How to breach the color limit

mongolianmisfit

New member
I noticed in Tower of Turmoil, the main character breaches the maximum colors utilizing layered sprites like Megaman did. I would love to see a tutorial on how to do this.
 

digit2600

Member
That's another Sprite on the scanline... I just chose to design my character using both color palettes... doing that you can get up to 6 colors if you're crafty.
 

Icon-Ninja

New member
It's something to keep in mind when designing sprites. When designing characters or creatures or anything else that will be implemented as a moving sprite object, remember that "sprites" are divided into tiles. A 16x16 pixel sprite has four tiles, a 32x32 pixel sprite (big for the NES) has sixteen tiles, and so on. Each of the tiles within a sprite can have one of two separate palettes assigned, each palette consisting of four colors (one of which is reserved as the alpha/transparency), but the palettes must share a common alpha color, but that leaves you with six unique color values available for a single sprite. You're constrained to one palette, or rather, three visible colors, per tile, but carefully planning the design of sprite, i.e. paying attention to the tile divisions, can let you really push the color composition of a sprite on the NES without any real additional effort like parented objects and some other advanced voodoo (like Mega Man's face).
 

CutterCross

Active member
While it's true you can get 6 colors per object by using both palettes, you're confined to keeping each palette's 3 colors in 8x8 pixel color cells. (Each individual sprite can only use 1 color palette). So in some cases (like mine) using some extra "advanced voodoo" to layer an additional sprite really brings out a lot more detail.

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Jorotroid is the one who actually helped me set up the layered sprite parenting, so it's probably best to ask him about it, as I'm not sure the same techniques in 4.0.11 will smoothly translate to 4.1.
 
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