Preparations For a New Game

[AnasAbdin]

Hello All
I'm preparing for my next game, and I wanted to ask a few things before I start AGSing.
I mean I already drew new character sprites and a few BGs.
But, I was concerned with the game's settings. My first game is a 16bit 640x480. Now my new game has a lot of glass walls, underwater rooms, colored lights and so on... So it would be much better to change the hues of the sprites going near them.

I have two options in mind (if you got more let me know!)
1. make the game 16bit and create different sprites with needed hues (e.g a normal player view, a blue-ish player view, a red-ish view... etc) I know this would result in 9573534985793485 sprites.... (This is the method used in Anastronaut)

2. make it 32bit (alpha channels...) and tweak the hues as desired. Does 32bit games work on most machines or does it need a super computer?

The reason I came up with 'option one' is that I won't need to create many different shades as thought to be, only the main -and maybe- a coupla more characters would be moving around areas affecting their hue....

Also, please let me know if there's anything else I should consider before beginning the game creation, specially those steps that are impossible or time-consuming to modify later.

Thanks!

[steptoe]

Hi

if you just want to change the players color you could just use Character.Tint

Quote from Manual:

Character.Tint(int red, int green, int blue,
              int saturation, int luminance)

Tints the character on the screen to (RED, GREEN, BLUE) with SATURATION percent saturation.
This function applies a tint to a specific character. For the meaning of all the parameters, see SetAmbientTint.

The tint set by this function overrides any ambient tint set for the room. For this reason, passing the SATURATION as 0 to this function does not turn it off - rather, it ensures that no tint is applied to the character (even if an ambient tint is set).

To remove the tint set by this function and return to using the ambient tint for this character, call RemoveTint.

NOTE: This function only works in hi-colour games and with hi-colour sprites.

Example:

cEgo.Tint(0, 250, 0, 30, 100); // replace cEgo with your character name.

will tint the EGO character green.

Eg If your character steps on a region for example, you could have him tint to green / red etc. and remove tint when he steps off it.

Hope this is what you refer to.

[AnasAbdin]

if you just want to change the players color you could just use Character.Tint

Thanks steptoe.. I know the Tint function, my question was about which of the two options I mentioned is considered to work better in most machines...

as far as I know (please do correct me) that the Tint function is useless in 16bit mode...

[monkey0506]

Regarding Character.Tint (and the other tinting functions), 16-bit is considered "high colour", but the tinting would work very differently than a 32-bit game due to the range of available colors.

I'm pretty sure that every Windows-based PC from XP onward has defaulted to 32-bit color in the OS. Considering the latest version of the engine doesn't support any Windows versions prior to XP, I'd say 32-bit color is a pretty safe bet for your games, but unless you need alpha channels or 32-bit color, then 16-bit is fine. It's a matter of preference really between those two. There shouldn't be a major difference in performance between the two.