109 replies to this topic

[Jay]

Yeah except for me to try to start a MC palette string would be the death of this project before it even begins!

[Radien]

Yeah except for me to try to start a MC palette string would be the death of this project before it even begins!

Oh come on now. You'll never know if you don't try. And if you want to learn, now's as good a time as any, right? If this is a group project, shouldn't we be able to use any pair of hands regardless of their strengths and weaknesses?

[Jay]

That's true, and it feels really great to hear that!

Well I guess best thing to say here now is for anyone that wants to help out with this post it here or PM me and lets see if we can get a group together!

[Radien]

Okay, well, you know what I'm interested in.

And hopefully if a new palette standard is created, it'll be useful for other projects too.

[Jay]

Yeah, this is definitely a big one this project, that's why I proposed it as a community one Any help appreciated!

[Giggidy]

Did you not read my suggestion, Radien? We don't need to bother with recoloring. At least not at first. Any worries about that can take place during the merging phase.

Edited by Giggidy, 22 March 2011 - 03:50 AM.

[Radien]

Did you not read my suggestion, Radien? We don't need to bother with recoloring. At least not at first. Any worries about that can take place during the merging phase.

Two pages of discussion earlier, yes. A lot of talk has happened since that post, Giggidy.

Unfortunately, I don't think your suggestion will work. Trying to never phase out even a single color in Minish Cap is a noble aspiration, but I guarantee you, ZC will run out of colors quite quickly if you don't plan things out. Try going into an image editor and working out how many unique colors each area uses, even not including sprites. I am quite ready to bet that you will discover more than 64 unique colors.

(64 being the maximum number of colors you can ever rotate using level palettes, and even then you need to dip into CSet 9 and use 8-bit mode to access the transparency colors)

P.S. -
Also remember that the maximum number of colors available in ZC at any given moment isn't really 256. It's more like 196. The rest are reserved for the GUI. The way they are displayed changes when you switch between ZC and ZQuest, so it isn't practical to count on using any of them, even though you will in fact see them in the 8-bit mode pixel editor's color selector.

[Giggidy]

The tiles and palettes can be broken up into separate qsts if needed (Honestly I wouldn't use a qst at all until the merging stage). My concern is trying to reduce the colors prematurely will cause us to reduce the quality unnecessarily. If you want all the TMC tiles in bad quality, there's already the Adventure set. I'd like to do it as well as possible, if you don't mind.

Plus, the full-color versions will make for fantastic resources! If the final qst has a few tiles with lessened quality, the full-color tiles will exist for anyone who wants to have them in better quality for their own custom tileset. Getting any particular set of tiles from TMC into ZC is easy, getting them all to work together is the hard part. Let's walk before we run.

[Bourkification]

So what you're saying Giggidy is to use the palettes from TMC for all the tiles, in separate files for each area? It could work.

And what Radien is saying, is that you won't fit all the colours into it. Well I think theres only one way to find out.

[Giggidy]

I agree with radien that color loss will eventually have to happen, we just disagree as to when it should happen.

[Bourkification]

Well in that case, I would agree with you Giggidy, that it would be great to have those quest files with TMC tiles ripped in, so that they are ZQ friendly, or at least as friendly as possible.

[Radien]

The tiles and palettes can be broken up into separate qsts if needed (Honestly I wouldn't use a qst at all until the merging stage). My concern is trying to reduce the colors prematurely will cause us to reduce the quality unnecessarily. If you want all the TMC tiles in bad quality, there's already the Adventure set. I'd like to do it as well as possible, if you don't mind.

Plus, the full-color versions will make for fantastic resources! If the final qst has a few tiles with lessened quality, the full-color tiles will exist for anyone who wants to have them in better quality for their own custom tileset. Getting any particular set of tiles from TMC into ZC is easy, getting them all to work together is the hard part. Let's walk before we run.

Getting all the tiles into ZQuest IS the goal -- and the difficulty -- of this project. Otherwise all you have is a bunch of images, and most of the people on this website don't have the programs (which, yes, can be downloaded) or experience using them (which can't) to get any benefit out of using anything outside of ZQuest.

Giggidy, I understand that you know how to rip and recolor graphics perfectly fine. Perhaps you could even make a quality tileset on your own. But don't come in here assuming that the only reason this sort of thing hasn't been done before is because no one has tried. The last person to try a Minish Cap tileset was Linkus. Why the italics? Because he's widely considered among the top artists on this site, but also has probably the most experience out of any of us with using image editor programs and converting the results into ZC. He understands this stuff better than most of us... and yet he gave up in frustration over ZC's limitations.

It's fine and dandy to be optimistic about a project, but the problem here has more to do with ZC than with the people working on the tilesets. ZC still has a little trouble accommodating all the graphics from Link to the Past, and that's a far cry from the quality and color-depth you'll find in The Minish Cap.

[Bourkification]

I think it is Relic you're referring to Radien.. At least he's the only one apart from Evile who made the tileset he was working on public.

[Radien]

I think it is Relic you're referring to Radien.. At least he's the only one apart from Evile who made the tileset he was working on public.

Relic, sorry. It's been awhile, and Relic became less active about the time Linkus came around and gained similar local fame.

[Bourkification]

Yeah I get confused some times as well!

Just by looking at what Relic did, and what Evile did, it seems they both got to a similar point then just stopped. Evile did rip some water tiles in though, but that's all taken care of thanks to Giggidy.

I think the end result, that we would want people to use, would be a MC-like tileset, that doesn't necessarily use the MC palette, colours, or all the MC tiles, but that is usable and has the same amount of tiles as a Pure or DoR tileset.