Now, the greater distances from object to shadow and from outer frame to background generate a more convincing 3D effect (thank you for pointing me to it Razoola
) . This is the current concept:
Ball(s) - checkerboard shadow with regular animation (animation needs more than 8 frames)
Laser-Bullets - checkerboard shadow with regular animation (animation needs more than 8 frames)
Guard-Line - checkerboard shadow with regular animation (animation needs more than 8 frames)
Items - checkerboard shadow with auto-animation
Paddle (+ Laser-Cannon) - solid shadow without animation (to avoid strange looking artefacts when overlapping with Guard-Line shadow)
Blocks - solid shadows without animation but with a slight dithering (I am not really happy with it... )
Originally, I had the Block shadows auto-animated with checkerboard but that has caused too much flickering on the screen - even when viewed on the real system + CRT monitor (it was much more noticable on my LCD monitor).
When an auto-animated checkerboard shadow is moving on the screen (like the Item shadows) there is no flickering noticeable and it looks great.
But when a checkerboard shadow is not moving (like the Block shadows) always a slight flickering appears in the "peripheral field of view". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peripheral_vision.svg)
Just watched Blastar's latest "lens effect" demo again (topics/186542-new-ngcd-demo) on my real NGCD-System - when the B-Button is pressed the "lens" switches to a circle with a nice "flicker-free" blue transparency effect.
@Blastar - Do you think your "palette ram trick" could be used for my Block shadows (projected on a static background sprite)? If yes, are you maybe in the mood to share some more details on how you have obtained this effect?
This is how it looks now: