10-22-2011, 01:33 PM
I've been working on a Castlevania game lately (sorry, my card game is on hold cuz the mechanics were getting complicated). While working on scripting the Axe Knights (by recording their movement and going through it frame by frame in AnimationShop), I noticed some discrepancies between the actual sprite in the game and the sprite in the enemies sprite sheet here on Spriters Resource. Now, that in itself isn't mind-boggling. When you rip from the ROM rather than doing screenshots, the pixels in the ROM are aligned for efficiency -- if one sprite is 15 pixels wide and the sprite adjacent is 1 pixel wide, merge them into a single sprite and then shift them in the game. Sometimes these are easy to spot in the sprite sheets (such as when a sprite is supposed to be pillowed but you have one or two pixels that aren't). However in the case of the Axe Knight, there were a couple quirks I noticed that you would never have guessed were in the game just by looking at the sprites.
![[Image: axekntdemo.png]](/image.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fimg231.imageshack.us%2Fimg231%2F5222%2Faxekntdemo.png&hash=8a325f10dda7488c9fa3705e008ece3a)
In the picture above, the sprites at the top are from the game. The sprites on the bottom are from the sprite sheet. The set on the left differs in that the arm and head are pulled away from the back. This leaves a gap right in the middle of the sprite. I caught this when an Axe Knight passed over a torch and I could see the torch showing through there. The set on the right differs in that the back foot is pulled away from the rest of the legs, leaving a gap between the knee and the shin.
So are these mistakes in the programming or did the Castlevania designers actually plan that out with some mystical farseeing powers? I mean, I can understand shifting a set of pixels to align them properly, but shifting a set of pixels AWAY FROM the rest of the pixels just seems really odd if it's going to cause graphical problems.
In the picture above, the sprites at the top are from the game. The sprites on the bottom are from the sprite sheet. The set on the left differs in that the arm and head are pulled away from the back. This leaves a gap right in the middle of the sprite. I caught this when an Axe Knight passed over a torch and I could see the torch showing through there. The set on the right differs in that the back foot is pulled away from the rest of the legs, leaving a gap between the knee and the shin.
So are these mistakes in the programming or did the Castlevania designers actually plan that out with some mystical farseeing powers? I mean, I can understand shifting a set of pixels to align them properly, but shifting a set of pixels AWAY FROM the rest of the pixels just seems really odd if it's going to cause graphical problems.