Originally posted by HunterZ
That's interesting. I wonder if that's the way all 2D PSX games work? Or, maye it's related to the fact that it was originally a Sega CD game.
SOTN was never under development for the Sega-CD. There was a Castlevania under development for the 32X add-on, but it died early in development.
I also wonder what it would look like played on a PS2 with PSX texture smoothing enabled.
It looks ugly with texture filtering enabled, just like all PSX games.
2D on 3D works great in Open-GL too, just upload your textures and tiles to the graphics card's texture memory and put them on 2D billboards. You can now move them around and stretch, scale or rotate them in hardware. You don't have to do screen writes, the graphics card handles all that for you. You now have platform independant hardware sprites and multiple scrolling planes with effects.
Even cooler, if you're using 3D rendered sprites, you can use the alpha channel to mask your sprite and not have to clean any dark edges off it.
In Lightwave you'd do it like this:
Place the object to be rendered on a black background and in the render options turn on "Fader alpha mode", this is the same as you'd do to composite the image over somthing else (like film, video, or whatever). It saves out the RGB channels and alpha channel seperately without combining them into an RGB image. (if you're using Photoshop, save the RGB and alpha to seperate images, Photoshop messes up the RGB channels in RGBA images)
Use the RGBA channels for your sprite or tile texture. It will anti-alias against any background (the AA was calculated in the alpha channel when you renderd the sprite) with no dark fringes. What you are doing here is real time compositing in hardware, neat.
DX8 actually merged 2D blits into the 3D pipeline, but I'm not sure how much control you have over them (haven't looked closely at that)
