#26925 - Wriggler - Wed Sep 29, 2004 10:14 am
Hi guys,
After receiving my new flash cart in the post yesterday, I was eager to try out some of our games which I've seen only running on my colleague's GBASP, or on an emu.
Having obtained an old school GBA (no backlight), I was suprised to see that the games appeared so dark in moderate light conditions. Looking back at the first batch of GBA games (Mario Kart was a fine example), you can understand why the colours were so bright and clashing. They did this so that you could actually see the game through the dodgy LCD!
I've noticed that using strong primary colours helps make your games more noticable on this older screen. Also, making the backgrounds slightly darker is emphasised on the hardware so it makes the sprites stand out. Also, most games use a black outline around their sprites. Is this just for cartoon effect, or does it help to improve readability through the screen?
Has anybody else got any design techniques in regard to colour usage to make your graphics as bold as they can be on old school hardware?
Cheers,
Ben
#26931 - Akolade - Wed Sep 29, 2004 5:41 pm
This has been a problem with a project I've been working on for the GBA. Looks great in an emulator, or with GB Player, but is tough to see on the actual GBA. Even with backlight.
Color choice is of huge importance especially with a portable.
That lies in the realm of artists though. Anyone have some good tips?
I originally had my sprites with no outlines. I later added black outlines, and it does make a huge difference, especially with smaller sprites.
#26933 - poslundc - Wed Sep 29, 2004 6:16 pm
Tepples once posted something to the effect of adjusting your values so they never go lower than 15 for any of your colour components. I'm not sure how many games actually implement this strategy.
Dan.
#26934 - Wriggler - Wed Sep 29, 2004 6:20 pm
Yea, I've been fiddling today. I've found it looks nicest with an almost black outline (looks silly in PSP, looks great on the hardware), and using bright, primary colours as much as possible. Trying to contrast adjacent colours as much as possible seems to provide a better result also.
Seems obvious now with hindsight, but before I started working with the hardware it wasn't a problem! :)
Ben
#26960 - sgeos - Thu Sep 30, 2004 6:32 am
Would looking into gamma correction be helpful?
-Brendan
#26983 - Quirky - Thu Sep 30, 2004 7:39 pm
Final Fantasy Tactics has 3 palette choices, LCD A, LCD B and Television. I think this was the first big game released after the GB Player, but I haven't seen many other games with palette choices.
#26987 - Abscissa - Thu Sep 30, 2004 10:44 pm
| sgeos wrote: |
Would looking into gamma correction be helpful?
-Brendan |
I'm sure it would be, in fact I think I saw a web page somewhere talking about just that (can't remember where, though). I think it might be a good idea to come up with some sort of mapping between how things look on a monitor/GBAPlayer and how it looks on the LCD, then you could add into your build system a flag for "LCD mode" and it would convert your palettes/artwork to the gamma-corrected LCD equivilant. That way you could create art normally and let the build process just adjust th birghtness/gamma/whatever for the LCD.
#26990 - sgeos - Fri Oct 01, 2004 12:42 am
| Abscissa wrote: |
| then you could add into your build system a flag for "LCD mode" and it would convert your palettes/artwork to the gamma-corrected LCD equivilant. That way you could create art normally and let the build process just adjust th birghtness/gamma/whatever for the LCD. |
I think you'd want, uhhh... LCD A, LCD B, and television with runtime configuration.
-Brendan
#26992 - Nessie - Fri Oct 01, 2004 3:18 am
The strategy you should choose is going to depend on how fussy you are about being in control of the final resulting palette. I'm going to assume your target is also the GBA and GBA SP hardware..
A couple of random thoughts....
To begin with, I'd guess most people are drawing their artwork with 24-bit colour, and then converting it to 15-bit colour for use on the GBA ?
With the loss of some precision, it's possible to end up with a potentially annoying hue and/or saturation changes for your colours. Example:
<before> RGB(167,160,167) - 24-bit colour, grey with a slight purple cast to it
<after> RGB(20,20,20) - 15-bit colour, grey...complete loss of saturation
<before> RGB(168,160,167) - 24-bit colour, grey with a slight purple cast to it
<after> RGB(21,20,20) - 15-bit colour, grey with a slight reddish cast to it...saturation loss and hue shift
Of course, these are contrived examples, but it will happen if you aren't careful. Maybe you care, maybe you don't.
Plus, on top of falling victim to the aforementioned pitfalls, gamma correction of your converted GBA palettes can end up adding another layer of hue and/or saturation havok.
As I said at the top, it depends on how fussy you are about these kinds of things. If you are fussy, you'd want to make sure that the art is created either in 15-bit colour depth...or with the conversions from 24- to 15-bit depth in mind...and that the palette brightness and saturation levels are set at the ideal levels without having to gamma correct.
If you do need to gamma correct in-game, I'd maybe recommend that you darken down the colour for play in VBA, etc. As I said before, this is with the assumption that your target is the real GBA hardware.
#26994 - sgeos - Fri Oct 01, 2004 5:33 am
How do you suppose storing a palette in HSV form and gamma correcting that at run time would work out?
I'd rather not assume a target. Gamma correction at run time lets the end user choose the most appropriate display option (LCD, backlit LCD, TV, monitor). A custom option would be nifty. I've played games on some dark TVs.
-Brendan
#26995 - Wriggler - Fri Oct 01, 2004 8:51 am
Excellent suggestions. I think that it's still more of an artistic issue than a technical one, but perhaps offering different palettes is the way forward. I'll check out Final Fantasy and let you know what I think of that technique...
Ben
#27008 - Nessie - Fri Oct 01, 2004 3:20 pm
| sgeos wrote: |
| I'd rather not assume a target. |
That's fine, but the original question was in regard to the GBA LCD colour response, so I was trying to offering some thoughts relevant to the original question.
Gamma correcting isn't such a bad thing, and giving players options to improve viewability isn't bad either.
Perhaps another way to put my suggestion is that if you are developing for the GBA, I would suggest that making the 'normal', non-corrected palettes look good on the system that the most players are using. If you want to offer a bright/dark variation on that, hey that's cool.
A last point is that, if your palettes are built out of heavily saturated primary and secondary colours, I doubt that gamma correction will create any annoying (noticeable) hue/saturation shifts.
In the game we were working on, there tended to be more muted colours, and the 'boiling' cloud layer in the background on all of the above-ground maps was pretty heavily affected by the issues mentioned in my above post.
#27123 - Gene Ostrowski - Mon Oct 04, 2004 4:56 am
I know this may sound silly, but I'd suggest simply creating the graphics brighter on the PC and seeing how they look on HW, and adjust it at the source until it looks good on the PC.
I'm working on a game right now that has a lot of "underground" areas, you know, dark and shadowy. In PSP they looked nice but they were too dark on the HW. I simply performed a palette lighten within the paint program and viola, everything is nice now on the LCD screen.
The point is that I go to hardware several times a day when I'm programming, especially after I add any art elements to the game. That way, I'm not cought by surprise by anything not looking or functioning properly on HW.
After all, it doesn't really matter how it looks on the monitor, it's whats in HW that counts.
_________________
------------------
Gene Ostrowski
#27125 - sgeos - Mon Oct 04, 2004 5:03 am
| Gene Ostrowski wrote: |
| After all, it doesn't really matter how it looks on the monitor, it's whats in HW that counts. |
This is complicted by the multiple pieces of hardware that exist. The orginal GBA has a dark screen. This is what I own, I always use it with a light. The SP has a backlit screen. The gameboy player uses a TV. There are all different kinds of TVs out there. Some of them are very dark.
-Brendan
#27146 - Nessie - Mon Oct 04, 2004 5:23 pm
To be fair, TV's are a huge problem anyway.
On the deveopment end, the developers should use properly calibrated TV's and all colours used in the artwork should be in the legal NTSC or PAL range depending on the target region, etc. (Actually, I wonder if the whole gamut of GBA colours on the GC GBA Player are NTSC legal or if the player software addresses that??)
On the consumer end, it seems like most games I've played leave it to the player to adjust their TV settings to make the game look acceptable rather than provide a gamma adjust option in game.
To bring this all back to game design, how many customizable options do you want to have in your game? Not saying that having more...or fewer..options is better, but I have noticed that Nintendo has tended to limit the number of options for the players in their game designs. Specifically regarding brightness though, I did notice that Nintendo put a brighntess option in for Zelda: Four Swords.
#27159 - keldon - Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:58 pm
If the GC GBA player appears wrong on a normal TV that is bad on the end of the player not the games (assuming it looks fine on the GBA). And although we all have different TV's we all adjust them fine for programs, so the games should match that.
Recent Nintendo products have a nack for outputting disgusting colours. The N64 looked muddy, and the gamecube at times suffers from saturation. How many shades of grey do we really want Ninty?
#27172 - sgeos - Tue Oct 05, 2004 11:45 am
| keldon wrote: |
| If the GC GBA player appears wrong on a normal TV that is bad on the end of the player not the games |
That's not very cutomer oriented... =P
| keldon wrote: |
| And although we all have different TV's we all adjust them fine for programs, so the games should match that. |
We try to adjust them. When I was younger I had to play on a dark TV. When brightness was turned all the way up, it was ultimately too dark. I tried all the little adjuster knobs. If I wanted to play games, that was the TV I was going to use. "Sorry mom, I'm using the TV up here now" doesn't cut it.
Many people are stuck with old TVs. Would you rather they upgrade or buy your game?
-Brendan
#27174 - Wriggler - Tue Oct 05, 2004 1:36 pm
Upgrade :)
Ben
#27189 - sgeos - Tue Oct 05, 2004 7:59 pm
| Wriggler wrote: |
| Upgrade :) |
Clearly you want a game that is not playable on dark TVs. =)
-Brendan
#31524 - tepples - Sat Dec 11, 2004 9:35 pm
| Nessie wrote: |
| On the deveopment end, the developers should use properly calibrated TV's and all colours used in the artwork should be in the legal NTSC or PAL range depending on the target region, etc. (Actually, I wonder if the whole gamut of GBA colours on the GC GBA Player are NTSC legal or if the player software addresses that??) |
I believe the color encoder in the GameCube itself addresses that.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#31541 - keldon - Sun Dec 12, 2004 1:25 am
| sgeos wrote: |
| keldon wrote: | | If the GC GBA player appears wrong on a normal TV that is bad on the end of the player not the games |
That's not very cutomer oriented... =P |
I think you missed my point. What I mean is in the case of the following
(a)game displays fine on a GBA
(b)TV displays GC games and TV programs fine
(c)game does not display good through GC GBA player
| sgeos wrote: |
| keldon wrote: | | And although we all have different TV's we all adjust them fine for programs, so the games should match that. |
We try to adjust them. When I was younger I had to play on a dark TV. When brightness was turned all the way up, it was ultimately too dark. I tried all the little adjuster knobs. If I wanted to play games, that was the TV I was going to use. "Sorry mom, I'm using the TV up here now" doesn't cut it.
Many people are stuck with old TVs. Would you rather they upgrade or buy your game?
-Brendan |
I think you missed my point again. What I mean is the following:
(a) TV programs display fine on TV's when adjusted
(b) An F1 game using official F1 colours and TV display themes, for examle, should be more concerned with getting the same output as the program than getting it to look fine on a specific setting because that's what any TV would be set towards; or viewers used to.
A perfect example of this is people who have colours geared to display fine in VBA, but when shown on a real GBA look too dark. Also F1 World Grand Prix on the N64 had the ITV displays; but their colours were too contrasted and the cars were all wrong.
I have this feeling you thought I meant that we have no problem adjusting our TV when we want to play games. If so, then that is not what I meant. What I'm pointing out is that your TV needs different setting for games and programs; and I am saying that this should not be the case.
#32086 - pyros - Sat Dec 18, 2004 2:08 am
Now with the DS, a GBA game could be run on either:
GBA - crap screen
SP - much better screen
DS - very good screen
PC - different screen
which means that some games (i.e. those with dark/distant objects) are going to look not-so-good on certain platforms.
i think i shall stick with optimising pallets for the SP as this is middle ground. I guess homebrewers could release different gba/emu versions or in-game-options for download.
#32141 - blinky465 - Sat Dec 18, 2004 11:28 am
| pyros wrote: |
Now with the DS, a GBA game could be run on either:
GBA - crap screen
SP - much better screen
DS - very good screen
PC - different screen
which means that some games (i.e. those with dark/distant objects) are going to look not-so-good on certain platforms.
i think i shall stick with optimising pallets for the SP as this is middle ground. I guess homebrewers could release different gba/emu versions or in-game-options for download. |
I'm sure with the different attachments and gizmos now available, you can play your GBA games on just about anything from an old b&w portable telly to a 48" flat screen.
But GBA games are inherently designed to be played on the GameBoy console (Advance, SP, DS). Playing games on other displays is acheived through "non-standard" operation of the console - so designing for an SP display seems a sensible idea.
Unless you are writing your game purely for yourself and solely with the intention of playing it on the TV, why would you want to limit yourself to a TV-optimised palette? Stick to what looks best on the console!
Then again, unless you're looking to publish your game and have it distributed, you could just stick to what looks best on *your* console!