Watch the master (sander, in this case) at work:




Awesome, dude

BTW, nice looking graphics..But I hope you realize most, if not all the detail will be lost when converting to MSX. Vector graphics are only usable for hi-res, IMO.

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I need the same for screen 5 and -if possible- higher. This way you can work with the MSX colors and RGB values within Paint Shop.

Paint Shop Pro can't work with palettes larger than 256 colors. I don't know what Photoshop's capabilities in this are, but MSX palette is 512 colors.

Snout posted my drawing a little bit to soon.

Most blocks you see in the drawing, use only 3 colors (except the blue ones and the rotated ones. But, switching anti-aliasing off really doesn't look very different. My point was that all blocks you see origin from the third block on the left side. And that one only consist of 3 basic shapes. A rounded rectangle, a line used four times and a half circle. The other blocks are just the same block, but with other properties, resized or rotated.

Drawing the first block took less than 1 minute, changing the properties of the other (cloned) blocks less than 2 minutes.

The point I want to make here is that drawing most shapes of one level can be done in less than an hour this way. If I can get more people interested in this way of drawing for MSX, and we can exchange and modify each other vector gfx, the possibilities are endless. Except the development time: I promise you this can be cut back to 10 % of original development time compared to -let's say- DDGraph.

So, this isn't about 16, 256 or higher colors. It's about the way you draw.

I will make some more examples soon. I'll stick to 16 colors only next time to avoid confusions.

BTW: Paint Shop pro works with 2,4,16 ore 32 bit colors. My point was that it is possible to program a plugin for it with support for custom color palettes.

The blocks you've drawn there are 38x22 pixels. This is far too big for MSX games, since the screen resolution is only 256x212 in screen 5 (or even Gfx9000 P1 mode).

Resizing a block to 16x8 would make it more useful, but you it looks like crap then! None of the detail that's in the original block remains, not even the edges.
Try then to decrease the colordepth to 4 bits (=16 colors) and nothing remains but an ugly collection of pixels.

I'm sorry, but vector graphics really are no option on a low-res 16-color palette screenmode. It takes more time to make a vector graphic look good on MSX, then it would take to draw from scratch in AGE or Graphsaurus.

I used 9 colors for the above picture. Not more than 2 colors per 8 pixels (I might be offset one pixel somewhere, but with vectors, I can easy click on the block involved, and shuffle everything that's drawn on them).

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Nice ones Sander. How about creating a public library of tiles GFX in screen 4/5/etc ?

Hmm. Public tile set yes. Static pixels no. I want to make a library that you can adjust over and over again without repixeling. I admit that drawing for screen 4 is a bit more challenging. I will try to make a title set for a complete platform level in screen 4, in vectors. That set can then be easy modified for screen 5 (more colors per line), or screen 10 or higher.

Let's say you need tiles for a screen 10 game. I know you have the 4 pixel restrain there too and I know of the color bleeding. You can avoid that if you use colors that are near each other in a 360 degrees color circle (look at your paint program and you see what I mean. I loaded the above vector tile set. Selected all blocks with the vector selection tool and turned on anti-aliasing on the vectors. Afterwards I selected some random vectors, changed the color value and added some gradients.



(256 colors used. I bet no colorspill will be seen when converting this to screen 12, after putting the blocks in a 8*8 matrix.

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Let's say you need tiles for a screen 10 game. I know you have the 4 pixel restrain there too and I know of the color bleeding.

Actually no... In SC10 you can freely use 16 palette colors. Only using YJK system is kinda bleedy.

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You can avoid that if you use colors that are near each other in a 360 degrees color circle (look at your paint program and you see what I mean.

Actually, you can avoid that by only changing Lumination each pixel while keeping the same basic color for 4 pixels.

>Actually no... In SC10 you can freely use 16 palette colors. Only using YJK system is kinda bleedy.

I was talking about YJK colors, else I wouldn't have posted an image here with 256 colors.


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>You can avoid that if you use colors that are near each other in a 360 degrees color circle (look at your paint program and you see what I mean.

>>Actually, you can avoid that by only changing Lumination each pixel while keeping the same basic color for 4 pixels.

That's how I made the intro logo for Dix. But you have to agree that if you keep the same basic color per 4 pixels and only change the luminance, you can not do more than do some reflection / brightness adjustments.

yadaa yadaa yadaa... ahum

But, GuyveR, how do you feel about generating a library of freely useable and adaptable MSX Graphics? No matter the techniques that were used to create these graphics, it could be a very interesting library don't you think?

Open source? Open graphics!!

>It's techically impossible to change the basic color within 4 pixels! It's simply the way YJK system works! Only luminance can change!

That's not what I meant. When drawing within doozle or Graphsaurus, you're stucked with the interface that let's you only scroll to nearby colors and luminance (or pick another basic color), so you would never dare to try things.

I have doubts... If lots of people would start using graphics from an open library, a lot of things would look the same.
I'm all in favour for writing some powerful cross-development tools for graphics and design, but in my opinion art should be original.

And I don't think people (both developers and users) want 'generic' graphics. If they want generic, they would use the standard MSX font in stead of designing their own.