SNES Mode 3 images can look this good (even before any HDMA or colour math)

[Kirk_Johnston]

These images are doing nothing other than using what is possible in the 8bpp Mode 3 using 256 colours from the SNES' 32,768 colour palette. And there's even enough VRAM spare to maybe have a little scrolling and stuff too (possibly along with switching some new tiles in on the fly), along with potentially a simple second background layer for some parallax and maybe some sprites in there also. But, even just as static images and nothing else, they can look gorgeous, and far beyond anything we ever saw in any commercial games or that we've seen in any indie games:

So, why in the hell aren't any SNES indie guys using this kind of stuff in their games, even for menus and cutscenes and the like?

 

I mean, I posted this before, but you can see how much potential there is in taking advantage of all those colours properly:

 

PS. Even though rainwarrior actually tested this 8bpp 256-colour palette cycling stuff, it was my idea in a thread on SNESdev that he was part of that led to him even bothering.

 

It's crazy that I as some random who can't even program on SNES directly, seem to be suggesting stuff the SNES development community isn't even bothering with for the most part, be it with high-colour stuff like this or my Mode 0 concepts that I've posted before but will post here again:

 

Where is the SNES dev scene's drive and passion to actually show off this console and push it to its limits, which presumably they are supposed to love?

 

The stuff we could be seeing on SNES . . .

Edited October 23, 2022 by Kirk_Johnston

[Kirk_Johnston]

Note: Any black bars/borders you see on those image above is just because I shrunk them down from real art examples to fit on SNES in only one of the axis (and then I reduced them to SNES colours and posterized them to 32 levels to match its palette), and they obviously weren't made with the SNES aspect ratio in mind, so I just filled the blank space with black to have them full SNES screen size. If someone were to draw/paint images in the SNES aspect ratio at the start, they could still get that image quality above in the final output result. There's more than enough VRAM on SNES to do full-screen 8bpp 256-colour images with all unique tiles like those and a little bit more, like I said.

Edited October 23, 2022 by Kirk_Johnston