yes/sorta, its not that big of a deal but yes, like how monochrome is more efficient and less memory consuming that gscale, however gscale and masking make things look nice. but even this is not a good analogy because masking will not out any noticeable tax on the system. i think the alternative to masking is that the guy just sits on a white tile, which probably wont look to good. i have not ever heard of transparency masking in calc games. also, you only have one thing that this needs to apply to, some games mask 10 things simultaneously.

at its most basic level, masking is just puting out 2 sprites instead of one. the first prepares the tile so that it looks normal, you dont want to be able to see the scenery behind the sprite right? and the second just puts the sprite out there on the prepared location.

as to your question about slowing the game down, it wont be noticeable. if you read what i wrote before, its not anything that requires an artists touch to create a mask, i would leave this part up to the coders. if you still dont know how calculator masking works, just post and ill try to go more indepth or w/e you need, my first post goes fairly technically into it, and if you dont know what 'and'ing or 'or'ing a sprite onto someplace i can explain that too.

This post has been edited by dinhotheone on 11 Dec, 2007, 16:14