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NEC PC-Engine/SuperGrafx => PC Engine/SuperGrafx Discussion => Topic started by: spenoza on May 24, 2011, 03:28:07 AM
Title: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: spenoza on May 24, 2011, 03:28:07 AM
Alright, I know I start a lot of these kinds of threads, but I love reading what comes out of them. So the new question is, what are the best technical and artistic tricks plied by PCE developers? Feel free to post pictures or videos to provide examples. Extremely complicated effects or very simple effects with dramatic visual or artistic results all quality in my mind. One of my favorite examples is the backgrounds in Vasteel.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: soop on May 24, 2011, 03:37:19 AM
I like the "parallax" in PC denjin. Really gives a sense of speed. And although it's not a trick per-se, the absolutely massive sprites in The Kung Fu are very impressive. Especially considering the time.
The thing is though, around that time, I was still playing Spectrum games, so things like sampled speech were mindblowing (like the Ghostbusters game).
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: roflmao on May 24, 2011, 04:19:03 AM
The thing is though, around that time, I was still playing Spectrum games, so things like sampled speech were mindblowing (like the Ghostbusters game).
The "I'll be back" from Soldier Blade wow'ed me like that back in the day. :)
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: spenoza on May 24, 2011, 05:33:17 AM
Another thing I really like is the combination of colors used in LoT on the Dezant level. Also, the desert level in GoT. I found those particular choices to be excellent design from a color perspective.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Digi.k on May 25, 2011, 04:15:42 AM
those pink clouds and scrolling effects later on in parodius DA!?! plus some of the boss sizes and drum samples especially on said level with the nutcracker suite music pc-e style!!
There are also some great graphical effects in Parasol Stars not seen in any other versions.
I was also particularly impressed with the rocking ship level in dracula X
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Arkhan on May 25, 2011, 04:36:57 AM
The plains of Shadow of the Beast create a very unduplicatable atmosphere.
I also like when simple parallax is done very well to create depth.
Dead Moon stage 1 for example. Its a simple effect, but the art is done so well that its like DAMN LOOK AT THAT.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: roflmao on May 25, 2011, 04:52:10 AM
I was just watching a video about Deep Blue and was blown away by the parallax scrolling. I'm tempted to hunt down a copy of the game just to be able to see that parallax scrolling on a real TV.
I noticed last night that Air Zonk has really impressive parallax scrolling as well. I think just about every level has tons of it. Then, last night I was watching a video of Super Air Zonk and thought to myself "What happened?" It isn't nearly as impressive from a graphical standpoint, and it's a SUPER CD!
Meh.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: _joshuaTurbo on May 25, 2011, 05:34:54 AM
Super Air Zonk sucks in comparison to the original.
I loved a couple of the animated effects in a few Super CD games especially.
In Loom, when the evil wizard finally gets whats coming to him.
In Might and Magic III when you enter the training facility and it shows a horse running. I could just stare at it for hours.. just amazing animation.
and in Shadow of the Beast, I thought many of the cut scenes were CRAZY well done. I know alot of people loved the 'picking up weapons' animation in Out of this World for Gens and SNES, but I was equally impressed with Beasts animation for SCD!
Also don't forget John Madden Duo's crazy hyper reality intro where you fly into the football stadium!!
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: nodtveidt on May 25, 2011, 06:10:48 AM
The shadow effect in Jackie Chan always impressed me, even moreso now that I know how it was done. Clever abuse of the VDC's priority system. :)
Dead Moon's final boss. The game has pretty awesome line parallax throughout most of the game, but that final boss is just awesome... the fast-paced parallax scrolling and the sheer number of on-screen sprites (especially if you use the green or blue weapons), coupled with the intense soundtrack, make it an cool, unforgettable event. :) At least to me anyways, hehe. :) Not a lot of tricks really, just the line scrolling, but there's virtually no sprite waste, something that some other lesser horizontals screw up with even less going on.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Digi.k on May 25, 2011, 07:31:29 AM
oh I just remembered the 4th stage in magical chase.. the shadows on the background... O__o
and the green clouds and scrolling backgrounds in the final stage of detana!?! twin bee O___O
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Black Tiger on May 25, 2011, 08:08:52 AM
Kabukiden has a cool scene where the camera zooms out from the world map and the landscape shifts around. It's kinda like the 'cinematic' scenes from FFIV, only more epic and complimented with some real cinemas and real orchestral music.
Ys IV has a spot when you go over a waterfall and the world map/bg flips over in 3D.
Legend of Xanadu has some very cool parallax effects in some of its cinemas that is balanced with beautiful art.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: awack on May 25, 2011, 09:36:26 AM
Quote
Ys IV has a spot when you go over a waterfall and the world map/bg flips over in 3D.
I forgot about that, it sneaks up on you.
Showing some card respect for now, scaling in Parodius, threw in the snes port for comparison.
SNES...there are 3 to 5 distorted sprites that i did not include, like the one in the box. (http://i567.photobucket.com/albums/ss114/bethcongo/screenshots/ParodiusdaShinwakaraOwaraiheJ002.png)
Ill post more stuff later.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: soop on May 25, 2011, 10:24:16 AM
Street Fighter II must have some good stuff, right? 20 Megs!!!!!
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Arkhan on May 25, 2011, 11:38:21 AM
Street Fighter II must have some good stuff, right? 20 Megs!!!!!
those aren't really tricks. Those are just tons of nice f*ckin pictures, stored on a really big card. lol
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: BlueBMW on May 25, 2011, 02:42:52 PM
I always thought the effect acheived in stage 3 of Metamor Jupiter was absolutely amazing! The video doesn't do it justice, but in person it really makes you feel like you're in a rotating space ship or something.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Bonknuts on May 25, 2011, 03:45:05 PM
Another thing I really like is the combination of colors used in LoT on the Dezant level. Also, the desert level in GoT. I found those particular choices to be excellent design from a color perspective.
That level has a very nice special effect setup too. The first part, the desert sand, is dynamic tiles - not actual hsync scrolls. This allows the large sand beast to be mostly made of BG tiles too, and not all sprites (which would flicker like crazy). It's clever and brilliantly executed, giving the impressive of a large sprite or to a console programmer into that era of systems, who would normally think of that as a separate BG layer. So it's impressive on both perspectives because the PCE has neither the sprite bandwidth or the second hardware BG layer to pull that off. Yet you see it as is :)
Quote
I always thought the effect acheived in stage 3 of Metamor Jupiter was absolutely amazing! The video doesn't do it justice, but in person it really makes you feel like you're in a rotating space ship or something.
I like that trick too. It's a little more than just a BG linescroll X offset table. They also hsync update the BG color #0 (which nothing can be show behind it) to make a 2nd BG layer. Which definitely helps give the appearance that the canon is rotating. Honestly, the effect really wouldn't work that good without it. That technique of treating the BG color #0 as a special separate BG layer is fairly rare in PCE/TG games, but a handful others use it too.
There is way too many to list and I'll let other people list the obvious impressive ones. So I'll mention Ninja Spirit. The effect isn't that spectacular looking, but the execution is one that surprised me the most out of all the games I've looked at on the PCE. The 2nd level. The forest level with the 2nd scrolling BG. For someone looking at special FX for PCE, it's pretty obvious that it's just dynamic tiles because it's a simple pattern and a pretty small one at that. But the surprising part isn't the dynamic tile, or that the dynamic tileset is rotated by the CPU in realtime (which is a little impressive considering most dynamic tilesets are prerendered). It's the fact that the game does a split level 2bit overlaid graphics manually. What does that mean? Look at the leaves of the trees. The dynamic tiles show through them. Yet, they're not sprite overlays. They also aren't special case of manual overlaid dynamic rotated tile onto these leave pixels either (which is what you would need to do on other systems, and by the cpu itself manually). Instead, the leaves use the upper 2bit planes of the tile and the 2nd BG layer via dynamic tiles uses the lower 2bits of the tile (a tile is 4bits for a total of 16 colors, 15 unique and 1 see through for low priority sprites or BG color #0). Through clever use and setup/structure of the palette (only needs to be setup once), the video hardware itself does the 2bit tile composite for the game. No cpu intervention or extra resource needed. That in and of itself is special, but the reason I found it extremely fascinating is that this is how I've done some specific special transparent graphic tricks on the PCE using the VDC as a hardware assist (akin to the Amiga doing it in some popular demos). And here I find a game that comes sooo close to doing it. I.e. They could have VERY easily made the leave 'pixels' transparent over the dynamic tile layer. But they didn't, of course. I don't know of any other game that does this type of setup (for hardware assist for transparency or even just simple overlaying). And I'm surprised IREM went to the lengths to set this up, but I'm also saddened that they never took the effect in the alternate direction for some really cool and complex transparency effects.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: fragmare on May 25, 2011, 04:36:29 PM
Dracula X - Rondo Of Blood is an obvious choice... it's like a tour de force of artistic and clever bg/sprite tricks that make it seem like the system can do things it's not supposed to.
I've always thought the multidirectional software parallax in lv1 and lv2 of Ninja Spirit was both technically and visually impressive. It's all done with tile animation, but it's so convincing that it's hardware-based parallax, somebody would have to point it out to you in detail to know that it wasn't.
All the games with tons of horizontal interrupt scrolling look great doing it (Coryoon, Air Zonk, Dead Moon, etc.) but it's no great technical feat. In that same vein, the games that use line scrolling (like SFII' CE's floors) or sine wave effects (like the lv2 boss background in Sinistron) are always crowd pleasers. All of these effects are essentially acheived the same way; by way of controlling the horizontal interrupt, sometimes on a per-scanline basis.
The "rolling barrell" effect in lv3 of Metamor Jupiter is pretty simple to do but also pretty nice eye candy. As is the "horizon" effect from Chris Covell's Axelay demo. They both use the same scanline trick, i believe.
Also, some of the tricks used in Soldier Blade are pretty impressive. The overpasses that "parallax" over the city, and the huge tank-like boss that is cleverly comprised of both tiles and sprites. Not to mention the vertical "metal canyon" that uses faked column-scrolling when the huge crack in the Earth opens up.
The transparency effect in Jackie Chan is also very neat.
The rotating "Gunstar-style" title screen of Chris Covell's Tongueman's Logic is also pretty nice looking. Makes the average person think, "Woa, the PCE can do THAT?!"
Not to blow my own horn, but I made some pretty neat effects for Xymati that are completely doable on the PCE...
Another thing I really like is the combination of colors used in LoT on the Dezant level. Also, the desert level in GoT. I found those particular choices to be excellent design from a color perspective.
Totally agree with both of those. In fact, the desert level (Crown) in Gate of Thunder was what really inspired me to play that game ever since I saw it in one of those Duo promo videos. Of course being the dork that I am, I like to pretend that level was a tribute to Insector X :D .
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Digi.k on May 26, 2011, 11:01:44 PM
BTW are those real vector graphics at the intro of space invaders Fukkatsu No Hi ?? because I love them even tho it's very short
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Black Tiger on May 27, 2011, 05:42:44 AM
BTW are those real vector graphics at the intro of space invaders Fukkatsu No Hi ?? because I love them even tho it's very short
A hardcore vector fan would point out that true vector graphics require a vector screen. I've also wondered if those wire frame animations were done in real-time. I think that I asked about it in an "how'd they that?" thread I started a long time ago, but never got an answer.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: sunteam_paul on May 27, 2011, 06:18:39 AM
Someone needs to dig deep into the PCE wireframe capabilities. Who knows what the machine could really do if it were pushed? (hopefully the answer isn't: not much).
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: SignOfZeta on May 27, 2011, 06:28:04 AM
Has anyone ever explained, or even come up with a name for, the weird BG effect that is present in Vasteel's battle scenes? Its also used a lot in the backgrounds of the cinemas in one of the Ranma games.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Black Tiger on May 27, 2011, 08:14:58 AM
Someone needs to dig deep into the PCE wireframe capabilities. Who knows what the machine could really do if it were pushed? (hopefully the answer isn't: not much).
I don't know how taxing wire frame 3D is compared to polygons, but I'm guessing its easier since the former predates the latter for common use. Considering the polygonal stuff that has been done in Genesis and Turbo games, I'm assuming that they should be able to do some decent wire frame stuff.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: ccovell on May 27, 2011, 08:36:24 AM
Has anyone ever explained, or even come up with a name for, the weird BG effect that is present in Vasteel's battle scenes? Its also used a lot in the backgrounds of the cinemas in one of the Ranma games.
It's still just line scrolling / raster effects, with a simple sine wave horizontally, and stretching / compression vertically.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: TheOldMan on May 27, 2011, 08:46:25 AM
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I don't know how taxing wire frame 3D is compared to polygons...
Wireframes are easier, if you don't mind background wires showing through. It gets a bit harder if you want them erased - at that point, it's not much different from a black-filled polygon.
Quote
I'm assuming that they should be able to do some decent wire frame stuff.
Possibly, assuming you don't need a high frame rate. In one test Arkhan and I did (for the vines in junglehunt), we managed to get 5 lines moving before hitting the frame time limit. The problem is that the pce has a 4-plane BG layer, so drawing 1 dot involves 4 read/update/write cycles. Add in the need for floating point math (faked or not), and you can see it's a problem. Not saying impossible, but it looks like it would take a hell of a lot of optimization to get anything above about 15 fps for more than a dozen or so lines....
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: nodtveidt on May 27, 2011, 08:51:01 AM
Doing wireframe on the PCE isn't necessarily easy but it's not tremendously hard either. It's hard to do it *fast* on a large scale in realtime. It also depends on whether you're doing it on tiles or sprites, as the memory layout is a little different between the two. The PCE doesn't have, as far as I know, any direct bitmap modes, so you need to draw pixels in whichever memory arrangement you're going to use, either tiles or sprites. It's tricky because you have to account for surrounding pixels, which means you're going to have to do some bitwise maths. It can be slow, especially if you're doing multiple colors and especially if you're trying to cover a large area. HuC's standard library has a method of setting up a pseudo-bitmap mode, but it's really just a few high-level functions that manipulate tile memory and these functions are sloooooooow despite being written entirely in assembly.
I would surmise that doing wireframe on a screen composed entirely of sprites would be easier due to the difference in memory model, but that's just an educated guess.
EDIT: And what TheOldMan said. :)
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Arkhan on May 27, 2011, 09:03:02 AM
I fiddledicked with doing 3D wireframe stuff on the PCE one time (tried drawing the standard Teapot using the dataset, and fixing it all to a 2D plane).
It went poorly. The lack of a bitmapped mode, coupled with the 6502ness, and HuC, made it a daunting task. Drawing lines and junk on a sprite/tile based system is pretty mentaltarded.
Also, I am talking a proper teapot wireframe, including only showing what should be visible.
If you want a better idea of how herp to the derp it will all turn out, check out the line-based C64 games. It goes a little like that.
I bet if I molested it enough, I could get the teapot working good and maybe even shade it or at least fill the thing in...
but the practicality of it doesn't exist. After you're done maiming the CPU drawing the thing, you'll have no juice left to do anything useful. its not really worth even doing. Prerender the crap as sprites.
As for the Vasteel effect:
The technical term I use is "wigglejiggle"
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: TheOldMan on May 27, 2011, 10:24:47 AM
Quote
I would surmise that doing wireframe on a screen composed entirely of sprites would be easier
Easier, yes. But a bit slower. (And you have to fight the line limit with sprites).
There are differences between sprites and tiles; but except for a slight difference in the memory layout, they are pretty close. It turns out that it's actually faster to use tiles than sprites. Why? Because when you are using tiles, the color planes are 'paired'; there are two sets of bits next to each other in memory for the tiles. This allows you to increment to get to the next plane of the pair. With sprites, the planes are at a fixed offset from each other (32 bytes, I -think-. Don't yell if I got it wrong, bonknauts). So, to go from one plane to another, you have to do an add, which takes longer :). Of course, you still have to do 1 addition when you move to the next plane pair using tiles, but that's better than 3.
Yes, this is seriously true. The time for setting 1 dot on an overhead map using sprites is actually longer than doing the same thing using fixed tiles. Unrolling the plane loop and using an increment saved about 6 cycles per dot. All the other code was exactly the same (we started with sprites). That was enough of a difference to stop frame timeouts when we updated the overhead map (which had 8 dots to be turned off, and turned on again in another spot).
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Arkhan on May 27, 2011, 11:58:40 AM
The difference being, Sprites let you get some transparency! Vines drawn in the background would result in alot of effort to make nice backgrounds.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: spenoza on May 27, 2011, 04:59:22 PM
Well now, didn't Gunboat and some air combat game use simple polygons? If you can do simple polygons you should be able to do simple wireframes.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Tatsujin on May 27, 2011, 05:04:25 PM
Well now, didn't Gunboat and some air combat game use simple polygons? If you can do simple polygons you should be able to do simple wireframes.
Youll notice both Falcon and Gunboat have an AVOID stamp on pcengine.co.uk
They suck.
Balls.
Lots of them.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: nodtveidt on May 27, 2011, 10:14:54 PM
I took a look at frag's first image in particular as it looks like it can be done with tiles alone. Looks like it would require 40 tile updates per frame, but split across three or perhaps four individual copies, depending on how much memory you're putting aside for unique pattern combinations. Even HuC can pull this off with ease if planned well enough. Shooters rarely require a ton of copies for sprites, so you can use that saved time to do stuff like this. :)
The second one looks like it's a palette cycle... but I can't be 100% sure without looking at the individual frames.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: shubibiman on May 27, 2011, 10:16:00 PM
I always thought the effect acheived in stage 3 of Metamor Jupiter was absolutely amazing! The video doesn't do it justice, but in person it really makes you feel like you're in a rotating space ship or something.
I never even heard of this game before, and it looks damn good!
I don't notice the technical side of games very much, I am more concerned with having fun, but I do have to admit this thread was very interesting with what has been mentioned.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: SignOfZeta on May 28, 2011, 07:06:40 AM
Has anyone ever explained, or even come up with a name for, the weird BG effect that is present in Vasteel's battle scenes? Its also used a lot in the backgrounds of the cinemas in one of the Ranma games.
It's still just line scrolling / raster effects, with a simple sine wave horizontally, and stretching / compression vertically.
OK, I was wrong. It isn't used in Vasteel, but it is used in the one Ranma 1/2 game and...something else.
To see what I'm talking about watch this video:
...and skip to 0:32. Its a short use of the effect. Its used much more extensively in the ending (where Ranma gets his crazy dragon punch technique). Watching the Youtube video you'd almost think it was an interlacing artifact or something, but its even more intense in person. Whenever its used in this game (and in whatever the other game is I'm forgetting) the color choice is the same so...maybe there isn't any "special" effect here at all, programming-wise, but it does have a sort of 3D/blurring effect going on, at least to my eyes.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: sunteam_paul on May 28, 2011, 07:22:54 AM
Ah, the red/blue 3D Glasses effect. Surprised that more games didn't use that.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Arkhan on May 28, 2011, 09:54:07 AM
I took a look at frag's first image in particular as it looks like it can be done with tiles alone. Looks like it would require 40 tile updates per frame, but split across three or perhaps four individual copies, depending on how much memory you're putting aside for unique pattern combinations. Even HuC can pull this off with ease if planned well enough. Shooters rarely require a ton of copies for sprites, so you can use that saved time to do stuff like this. :)
The second one looks like it's a palette cycle... but I can't be 100% sure without looking at the individual frames.
theres a rom floating around of the first pic, with different tiles, but its the same exact shit. Charles made it.
and the second one, I accidentallied stuff like that when messing with the Insanity title screen. Its rasterloleffects, with a palette cycle behind it.
the trick is getting the right wigglejiggle.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: awack on May 28, 2011, 02:02:24 PM
This isn't a trick, but a strength, the pce seems to be very good at putting allot of unique, well animated sprites on screen at once....when comparing ports , the snes version typically reduces or subtracts and the genesis just doesn't have the number of Palettes needed...some of the combined attacks have a total of 30 colors alone.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Arkhan on May 28, 2011, 02:28:42 PM
Its because the PCE has 16 16 color palettes just for sprites.
Thats alot of color possibilities you can spew on screen at once!
well, 15 colors each (transparency ) so 16*15 colors is alot of f*ckyes going on.
and, your screenshots show that perfectly.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Tatsujin on May 28, 2011, 05:52:17 PM
Yeah, drac x is always a nice power horse to show off some ubergreat animations and colors. It's a pure graphical fest and beats the shit out of almost every game ever done on it's 16Bit rival plattforms.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: spenoza on May 29, 2011, 03:15:01 AM
It's a good thing the PCE never had any late popularity in Brazil, otherwise they might be trying to make more rudimentary FPSs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9doqwl-U7jU) for it.
Edited for clarity.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: SamIAm on May 29, 2011, 09:53:12 AM
Why?
In the Genesis community, even people who think the games themselves aren't especially fun to play still think the popularity of the system in Brazil and the surprisingly functional FPSs that came out of it are really cool.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: fragmare on May 29, 2011, 10:30:54 AM
I took a look at frag's first image in particular as it looks like it can be done with tiles alone. Looks like it would require 40 tile updates per frame, but split across three or perhaps four individual copies, depending on how much memory you're putting aside for unique pattern combinations. Even HuC can pull this off with ease if planned well enough. Shooters rarely require a ton of copies for sprites, so you can use that saved time to do stuff like this. :)
The second one looks like it's a palette cycle... but I can't be 100% sure without looking at the individual frames.
The first image is easy to explain. The very topmost layer is the "normal" non-animated background tiles. They scroll at 2 pixels per vblank and they have a palette shift applied to some pixels on the edges to make it appear like they're glowing. The next layer down consists of two 32x16 tile-chunks that repeat vertically and scroll at 1 px/vblank. The next one down consists of two 24x16 chunks that repeat vertically and scroll at 1 px every 2 vblanks. the next one is two 16x16 chunks that scroll at 1 px every 4 vblanks. the deepest layer is two 8x16 chunks that scroll at 1 px every 8 vblanks. All layers except the very top (normal scroll) layer are made of animated tiles and have the "wiggle" effect built in. In addition, each of the animated tiles consists of only 4 colors, so they can be "bitplane packed", and the space used in VRAM by them is effectively halved. As a result, the entire background tile set uses like ~16KB of VRAM space or something like that... pretty minimal for the visual wow-factor generated.
The second image is just a static 64x64 tile chunk that repeats across the screen, has a sine wave applied to it along with a palette cycle. What I'd *REALLY* like to do with that background, however, is something like the trippy effect from Gaiares lv3 (the hyperspace scene) on the Sega Genesis. I'm pretty sure one of the bg layers of the hyperspace scene from Gaiares uses a DOUBLE sine wave or something, but I can't be sure until somebody diddles with the ROM in a debugger. The animated GIF i made just uses a regular sine wave.
For those who've not seen that level of Gaiares, check this link out: Still, one of the most amazing levels of any 16-bit era shooter, imo...
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Arkhan on May 29, 2011, 01:08:32 PM
In the Genesis community, even people who think the games themselves aren't especially fun to play still think the popularity of the system in Brazil and the surprisingly functional FPSs that came out of it are really cool.
FPS suck in general. Crappy FPS on systems that obviously can't handle them suck even more.
A system living on for a ridiculous number of years is really wonderful, especially if only regionally. Brazil's love of Sega systems the rest of the world threw away years before is super cool. It would have been neat to see...I don't know, Street Fighter Alpha or Guardian Heroes or something, but not Duke.
Games cost money, and are meant to be played, to actually have fun with. Now its just a free ROM to add to our infinite collection of ROMs, something to be analyzed and talked about, to make Youtube videos out of, etc. But people actually MADE that thing. They went to work every day for months porting a game that barely ran on the PCs of the time. Then somebody (I assume) actually saved up money all week and plopped it down on that piece of crap, and that's just depressing.
Its like Ultimate Mortal Kombat III for Famicom. Sure its impressive, but if you (and by "you" I mean, "every single person in the world") aren't actually going to play it, ever...who gives a shit?
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Bonknuts on May 29, 2011, 07:35:15 PM
I don't know how taxing wire frame 3D is compared to polygons...
Wireframes are easier, if you don't mind background wires showing through. It gets a bit harder if you want them erased - at that point, it's not much different from a black-filled polygon.
Quote
I'm assuming that they should be able to do some decent wire frame stuff.
Possibly, assuming you don't need a high frame rate. In one test Arkhan and I did (for the vines in junglehunt), we managed to get 5 lines moving before hitting the frame time limit. The problem is that the pce has a 4-plane BG layer, so drawing 1 dot involves 4 read/update/write cycles. Add in the need for floating point math (faked or not), and you can see it's a problem. Not saying impossible, but it looks like it would take a hell of a lot of optimization to get anything above about 15 fps for more than a dozen or so lines....
If it's wireframe and you don't care about different colors, you can setup the VDC for 1bit bitmap. You write/use the 1bit frame buffer in main ram, then you blit it to vram. But vram tiles need to be setup in a specific order. And the vram increment pointer needs to be set to 32. It's true that you need to write a whole WORD to the vram port at a time, but the latch is only on the MSB port. Just write a zero on the LSB port once at the very first write (or whatever value you want to repeat), and only write to the MSB when copying the rest of the 1bit frame buffer data. Instant scanline blitting. You can either update the vram pointer at the end of every bitmap 'scanline' transfer or let it wrap on to do 1 scanline writing per 8 high block area, doing 8 passes total (each pass writes scanline Y of an 8 high pixel group in the pseudo tile arrangement bitmap in vram). And since you're only using the first two bits of the tile (and one plane you don't even write to, so it's a free cycle to update), you can uses the other 2 bitplanes to hold a crude/low color BG image that the poly lines overlay onto. It's very complex to setup, and probably difficult understand (you have to keep your head constantly wrapped around it), but once you do both - you'll see that you have do a ton of stuff you can do (you also have the option of making the wire frame overlay translucent over the other 2bit planes or not). You could take the slower route, 1bit frame buffer and 3bit tile graphics, but it requires you write the 1bit frame buffer data to the LSB and read the MSB and write it back to the MSB. So, quite a bit slower - but more colors and still the ability for translucency (don't forget you can still apply subpalettes to the tiles to make the underneath buffer more than just 8 colors. I've done many of private demos/tests messing around with this kind of stuff).
You could use sprites in the same fashion and it's a little easier too (setup wise), but that's a waste since you'd probably want some movable sprite ability. Of course stock ram isn't much for holding a working frame buffer. 240x200x1bit is 6000bytes, leaving only 2192bytes left over on a stock hucard (without cheating and using the Populous hucard setup with its extra 32k of ram on chart). That's pretty tight, but doable.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: SamIAm on May 29, 2011, 09:08:15 PM
Most retro fans agree that enjoying some older games requires an understanding of the context of their releases. For example, Blazing Lazers wouldn't be half as well regarded if it had come out it in 1994. Here we have an FPS that came out in Brazil in 1998 - assuming most people couldn't afford PCs, this was probably the first FPS that fair number of Brazilians played, at least at home. If it was at least playable, then I dare say some of them probably had fun with it. Ain't nothing wrong with that.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: termis on May 30, 2011, 12:33:13 AM
For those who've not seen that level of Gaiares, check this link out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3CQcLzImGI Still, one of the most amazing levels of any 16-bit era shooter, imo...
Man, it's been a while, but what a treat that level is. Just watching (and listening!) to that stage gave me a huge grin.
Actually, even more so than the trippy wavy-effect, I thought that hyperspace effect was awesome (I still remember being very impressed back in the day, and it still looks great today). I can't recall anything similar in a PCE game (shooter or not). Perhaps because I've seen the wavy-effects done already at the time with the Thunder Forces and all. Granted, the Gaiares wavy effects has helluva lot more going on than.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: awack on May 30, 2011, 08:50:33 AM
A few pce shooters the wavy...Violent Soldier, Image Fight 2 and Super Darius 2 etc.
Its hard to tell whats going on in the Gaiares video, but one of the best effects of that type Ive seen is from Terraforming.
Fast forward to 25:40
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Arkhan on May 31, 2011, 04:46:08 AM
I like the derpy effect when you beat levels in Final Soldier.
it reminds me of yars revenge.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Necromancer on June 29, 2011, 08:54:26 AM
This came up in another thread but wasn't answered (unless I missed it), so I figured I'd repeat it here: how does the magnifying glass work on the stage select screen of Darkwing Duck? I don't know if it's technically impressive, but it sure looks neat. Do any other games use a similar effect?
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: awack on June 29, 2011, 12:47:01 PM
As far as a similar effect is concerned, this is the only thing i can think off the top of my head, in this Case, it looks like a different sprite with a different color palette.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: shubibiman on June 29, 2011, 06:05:47 PM
I have ti play this game. I've got it for 1 year now but still haven't had time to play it.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: RR1980 on June 29, 2011, 07:23:17 PM
As far as a similar effect is concerned, this is the only thing i can think off the top of my head, in this Case, it looks like a different sprite with a different color palette.
which game is this?
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Tatsujin on June 29, 2011, 08:06:40 PM
As far as a similar effect is concerned, this is the only thing i can think off the top of my head, in this Case, it looks like a different sprite with a different color palette.
This came up in another thread but wasn't answered (unless I missed it), so I figured I'd repeat it here: how does the magnifying glass work on the stage select screen of Darkwing Duck? I don't know if it's technically impressive, but it sure looks neat. Do any other games use a similar effect?
Maybe it doesn't factor in to how that effect is achieved. But it seems all the more impressive on a system with a single tile layer.
But the best kinds of effects are ones that that simply look cool or good regardless of whether or not they are technically challenging.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Bonknuts on June 30, 2011, 05:14:58 AM
This came up in another thread but wasn't answered (unless I missed it), so I figured I'd repeat it here: how does the magnifying glass work on the stage select screen of Darkwing Duck? I don't know if it's technically impressive, but it sure looks neat. Do any other games use a similar effect?
There are a few games the use/abuse the sprite priority for other than normal masking stuff, but not in this particular way. It's pretty clever. Clever like Jackie Chan silhouette effect. And what's even weirder, is that DWD of all games has this trick. Everything else in that game is plain jane/below average FX wise.
The effect works like this: Sprites have a priority setting directly inherent to the order they appear in the SAT (sprite attribute table, there are 64 entries for 64 sprites). Sprite #0 has a higher priority and shown above sprite #1, and so on. The each sprite also has a BG priority setting. Set to 0, the sprite gets shown behind the BG colors #1-15 (palette assigned doesn't matter and color #0 is always shown in the least/farthest layer. No even low priority sprites show behind this). If a sprite is higher priority than another, but is set to show behind the BG while the less priority sprite is set to show above the BG layer and they collide, the visible pixels of sprite 1 that overlap visible pixels of sprite 2 - cause the BG to show in its place instead.
A group of high priority sprites (low priority to the BG layer) for a mask with a hole in the center. The mask is behind the BG tiles, so you can't actually see it. But the center has a circle of blank pixels. This allows sprite layer #2 to be seen in that area, everything else is hidden behind. Sprite layer #3, the magnifying glass, is highest priority and above the BG layer - so it shows above everything and moves in unison with sprite layer #1. Sprite layer #2 scrolls at a different speed and direction, but to remain behind the mask it needs to drop out sprites on the border edges as not to be show outside the masking box.
It's clever that they used it in this way. It definitely took a bit of thinking to flesh this out.
As far as a similar effect is concerned, this is the only thing i can think off the top of my head, in this Case, it looks like a different sprite with a different color palette.
I gots to have this also! Reminds me of Castle of Illusion.
It's actually a traditional RPG like Tengai Makyou II or Phantasy Star IV. It just happens to have the occasional side scrolling section.
Sounds even more interesting! :D
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Keranu on June 30, 2011, 04:14:50 PM
Castle/World of Illusion was the first game to pop in my mind too!
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Tatsujin on June 30, 2011, 04:16:16 PM
Watch the nice opening :)
More isn't up on yu0tube so far.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: BlueBMW on August 03, 2011, 01:50:59 PM
I've been playing Dead Moon the last few days. While its not exactly a technical feat per say.... the way the did the multiple layer background scrolling in this game looks absolutely amazing! It just gives a real feel of depth and distance. And the way they speed up / slow down the scrolling when you start / stop moving.... very nice very nice. And the chiptunes are pretty good too.
Title: Re: Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE
Post by: Black Tiger on August 03, 2011, 02:51:29 PM
I've been playing Dead Moon the last few days. While its not exactly a technical feat per say.... the way the did the multiple layer background scrolling in this game looks absolutely amazing! It just gives a real feel of depth and distance. And the way they speed up / slow down the scrolling when you start / stop moving.... very nice very nice. And the chiptunes are pretty good too.
It's amazing how well they setup the parallax and used other effects, but managed to pair it with nicely touched up and carefully polished, yet counteractive dull artwork. Everything looks perfectly fine... yet never tries to push beyond that. It looks like a tech demo by a homebrewer who pulled out all the stops, but couldn't quite pull off top tier professional looking graphic art.
I'm not a fan of full screen spamming of Coryoon style strips of parallax, at least the way that many games do it. But Dead Moon is the best I've seen on any console. Except maybe Spriggan Mark 2. :)