Roach's endless sprite parade

Except Tails, because of his trailing tails- and even he can just use the same sprites with a spinning tails overlay, possibly.

But that's a job for Iceman when he gets around to it.

I don't think his tails should be seperate objects - he could have a idle animation that is unique to others because his tails would be animated. His tails should probably be seperate objects when jumping/spinning.

The obvious problem with separate tails is making sure the objects share the exact same space and face an identical direction - I seem to recall that capechase and shields have historically had problems with this. Tails has a bigger butt in SRB2 than he did in the Genesis games (especially if Iceman works on him), and we can see it more clearly than ever; the tails would have to be positioned precisely on every sprite and be ahead of/behind the sprite properly in the side frames, and at this point you might as well just make them parts of the sprite.

But yeah, Knuckles' spin dash animation will be the same as Sonic's spin dash animation. As for Tails, while I'm not responsible for his development, I'd probably go for making his spin dash animation have a difference appearance, rather than just a sphere looking animation. I'd probably make him a bit fuzzier looking, and obviously, have his tails to stick out.

Also Tails' spinning animation would have more frames because his animation is different than sonic and knuckles.

Arcade Gamer said:

Also Tails' spinning animation would have more frames because his animation is different than sonic and knuckles.

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... No it wouldn't. The tails... would just use the same frames to flap.
I fail to see your point.

Phil the hegi said:

... No it wouldn't. The tails... would just use the same frames to flap.
I fail to see your point.

Click to expand...

NO, his spinning is different. I am not talking about the tails should be in the same sprite!

Arcade Gamer said:

NO, his spinning is different. I am not talking about the tails should be in the same sprite!

Click to expand...

Ehhhhh. In Sonic 2, there are apparently six frames for Tails' spinning animation, but I bet you it could probably be done in four easily enough.

I think another problem with Tails actually having tails is the fact he'll use his spinning sprites when he jumps. If the tails are part of the sprite, you'll have to get used to his tails being behind him all the time perfectly horizontal with the ground. It'd be like if you jumped in Sonic 2 and the only position the tails took would be where they are in the sprite Arcade Gamer posted.

If the tails are only used in the spindashing sprites, this might look a bit funky at first since it'd kind of look like he loses them once he shoots himself out of the spindash. I think it'd require a bit of experimentation to figure out what'd really work best; maybe make the tails more prominent in the spinning sprites instead of having them stick out?

I know this is supposed to be Genesis-based, but I don't even get the sense of having Tails' tails stick out of the spinning state Tails is into, it just always looked odd to me; having "static" tails while the rest of the body is spinning.

I frankly prefer SRB2's spinning frames for Tails because of that, and also because of how annoying it would be to have the tails adjust to Tails' vertical momentum, unless you have them as a separate object, but it has already been stated that it would still be annoying to make.

EDIT: "tails" counter: 6

Well, to be fair, using his tails to fly conceptually breaks the laws of physics anyway. For them to stay behind him during his spindash isn't much more absurd.

I have to say, to have Tails' spin animation be the same as they are in the classics wouldn't really look right in SRB2 (maybe it's because they're not a thing yet).

Maybe do something along the lines of what MotorRoach suggested. Do something similar to his current animation, but fuzzier, and with each frame have his tail stick up (or down depending on which one it is) so it looks as if his tails are sort of lagging behind while he is spinning.

EDIT: I just saw the dates. And I have no idea what the current state of tails sprites are, so please don't kill me [emoji14]

Sent from my XT1021 using ********

I have always sort of felt that Tails' tails should be a seperate entity from his body that rotates with him depending on the angle he's going at when spinning and animates depending on what state he's in, but I understand that's a lot of work for something that could be taken care of by having his tails curl up with him when he jumps.

I think it'd be best if they were a separate entity. Of all the angles to make, the side frames could simply be made with RotSprite, like NiGHTS Super Sonic. All they would have to do is pick a frame set (again, like NiGHTS Super Sonic) but based on the player's momz.

Jay said:

I think it'd be best if they were a separate entity. Of all the angles to make, the side frames could simply be made with RotSprite, like NiGHTS Super Sonic. All they would have to do is pick a frame set (again, like NiGHTS Super Sonic) but based on the player's momz.

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Actually you have just reminded me of something I've not had answered, why is this not a function in the regular game? It seems like it'd make more sense for the actual game to rotate certain sprites to cut down on space usage and would be useful for things like slopes in 2D and NIGHTS mode, just limit it to frames 3 and 7 unless specified otherwise...

I'm sorry that i'm dragging this discussion further off topic at hand, but i'm just curious.

I've said numerous times before that the reason in-game sprite rotation isn't a thing is because of the way the sprites are stored. They aren't stored as a simple grid like flats are; instead they're stored as a series of columns of specified length, color, and offset. This is to make them as quick to render as possible; the software renderer has to make fewer calculations during the rendering process, which means more sprites can be shown on-screen before heavy lag sets in. Unfortunately, this means they can't just be rotated, as that would involve using multiple sprite columns per screen column, which would be more expensive to compute by... I'd estimate a factor of n² per sprite. That'd make sprite-heavy maps lag even worse than they already do.

That's not to say it's impossible to make sprite rotation a thing; it'd always be possible to blit the column data into a separate color grid like flats use and switch to a renderer similar to that when rotation is needed. But it wouldn't be worth implementing all that just to cut down on a sparse few frames here and there.

And if you're going to say "just switch to OpenGL!": great idea! Find us someone who knows how to deal with that; the last guy we had quit.

Did someone say NEW PALETTE???

That god darn purple... It's... It's so freaking sexy. (How long was I'm inactive? Jeez.) Also make the gold a bit more vibrant it looks dull in my opinion. but overall, you did good.

Gold? That's not gold, that's tan!



Now this is gold!

Please, I want to see the good old 2.0 yellow thrown on him. Also that purple is wonderful! (Hah, gonna take me a while to get used to the fact that our actual purple is gonna get renamed to magenta when 2.2 comes out.)

I had forgotten what the 2.0 yellow skincolor looked like, so I decided to go and take a screenshot myself, to compare the yellow between versions.

2.0:



2.1:



2.2:



I take it that the 2.0 yellow skincolor is reserved only for Super Sonic now. Still, the 2.2 yellow is a rather decent improvement over what we had in 2.1!