Separate night backgrounds in QFG2VGA? (QFGIVGA related too)

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ATMachine
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Separate night backgrounds in QFG2VGA? (QFGIVGA related too)

#1 Post by ATMachine » Tue Mar 22, 2005 4:28 pm

Hi! I'm not new to the boards (I used to post here under the name TheFatherInLaw), but I've been absent for a good long while, and I expect many of you have forgotten me.

Anyways, I was playing QFGIVGA for the first time the past few days, and happened to notice that the day-to-night cycle took a long time on my computer (I used the SCI timer patch, which is a great help).

However, speaking of this cycle, when I played the QFGIVGA demo, which I've had for a long time, I noticed something interesting.

At one point, it shows the graveyard at midnight, but it uses a separate "nighttime" background to do so, not the color-shifted version of the daytime background.

Actual Game Nighttime Graveyard:
Image

Demo Nighttime Graveyard:
Image

While Sierra could have created this background especially for the demo, it seems to me unlikely, as the company often didn't bother to make special resources for a demo (Freddy Pharkas and SQ6 stand out as exceptions).

Instead, I think maybe the QFGIVGA team originally wanted to make separate backgrounds for all the night scenes, but were forced not to do so by disk space constraints. So they implemented palette-shifting instead.

Of course, I could be totally wrong, and the background could have been made especially for the demo.

This is a long-winded way of asking: Will QFG2VGA use palette-shifting, or  will it have separate backgrounds for nighttime scenes? The AGD team certainly isn't bound by disk space constraints.

Erpy
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#2 Post by Erpy » Tue Mar 22, 2005 6:02 pm

No, palette-shifting only occurs in 256-color games, which QFG2VGA is not. Nightfading is done by drawing a night-version of a background over the day-version at a certain transparency. The night-version of a background is identical to the day-version except for the fact it's darker and tinted blue.

Image

Boogeyman
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#3 Post by Boogeyman » Tue Mar 22, 2005 9:36 pm

In the demo picture, also note that the ghosts are a somewhat different color.

Paladinlover
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#4 Post by Paladinlover » Fri Mar 25, 2005 6:03 pm

Just a fact about 256 color games. They're not really '256' color, as they can actually have thousands of colors in them. They just can't have more than 256 colors at a time on one screen.

Till next time stay cool :smokin:

Ghost_Rider
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#5 Post by Ghost_Rider » Sat Mar 26, 2005 3:45 am

Boogeyman wrote:In the demo picture, also note that the ghosts are a somewhat different color.
Yeah, I actually think the ghosts in the demo screenshot look better than they do in the full game.  I was going to say more realistic... but... does anyone know what a ghost REALLY looks like?  I sure don't.   ;)

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