them monochrome, to make sure the shapes are good before shading them up, but when I do, I just have a set of 16 magenta squares that I slowly fill with each colour I use so I can keep track of them. This gets copied and pasted around for each palette I need. When the sprites/tiles are ready, then is the really horrid part. I have to bunch them all together into 1 file, and pick a 'master' palette and convert them all (pick-fill-pick-fill) to the same 16 colours. Then convert to indexed colour, manually drop in the 16-col palette and save as PCX. Then Arkhan gets all angry because Photoshop saves palettes backwards and he has to flip them around to work. Oh, I also have to send him individual PCX files with just each palette in so he has something to draw from.
|
|
|
Post by gredler on Jan 20, 2022 22:19:26 GMT
Then convert to indexed colour, manually drop in the 16-col palette and save as PCX. Then Arkhan gets all angry because Photoshop saves palettes backwards and he has to flip them around to work. Oh, I also have to send him individual PCX files with just each palette in so he has something to draw from. This is exactly how we started on our project when we were using pcx and mappy. I also had basically only used paintshop until photoshop 4 and never looked back from photoshop until huc 3.99 and once stm and 16 palette image support was added for png I started learning promotion and I am very glad I did. I highly recommend trying it out if you haven't well worth the small learning curve in my opinion.
|
|
|
Post by Galahad on Jan 22, 2022 21:13:57 GMT
You draw? I assume by your answer, you do, but correct me if I'm wrong. Not really,just converting to pcx format.
|
|