Posted By
Csabo
on 2024-04-06
15:02:16
|  Re: Standardization questions
Now that you explained a bit more about what you're thinking, I'll add my two cents: there's no real need for something like this. That's also the reason why such a standard never emerged organically, despite the several decades of homebrew projects.
Typically, games will have similarly sized elements. There are lots of examples for this: Adventure Park (which I thought of randomly) has 2x2 character tiles and same-sized enemies. Therefore the code is usually written to handle those sizes explicitly.
Some such "standards" kind of exist though, for example, the Adventure Soft UK games (Rebel Planet, Temple of Terror, and tons of others) have 256*96 size hires bitmaps. These are stored in a very complex, compressed format. The engine that displays them is the same between games, and it's even cross-platform (same gfx on C64, ZX Spectrum). The Bard's Tale animated portraits also have their own format (still fixed size though). Again, these are very game specific.
I honestly can't think of any game that loads and displays variable-sized bitmaps.
Despite all of that, that shouldn't stop you from proposing such a format, but I would not expect widespread use of it.
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