Posts like this on "SNES"dev are really starting to annoy me

[Kirk_Johnston]

https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=24117

 

Some guy has developed a really cool tool for converting high colour images to 4bpp images that are compatible with the likes of SNES, PC Engine and presumably Genesis too, but, in all the talk of how to get around the 4bpp colour limitations and get closest to the high-colour original images, not one of these so-called SNES guys is actually advocating for the fact that SNES has a dang 8bpp mode that would allow for 256 colours per tile without any stupid 16 colours per tile limitation (I know I've certainly brought that up a few times now), and I absolutely think that could make a rather huge difference in some cases especially with some of the banding they mention (even more so when palette cycling and stuff like that comes into play in the example I've mentioned below).

 

Why are SNES developers getting stuck with tools that actually just serve the capabilities and indeed limitations of PC engine and presumably Genesis but not fully taking advantage of all SNES has to offer?

 

And why do all the people in "SNES"dev seem so frikin' happy about this--like reducing the SNES' full capabilities down to that of the other consoles, effectively wasting its full potential here, and indeed one of its big advantages over the other systems of the time, is a good thing.

 

If this tool were properly designed for SNES, there would absolutley be an 8bpp mode in there for people who actually do want to push the system fully and show off just what it can do.

 

I mean, I brought up this idea about using the 8bpp mode on SNES for some potentially stunning images https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=282500#p282500 and it really just received ideas for how to immediately gimp it by most of those guys, for all the most stupid reasons imo. Yet, ironically, when one of them bothered to actually test my idea (roughly), it showed just how much potential there was there: 

And that was literally just the guy's first atttempt at doing what I said, not really taking it to it's full conclusion. So imagine what could be achieved if anyone actually gave a proper crap and really tried to push this idea as far as possible on SNES.

 

But "SNES"dev just wasn't the place for that. I wasted so much breath there basically talking in pointless circles with mostly people who just wanted to code for the sake of coding and little more. People who literally couldn't talk in common language like "aspect ratio" and understand what that means to most people outside of their own nerd-centric world.

 

I also had an idea for a SNES shmup using Mode 0, to specifically show off another unique aspect of the SNES SNES again, a d they constantly kept trying to basically shut that down too or get mr to just turn it into every other Mode 1 SNES title, so nothing different about it all really--missing part of the point entirely.

 

You can check out early concepting for that Shmup here:

Honestly, it was like dealing with a bunch of small-thinking robots most of the time, with no passion or vision or ambition whatsoever, certainly not for the console they were supposed to be in that particular forum for. They nearly drove me away multiple times--the mods literally told me I couldn't big-up the SNES every now and then (in a SNES development forum--just think about that for a moment)--and I eventually just left of my own accord.

 

It seems this is what the current SNES community is--it's so sad to see--no wonder the Genesis dev community is running utter rings around it right now.

 

No wonder I left that place--most of those dudes just don't seem to give one crap about SNES at all, and are just a bunch of programming nerds, who might as well have made a forum that wasn't titled "SNES"dev at all but rather "ElitistCODERSunit" or something like that.

 

Sorry for the kinda blunt rant, but there's a reason behind everything.

 

Can someone out there please build a forum for people that are ACTUAL SNES fans/creators first and foremost. . . .

Edited September 8, 2022 by Kirk_Johnston

[Lost Monkey]

That thread you linked to tells me all I need to know.

[Punisher5.0]

When did the NESDev forum come back?

[neogeo1982]

2 hours ago, Punisher5.0 said:

When did the NESDev forum come back?

I wish MUDs would make a come back. Imagine a keyboard adaptor and a MUD for Snes. 

[roots.genoa]

3 hours ago, Punisher5.0 said:

When did the NESDev forum come back?

Around last December

[Kirk_Johnston]

3 hours ago, neogeo1982 said:

I wish MUDs would make a come back. Imagine a keyboard adaptor and a MUD for Snes. 

You know, with the kind of graphic novel type of adventure game I was talking about in my post on SNESdev, I think something akin to this could be possible on SNES, at least in a single player capacity.

 

https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=282500#p282500

 

And 

 

It would most likely work in the form of a slightly more interactive Choose Your Own Adventure kind of experience. But, with those 8bpp 256-colour images with palette cycling for some lovely animation and such, I honestly think something pretty stunning could be achieved on SNES in that area.

 

And, the whole point I was getting at originally when I proposed the idea, was that because of SNES' specific 8bpp 256-colour mode, it would be possible to achieve a visual result on that system that would be beyond what could be achieved on the other consoles like Genesis and PC Engine what were competing with it at the time.

 

When you mix and match the various modes and capabilities of the SNES correctly, sometimes using the full 256-colour mode for the most visually stunning colour-cycled images, sometimes maybe using Mode 0's four fully overlapping backgrounds for something a bit more visually dynamic (lots of parallax), and get a lot of nice transparency effects in there too and so on, it could just be pretty awesome imo.

 

Well, at least I can totally visualise soemthing along those lines in my head anyway.

Edited September 9, 2022 by Kirk_Johnston

[roots.genoa]

32 minutes ago, Kirk_Johnston said:

Well, at least I can totally visualise soemthing along those lines in my head anyway.

In your head, sure, but there are probably memory constraints (both in RAM and ROM). 😅 I found your shoot 'em up videos very impressive until I realized it was done with Game Maker; I really can't imagine that running on SNES without being very slow. I can understand your frustration, though.

[Kirk_Johnston]

1 hour ago, roots.genoa said:

In your head, sure, but there are probably memory constraints (both in RAM and ROM). 😅 I found your shoot 'em up videos very impressive until I realized it was done with Game Maker; I really can't imagine that running on SNES without being very slow. I can understand your frustration, though.

To be clear, the shmup stuff has already been tested in actual SNES format, both via a SMW ROM hack and as a standalone .smc file, and everything works as intended--I think I mentioned that in most of the video descriptions--so you don't have to worry about anything there. And the test above by rainwarrior shows the 8bpp 256-colour images working directly on SNES (with VRAM and ROM room to spare), so no issue there either.

 

Both examples are totally within the SNES' capabilities, and, honestly, neither is actually near pushing it to its limits. That shmup is currently doing little more than displaying the standard four backgrounds available in Mode 0, some row/line scrolling and some simple transparency for the most part. And the high-colour image examples are literally nothing more than full screen 8bpp images with some palette cycling.

 

I think a lot of people get confused with what they are seeing and what they think has to be done to achieve it, which, I guess is part of the whole trick. 

 

Everything you see is pretty standard for SNES actually. It's just that, imo, most people haven't bothered to even try doing some pretty standard but not so typical stuff like this on SNES to date. Most people seem to just default to Mode 1 and have a couple of basic overlapping layers and done, or it's a whole load of [admittedly cool] SMW ROM hacks. And Mode 0 has been almost entirely ignored for the most part, with literally around a handful of commercial games using it. So a lot of people probably underestimate just how capable the SNES is in some specific areas, particularly once you start experimenting with some of the less popular modes.

 

I mean, honestly, so many people still think the SNES can only show 4 colours per layer in Mode 0 and 16 colours per layer in Mode 5 [also thinking Mode 5 is only a single layer too] for example (it took me ages to find decent sources that actually explained this properly and clearly). And many of them don't realise that it is also capable of column scrolling just like on Genesis but actually to a higher quality, that Mode 5's 512x448 resolution is fully usable in-game, and that you can repeatedly switch background modes down the screen, etc. This is exactly why I created this article:

 

https://inceptionalnews.wordpress.com/2022/08/26/snes-background-modes/

 

They're not fully aware of the actual capabilities of these modes, and sometimes don't even know of all the other background modes and/or many other features of the system, at least not in terms of actually trying to use them in any meaningful way that could be applied in actual games from what I have seen.

 

So, yeah, I think the SNES still has a whole lot to give.

 

That's my take anyway, and part of the reason exactly why I want to see people trying some of this stuff on the system in modern times, and really showing off exactly what it is capable of in the right hands and with a bit of vision, passion and ambition. And hopefully some of the topics I post and the concepts I test myself and then share with the SNES community can help a little in achieving that at some point. 

Edited September 9, 2022 by Kirk_Johnston

[SlidellMan]

I'm kind of glad that I didn't sign up for that forum. Even the Critical Drinker would be calling them out for their dismissive attitudes.

[Tanooki]

Seems fairly toxic if the hardware limits are hard facts and known to have them dismiss that, make excuses, and choose a 4bpp video option over the clearly open to use one twice the size.  It's like they enjoy being crippled.  I'm quite disgusted because there has been quite so few releases for the SNES compared to the Genesis and largely the NES.  It makes little to no sense, until you see idiots and apathy smash together, in that sense right there.  There have been some impressive bits of work on the SNES side but few and far between.  DSP required Hind Strike is a fantastic game that does some really solid work, largely seems to expand on the concept of the attack chopper bonus ending stages of Pilotwings.  And some other bits like that for a time, that have come out from Piko who grabbed up a few unfinished titles.  But largely the SNES stuff has been pretty sad.  I don't see why the system should be so much worse and harder to work on, is not the CPU basically a 16bit variant of the popular 6502 the NES gets new homebrew for weekly it seems.  Maybe it's the SPC people don't want to make sampled audio for?  I'd love to know a legit reason why it doesn't get much despite being by far the most popular of the old era of Nintendo consoles along with the NES.  But if the problem comes down to time wasting excuse making lackies and toadies on that faux snes dev forum there being a root cause or at least effect of X causing this garbage, a huge shift needs to happen or snes game dev is doomed for now.

[Kirk_Johnston]

Yeah, it's just really weird to me that, given how beloved and popular the SNES was and still is, the modern homebrew development scene for it is nearly completely stagnant.

 

I think it just needs one person who can really code or whatever to create a proper software development kit (SDK) and give everyone else a solid foundation to build on.

 

I'm kinda amazed that a bunch of the same people who built all the awesome emulators for SNES never got around to creating an SDK or general set of creation tools for the community to use at some point too.

 

It's times like this that I really wish I could wrap my head around programming properly, but I just can't--and I really have tried.

 

All I can do is wait and hope it happens at some point in the not too distant future....

Edited September 11, 2022 by Kirk_Johnston

[jeffythedragonslayer]

On 9/11/2022 at 4:24 AM, Kirk_Johnston said:

I'm kinda amazed that a bunch of the same people who built all the awesome emulators for SNES never got around to creating an SDK or general set of creation tools for the community to use at some point too.

I think creating an emulator (well, the CPU core anyway) is a lot easier than creating an SDK.  You implement each opcode, just once, and you're done.  But to write a big piece of software that runs on the system being emulated, you not only have to know what the opcodes do, but you have to use them many times, in exactly the right order.

 

I think PVsneslib has a lot of potential but it's still in its infancy.

[Kirk_Johnston]

What I think would be something really amazing for us all to use, from complete noobs to the most hardcore programmers, would be pretty much a single SNES development tool/program along the lines of something like Game Maker 8.1 (and even older versions if possible, but not the newer versions that get far too convoluted imo).

 

It would be designed so you could create an entire game basically from inside the program (art, sprites, backgrounds, levels, code/scripts, etc--only music creation is missing in GM8.1, but it's probably in new Studio now) and/or very easily load in any necessary files you might have created in some art package like Photoshop or some audio program or whatever, with an interface designed for actual humans rather than just programmers, and that can be, on one end, as simple as a drop & drag tool for making very simple games in literally hours, or at the other other end, allow full access to the programming language to access of all the various elements needed to create games as complex as Hyper Light Drifter, Overcrowd, Lunark, Undertale, Katana Zero, 8-bit killer, etc.

 

If that existed, I think the SNES homebrew scene would go through the roof almost overnight. But, I think it would take some very special and talented people to create something like that. And, if these people were very smart, they'd not only make that program output games that work perfectly on SNES, but also in other format so those same games could easily be published on other platforms for more revenue if desired. That's just the idea I have in my head for it.

 

Now, Game Maker 8.1 already shows a perfect starting template for that imo, and it just needs someone to basically create the same for SNES as a complete development environment with a user interface that's as completely intuitive and simple and designer/artist-centered as that on a surface level. I mean, seriously, if I had the means, I'd almost completely rip it off and just make the same thing but for full-on SNES development, right down to the layout and menus and drop & drag buttons and everything (making sure to change just enough visually and the like so I couldn't get sued).

 

PS. If some of you have never used Game Maker (the older versions before Studio), go download it and see how truly quick and easy it is to open, start the fist tutorial and have a simple but fully-working game up and running in minutes, as well as learn basically all of the interface extremely quickly at that initial drop & drag level, and then just keep progressing from there, until, maybe a week or so later, you're able to start programming your own games using the GML language. THAT is exactly what the SNES development scene needs imo. Basically, it's a SNES version of NESmaker, ala SNESmaker, but I think maybe even a bit better.

 

I'm still crossing my fingers that one day the guys who made NESmaker will actually make the SNESmaker they were talking about. But, sadly, it's feeling less and less like that's actually going to happen.

Edited January 6 by Kirk_Johnston