03-28-2016, 01:37 PM
The bosses consist of parts, and some of the effects do.
Some of the sprites also use color overlays or tweens or whatever
The bosses, in particular, also have a nasty habit of nested clips.
There is one normal (I'll exclude Monster 06 cuz it's a mini-boss) monster that uses parts, but they're still all bitmaps:
Monster 10's head rotates.
The problem is that the parts are usually vectors, which are time-consuming to export + convert, and then re-assemble. There's also, not that I've observed this in RTBZ, a chance for vectors to export incorrectly.
I know what I'm dealing with, more or less. I just am not 100% sure how to deal with it, because each one is going to require a different trick.
If any of these rips never see completion, it will be the bosses. And I also know for fact that the boss sheets will easily be several megabytes each. I will do what I can to make them somewhat effecient, but between the fact it'll be hundreds to thousands of frames per boss, the bosses are going to be a fairly decent resolution, also, I expect them to be pretty large. There's a reason I not only dread ripping the bosses, but that they are vector-based.
Whether or not the monsters started-out with vectors I doubt we'll ever know. But I can guess that filesize optimizations (and maybe quality) led the bosses to use vectors, and then performance optimizations would lead the normal guys to be bitmaps. This is only a theory, of course, but it also makes a lot of sense. Assuming that the normal monsters might have started as vectors, that'd mean they were probably at least partially as complex as the bosses. And then when you get down to the matter of rendering them, having a bunch of vector-based sprites on screen might have caused lag. The filesize would have suffered for this, and the quality, since they must have also been color-reduced to fit this theory.
That is all for now.
I'm currently working on some other stuff.
Some of the sprites also use color overlays or tweens or whatever
The bosses, in particular, also have a nasty habit of nested clips.
There is one normal (I'll exclude Monster 06 cuz it's a mini-boss) monster that uses parts, but they're still all bitmaps:
Monster 10's head rotates.
The problem is that the parts are usually vectors, which are time-consuming to export + convert, and then re-assemble. There's also, not that I've observed this in RTBZ, a chance for vectors to export incorrectly.
I know what I'm dealing with, more or less. I just am not 100% sure how to deal with it, because each one is going to require a different trick.
If any of these rips never see completion, it will be the bosses. And I also know for fact that the boss sheets will easily be several megabytes each. I will do what I can to make them somewhat effecient, but between the fact it'll be hundreds to thousands of frames per boss, the bosses are going to be a fairly decent resolution, also, I expect them to be pretty large. There's a reason I not only dread ripping the bosses, but that they are vector-based.
Whether or not the monsters started-out with vectors I doubt we'll ever know. But I can guess that filesize optimizations (and maybe quality) led the bosses to use vectors, and then performance optimizations would lead the normal guys to be bitmaps. This is only a theory, of course, but it also makes a lot of sense. Assuming that the normal monsters might have started as vectors, that'd mean they were probably at least partially as complex as the bosses. And then when you get down to the matter of rendering them, having a bunch of vector-based sprites on screen might have caused lag. The filesize would have suffered for this, and the quality, since they must have also been color-reduced to fit this theory.
That is all for now.
I'm currently working on some other stuff.