PDA

View Full Version : Transparencies



Shoelace
06-19-2007, 09:59 PM
I am not sure if they is a bug because it has always been like this. But like at the transparencies, they blend the colors together awkward. For example, I have different shades of green in my pallete, and it will make them all of the same shade if there is a transparency. It may be a huge limitation, but I just wanted to see if this was a bug or not. As the colors that come out of a transparency is weird:

http://www.mbwonline.x10hosting.com/zelda001.bmp
Normal

http://www.mbwonline.x10hosting.com/zelda003.bmp
transparency (Look at the transparency here. They are dark shades of green, and now you can't see any detail in the green. Also, my grass turned gray. Where the hell did the gray come from. lol)

I don't know. I guess I am just wishing that the transparencies actually worked the way it was supposed to.

DarkDragon
06-19-2007, 10:18 PM
"the way it was supposed to" is a very thorny question here. ZC runs in 8-bit color mode, meaning that rendering is done using a 256-palette. Thus we can't just put random new colors onto the screen; they have to come from somewhere on the palette. Currently transparencies work by finding the closest color in the palette to the "blended" colors. If this best-fit doesn't look good, well, the only thing that can be done is to try to better balance your csets.

I'm all for porting ZC away from Allegro and abolishing 16-color csets altogether (in favor of true-color with "virtual" palettes to preserve NES palette effects) but that will almost certainly need to wait until after 2.5.

Moving to Bugs in Limbo.

Shoelace
06-21-2007, 12:46 AM
That makes sense. I didn't really understand how it worked until now. So thanks for clearing that up. I guess I will just leave it without shadows as I can't get my ideal colors with it. Thanks. :P

DarkDragon
06-21-2007, 01:57 AM
I'm not sure how many other colors are causing problems, but if you have any slots at all to spare in your palette, adding another shade of dark green should improve this particular screen.

beefster09
06-22-2007, 02:17 PM
You could make it flicker really fast. It gives the appearance of transparency without actually being transparent, but it looks kinda weird and you can only have one transparent layer.