Trying to figure out Mode 8
Posted: Mon May 07, 2018 12:38 am
I'm still exploring uzebox here, and right now I'm looking at video mode 8 a little more closely. It looks quite simpler than other modes, mostly because it's a very raw approach to making graphics, so one would need to code a lot of functionality on top of it. But it looks interesting. I imagine it would limit drastically the amount of images you can have in your game, without any sort of compression. And putting pixels individually also seems computationally expensive.
Anyway, while it looks simple to read pixel, put pixel, the actual workflow to make a sprite you can read from doesn't look inviting. Looking at the sprite.raw from bitmapdemo, it looks like it came from a similar exporter to Gimp's raw data (.data) format. The include (sprite.inc) however seems to have been generated by some other means (hopefully not by hand!). I tried other export options from gimp; there are some bitmap that output an almost usable result. I tried using that bin2hex tool but doesn't seem relevant here. I can't seem to force Gimp to output 2 bits for each color, even in indexed mode with only 4 colors in the palette.
Are there any tools out there made for this mode that I'm not seeing? Has anyone used this mode before and would like to share some hints?
Anyway, while it looks simple to read pixel, put pixel, the actual workflow to make a sprite you can read from doesn't look inviting. Looking at the sprite.raw from bitmapdemo, it looks like it came from a similar exporter to Gimp's raw data (.data) format. The include (sprite.inc) however seems to have been generated by some other means (hopefully not by hand!). I tried other export options from gimp; there are some bitmap that output an almost usable result. I tried using that bin2hex tool but doesn't seem relevant here. I can't seem to force Gimp to output 2 bits for each color, even in indexed mode with only 4 colors in the palette.
Are there any tools out there made for this mode that I'm not seeing? Has anyone used this mode before and would like to share some hints?