A new GBA 3d engine! (also, the best Wing Commander on GBA!)

[*b*]

that's right! there's a new 3D engine on the GBA! go to Ray Light studios and look at the games! and look at the <drumroll>WING COMMANDER PROPHECY!</drumroll> the best Wing commander game for the PC is now on the GBA! I can't wait for this summer/fall/winter/next spring!

[Dart Zaidyer]

They better have figured out FMV for that. NOTHING beats seeing Mark Hamill as Blair. =)

[Warlock]

Originally posted by Dart_Zader
They better have figured out FMV for that. NOTHING beats seeing Mark Hamill as Blair. =)

1.) FMV is impossible to do on the GBA. So no, there cannot be FMV.

2.) It is doubtful there will be much voice acting, as it takes up a lot of room on a cartriage.. same reason there were no narrated SNES games..

[Cloral]

FMV's have to do with storage space, and that is something the GBA doesn't have much of. What could (and probably will) happen is that they take stills of the FMVs and use those for the storyline sequences (ie one frame per line of text, and then have the line of text on the bottom of the screen).

[Warlock]

Well yes, but also, FMVs are essentially like a DVD movie or a high-quality AVI (DivX for example). The GBA simply cannot produce that. It requires a full color set, rather than the GBA's limited set (it has a large set, but not THAT large.. I believe the SNES could do something like 52,000 colors on the screen at a time, but sprites were limited to 256 each -- incidentally GBC/GB sprites are limited to 4 colors each, while the GBC can only display 52 colors at once, unless they use that trick, which is unfortunately memory intensive or something, so it can really only be used for stills).. anyways, I believe it also requires a built-in support for that type of thing, something GBA would not have.

ANNNNNYWAYS, I am rambling. The GBA cannot do FMV. What they would do, would just recreate them in a sprite-based manner. They could do stills, but I think they could animate it. As long as it isn't an extremely complex animation of course. Think of it as something like the cutscenes in the GB/GBC Zeldas. Those are sprite-based. GBA could of course, do much better than that as well.

Now that I think of it, I'm not sure about the voices. Because I remember Perfect Dark for GBC did have full speech. Of course, the speech was extremely horrible in quality. It was very scratchy, most likely due to the GBC's poor sound. GBA can prob. do better. But I don't know just how much dialouge it could fit. My guess is that it could handle cockpit dialouge, stuff like your Wingman's comments (honestly I have only played Wing Commander 2 so I don't know a hell of a lot about what they say in this one ), but cutscene-type scenes would probably be text.

[Daarkseid]

Both the SNES and the GBA have maximum palettes of about 32,000 colors at their disposals. The SNES can only display 256 colors onscreen at once, and I believe only 32 of those can be used for a single sprite... though it may just be 16 per sprite.

The GBA can do 512 colors in sprite mode, but it can display its full palette(at just above 32,000 colors) in bitmap mode.

So this would suggest the GBA is capable of displaying near photographic quality still pictures, with no animated sprites(so no sparsely animated stills).

[Duran]

Originally posted by Warlock

2.) It is doubtful there will be much voice acting, as it takes up a lot of room on a cartriage.. same reason there were no narrated SNES games..

Not true actually... Star Ocean 1 had some voice overs, not all that great, but really compressed, with current compress technology it might be possible, but not good quality. But i'm not talking about an entire game voiced over, I mean only the important parts maybe.

[Cloral]

Snes had 16 colors per sprite palette, and 16 of these palettes could be on-screen at once. So 16x16 = 256 colors onscreen at a time. This is actually far more limited than most people thought - in fact, ZC has very similar graphic power in terms of number of colors displayed at once.

[Dracula]

Originally posted by Daarkseid
Both the SNES and the GBA have maximum palettes of about 32,000 colors at their disposals.

I thought the GBC had 32,000 possible colors, and the GBA had 65,535 colors... I might be wrong, but I know GBC has 32,000 colors...