[Feature Request] Layer / Sprite Analyzer(?)

[SlyCoop91]

Hi, I am unsure if you'll ever implement this feature, but I would be interested to see a way to visually analyze the background layer(s) and the sprites used currently on stream. It would have a window showing the color palettes used by the on-screen background layers and sprites, as well as a way to rewind animations one frame at a time. The rewind function wouldn't affect gameplay since exiting would return you to exactly when you paused it in-game.

The reasons for requesting this feature are two: First, it'll help users to easily keep track of visual bugs and stuff they might miss. I know that I had this problem when playtesting games and having to restart repeatedly to record the problem. Secondly, it'll help any devs who love retro games and wanna honor them by keeping graphical tricks used in them alive to this day. I am one such individual who is fascinated by how Sting Chameleon goes invisible, so I want to replicate how the game's developers did it but in my own way.

[mstan]

Hello! Thanks for the question. Happy to give my thoughts on the matter:

Is this something I may consider eventually implementing? The answer is yes, I would like to implement this plus other developer friendly tooling to help continue modding and decompilation.

As far as bandwidth goes, it is not something I realistically have the time for. Megaman X recompiled is a byproduct of snesrecomp, which is where I'd actually build these types of implementations out, as I'd want it to be re-usable across the snesrecomp ecosystem and not Megaman X specific. That said, I also maintain many other recomp ecosystem tools, such as psxrecomp. For that one in particular, I have been very humbled and am grateful that others in the community have built in tooling to that one, including tooling for rollback, which allowed us to implement rewinding (and I believe would be extremely useful for you especially to avoid that restart loop).

Candidly, I'd love to see it and am willing to collaborate with community contributions. In reality, it is not a priority for myself at the moment given other tasks I'm working on, so likely it will need to come from the community. I'll run it by the others I'm collaborating with on psxrecomp and see if they have any opinions about the future of this type of taskwork here in the snesrecomp ecosystem.

Let me know if you have any other questions on this!

[SlyCoop91]

Thanks for answering back. As of this moment, I don't have any questions right now but just statements on the matter. The main things I wanted to figure out using that feature if implemented were to figure out three things: First, from the base color palette to when changed to completely black, what were the color palettes used in-between during the shifting? Second, how much horizontal offsetting (max from left and right) was used for the subscreen in comparison to when the pixels were in their original positioning while Sting Chameleon was invisible? Finally, what color maths were used during each frame of its disappearing animation?

The first two reasons are the main ones I wanted to use the feature for, and I was gonna trying to extrapolate what color maths were used by testing the formulas to properly recreate the invisibility ability of Sting Chameleon. That would entail testing different formulas, including multiple ones, with each animation frame and their particular color palette.