Comparison of Backgrounds

Ok I have put a comparison of the backgrounds from the NES, All Stars and our version of Super Mario Bros.

I think most of the backgrounds work really well however there are a few that have major differences.

10. The nightime background, we don't have anything to reproduce that at this point. It is very important that we find a way to recreate this background. Any ideas??
13. This is basically the same as 7 but brown.
14. The level before bowser's castle, again there isn't any similar background to use with the castle walls. We might be able to create this with a modified tileset.

Also the title screen is still being worked on so keep that in mind.

Post any ideas, suggestions or comments you may have.


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hamradio wrote:

10. The nightime background, we don't have anything to reproduce that at this point. It is very important that we find a way to recreate this background. Any ideas??

What exactly do we know about this?

I understand that the sky color of a background model is probably be determined by the "_sora" texture files (naturally, sora means sky). They have a 8-bit gray-scale color depth and are either solid color or may also contain transparent sections.
I tried to recolor one of them, but it snaps back to gray once I try to re-insert it. I believe the color information might be hidden in the texture file or somewhere else in the model data, but hell if I knew where to look.

Edit: Didn't you forget SMB 6-3 in your list? It has a very unique look with its completely gray environment.

Yeah I had the same problems when trying to recolor the gradient backgrounds, the texture seems to just control the shape of the gradient. The colors of the gradient must be stored somewhere. I think by comparing the blue gradient background (0B02) to the teal gradient background (5802) we might be able to find out what is different and determine what controls the color. But I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

Oh yeah forgot about 6-3 with all those backgrounds I was bound to miss one. It is really just 4 with a nightime background. I'll update it soon.

Ok I have made a bit of progress due to VampireLordAlucard's post (and Pop006's reply) over at the Riivolution forums.
There is a background that has only one large texture and a single plane. It is blue mushroom (3C02). It is very easy to replace the background texture with another completely different one using SZS modifier.

Theres only one catch I tried copying the arc for this over another one with the intention of replacing a number of backgrounds with this method and it didn't work (it just didn't appear at all).
So if we could find a way to replace a lot of the backgrounds with 3C02 we could easily create a number of new backgrounds.

I quickly tried out a simple nightime background and it worked pretty well.

Update

Credit: VampireLordAlucard and Hamradio

Looking good hamradio, this is really starting to take shape now.

Love the shaded hills.
Now it would be great if we could even animate the stars to be blinking, but we can't have everything...

hamradio and I have been working hard on getting these backgrounds to look nice. I've been finding backgrounds that are good to edit and coming up with the concepts, and he's been putting it together. There is another one we made some quick 'proof of concepts' of, and it looks great. I think you guys will really like it

nikeymikey wrote:

Looking good hamradio, this is really starting to take shape now.

Sorry I forgot to say that it was VampireLordAlucard and myself who worked on this, I just edited the textures. I can't take all the credit.

Quote :

Love the shaded hills.
Now it would be great if we could even animate the stars to be blinking, but we can't have everything...

Thanks. I'd love to see that too but I'm not sure it is possible at this point.