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Artheau / SpriteSomething

A GUI-enabled suite for management and replacement of retro gaming sprites. Most known for its ability to inject custom player graphics into Super Metroid and A Link to the Past. Get the latest version at https://github.com/Artheau/SpriteSomething/releases .
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[M3Samus] Unique Suit Graphics #118

Open MoriyaFaith opened 2 years ago

MoriyaFaith commented 2 years ago

In the original Super Metroid, The only poses with separate Power Suit and Varia Suit versions are the elevator and save sprites. Every other pose only has versions that better match the Varia Suit. Would it be possible to add an option for Seperate Sets of sprites for each suit?

Artheau commented 2 years ago

We gave thought to this, and also to the idea of having unique sprites for all three suits. The difficulty is in how much space the extra graphics take up inside of the game file. We already extended the game from 3MB to 4MB in order to make the left-facing/right-facing graphics unique and also to reduce the amount of shared tiles, so there isn't a ton of space left. In the original game, Samus's graphics took up three full banks and large portions of some others -- that was already a tremendous amount of space to assign to the player sprite, given the games at the time, and we added more on top of that to try to make the artist's job easier (because shared tiles are a PITA).

In theory, we could extend the game to a ExLoRom with 6MB in order to have more space, but then we'd run into compatibility issues with flash carts and emulators and the like (since only Star Ocean used ExLoRom commercially, there is not a lot of compatibility for that file type). It would also be necessary to think about how these sprites would work in the combo rom which already has an entire second game stuffed in there. Also, we'd be asking our artists to make more unique artwork, when the sprite sheet is already pretty large already.

So, in theory it's possible, but the amount of trickery involved would probably cause some of the other features to not work well, so we haven't really pursued it beyond that.

I think that there was a patch/hack for vanilla Super Metroid that gave the three different suits unique graphics, but it doesn't have the added convenience of left/right-facing sprites and it keeps all the wonky shared tiles and missing scan lines that are part of the original (broken) graphics. If memory serves, it also expanded the game file to 4MB AND it used most of the free space just for the extra graphics, so there wasn't much room for randomizer and gamehack features. It wouldn't be compatible with the way that SpriteSomething stores the sprite graphics.

MoriyaFaith commented 2 years ago

Ah, that makes sense. I'm pretty sure there's a version that just adds unique power suit graphics with both directions intact that ups the size to about 3.2 MB. not sure if you could work with that or not since that's how the original game's supposed to look, I guess.