... Err. Thank you! ;D
The decision about transparency arose with hud stuff. A solid hud could potentially hide missiles, enemies, etc, but a little transparency helped a lot. ...
In one of your last posts you wrote;
... Furthermore I was doing a little consideration. In this game I'd like to recreate the feel of a PCEngine game, but the PCE has no transarency management (iirc). PCEngine games (iirc, again) emulated transparency alterning image/blank rapidly ... Instead, as an "artistic license" I'll use proper transparency since I find the result much, much better and I can use it for weapons and UI without causing anyone an epileptic seizure; please don't get mad at me! ^__^
Almost none of the older video hardware, based on color mapping, has any sort
of "transarency management". It won't make any sense to begin with. For,
wiping the color table would render any transparency relation useless.
Whenever you can set three different colors you can also have transparency
independent of whatever the video hardware is capable of. Even the C64 could
show transparent colors.
You know what? If you want to reproduce PCEngine graphics, or retro graphics
for that matter, you better skip 24-bit truecolor mode and all the fancy
blending equations and work out straight from a color table. This might sound
counterintuitive for the spoiled developer raised on a 24-bit color space. xD
Making a retro game with 24-bit coloring / 24-bit shading / 24-bit
transparency will never get the vibe from any of the older games. This is
mostly misunderstood by many devs while making retro games. It's not just only
about junky pixels, scanlines, or simple sprites. A major part is the color
table. Cutting out the table will cut out a very specific flavor of being
retro, i.e. the false coloring produced while creating many shades and false
transparency colors from the color table. It's not important that the shades
or transparency colors always match perfectly, it just needs to be consistent.
So given a color map, you compute a transparency lookup table that index the
color table. And voilà, you have transparency (epileptic seizure free! xD). On
its core basis you won't even need the blending equation, you can set the
index by hand, yet it can be used for finding the best possible index. Same
thing can be done for shades.
This picture already shows what I mean. The craft, the green bug, and the
stars have way too many shades already. It really doesn't fit from a retro
perspective, even while putting scanlines on it, it doesn't help.
I know there are many people out there ready to ban color tables from the
planet for good. It was always sort of a hassle using them and working around
their limitations. However. This sort of limitation gave birth to a very
distinctive style, which, up to my point of view, can be put to good use for
modern video games esp. for those trying to mimicking all the retro antics.
