It finished during the last hour actually (thanks for the offer though), and managed to reduce it to 92.1% of its original size. It still won't fit ImageShack or Hotmail's file size limits, but it's better than nothing.
And Zeric, considering the amazing work you usually put out (and the quantity too when you're on a roll), you really shouldn't short-change yourself like that. Too bad you've stopped mapping, but I'm sure there's a good reason for that.
Honestly, I'm 99% happy with the final result and I think I can safely say this is the project I'm the most proud of.
That missing last 1% is because I had to "fudge" certain transparent parts so they don't look exactly like they do in-game. In short, it's impossible to reproduce how the GBA handles transparencies. That meant problems with two parts of the game:
1) Transparent fog swaying in a wavy pattern over a cellar room in the Dance Hall. To reproduce the real colors, I basically took screenshots of the fog over the room in each of its 16 positions, and used single lines from each one that were in the same offset position. In short, I transformed the wavy fog into straight fog.
2) Transparent waterfalls and water surfaces over the parallax background. Transparencies over the foreground aren't a problem since you can map them as is, but the rest, I had to be creative. Thankfully, the water layer uses a single shade of blue for everything that's under the water surface, so I simply had to take a screenshot underwater, and use those colors to make a separate background for the parts underwater.
After that, all that remained were the water falls and water surfaces which, unfortunately, use 14 colors. It was simply impossible to capture how each color in the background would look with the transparency effect for each of those 14 shades of blue. Thankfully, those parts aren't really big and so I was able to approximate something acceptable using Paint Shop Pro. And anyway, the most important part was the underwater effect which I got perfectly.
I'll try to finish the Boss Rush tonight (all that remains are, again, the labels and final layout) and I'll look into a way to upload this ~14 Mb behemoth.
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Current project: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
Upcoming project: Castlevania Legends (GB)
