Hmm, I haven't put em in tiles yet, but I would estimate 7x256x256 tiles should do it. The game has a budget of 32 tiles in memory at a time, for general spritey stuff (not counting the main background, sky, font etc). Each tile takes up 256x256x4 = 256K of memory, so those guys should take up nearly 2 megs altogether - quite a bit, sure! I certainly do wish we had more graphics memory to play with! (I'd make 'em higher res). Or proper, fast access to system memory, I'd love to fill up 128megs of sysram with graphics!
But I'm going to get good value out of those graphics. I'm going to put different weapons in their hands, and because the head is seperate, I can use vertex colours to make the bodies any colour I want - notice that it's all grey, and therefore a blank slate for colour manipulation? So I can have regular white ones, extra big yellow ones, red ones with laser guns, and super-evil black ninja ones, for example, all with the one graphics set. Getting the maximum use out of vidram is my #1 concern with this game.
Oh, and there IS the option to reduce the tiles to half size, and store them in 16 bit colour. It looks really crappy, but then each tile only takes up 32K, so maybe it'll make all the difference to some sorry sod somewhere...
But I'm going to get good value out of those graphics. I'm going to put different weapons in their hands, and because the head is seperate, I can use vertex colours to make the bodies any colour I want - notice that it's all grey, and therefore a blank slate for colour manipulation? So I can have regular white ones, extra big yellow ones, red ones with laser guns, and super-evil black ninja ones, for example, all with the one graphics set. Getting the maximum use out of vidram is my #1 concern with this game.
Oh, and there IS the option to reduce the tiles to half size, and store them in 16 bit colour. It looks really crappy, but then each tile only takes up 32K, so maybe it'll make all the difference to some sorry sod somewhere...