Dithered Shadows or Flickering Shadows?

[Joe Redifer]

I was playing some Neo Geo games and it seems almost to be a mandatory requirement for games on the system to have flickering shadows. It's really annoying. But systems like the Genesis or TurboGrafx often have dithered shadows. Quite a few Genesis games have real transparent shadows. SNES is super powerful and therefore always has perfect shadows for its perfect games. PS3 has jaggy-ass ugly as sin shadows.

Personally if it can't do sweet-ass SNES true transparent shadows (the SNES is the bomb yo, Black Tiger told me it's his favorite system), I'd prefer a solid shadow. Then I'd prefer dithered mesh. Flickering shadows would be dead last because they're just dumb.

[NightWolve]

I never paid attention to that level of detail when it came to shadows in my major TG-16 and SNES playing days. It is surprising to hear that an arcade level console had this trouble though.

[esteban]

Joe, I know what you are referring to, but I can't help it: I want you to make a short video comparing the different methods. Don't do screen capture, just film actual CRT monitor/television.

Thank you in advance for spending many hours to create this 50-second video comparison.



For the record: I'm serious.

[Joe Redifer]

I don't like shooting CRT displays because of the roll bar. It's almost impossible to get the camera and CRT display to sync perfectly. And then I don't shoot at 59.94 frames per second so the effect of the flickering would be lost.

[esteban]

I don't like shooting CRT displays because of the roll bar. It's almost impossible to get the camera and CRT display to sync perfectly. And then I don't shoot at 59.94 frames per second so the effect of the flickering would be lost.

Oh, damn. I am ignorant about the technical issues. I didn't realize the flickering couldn't be captured with that setup. Roll bar I can live with, however.

My dreams of a quick-n-dirty video to accompany your Shadow Manifesto have evaporated.

[Gentlegamer]

I prefer perfect SNES shadows, but when I'm slumming with inferior systems I'm ok with different methods used. Neo Geo flickering shadows were the last thing I noticed when playing in the arcade.

[Necromancer]

I slightly prefer a mesh, but it doesn't really matter all that much one way or the other, seeing as there's almost always something else in the artwork that's far more deserving of nitpicking complaints.

[Arkhan]

I could care less as long as there's a shadow.


Put that option in.

[EvilEvoIX]

Dithered mesh, It's what I like best and I think works best in the limitations. 

[SamIAm]

You have to be a little sympathetic toward developers who were expecting literally 99.99% of the people buying their games to be using a composite or RF connection, which was basically the case with the Genesis and close to being the case with the SNES. Genesis composite is low-quality enough that dithered shadows (and everything else) actually undergo a melting effect and look truly transparent. I'll definitely take this over flickering.

But on the other hand, checkerboard-dither transparencies looks pretty bad in RGB. You can't really tell what the transparent object is supposed to be, nor can you really even see what's behind it. Like Joe, I'd rather just have solid black (or solid whatever) if real transparencies aren't possible. However, if that's not a choice, then in most other cases I'll take the flickering.

The biggest failure of a fake transparency I have ever seen is the giant skull in the Saturn port of Symphony of the Night. I can't find a good shot of it at the moment, but trust me, it really looks awful.

[Black Tiger]

I love flickering transparencies when done right. Like the Xanadu games boss fights which use them or Vasteel. I guess if a game is plagued with slowdown then they might become spazzy. I don't like dithered transparency effects in most cases. I remember watching a Neo Geo arcade game (KOF '94) when it came out and being disappointed by the dithered (waterfall?) effect and wondered why they didn't just use flickering.

My friends who were fanboys of various consoles, including SNES, couldn't tell bitd that many effects were flickered and not "real" transparencies.

The idea of Megaman getting hit and turning into a mesh or the yoga flame being just a dithering makes me uncomfortable.

I prefer perfect SNES shadows, but when I'm slumming with inferior systems I'm ok with different methods used. Neo Geo flickering shadows were the last thing I noticed when playing in the arcade.

I don't know what games Joe's been playing, but SNES games usually used flickering for shadows. I'm guessing that he's been fooled by many flickered shadows and only assumed that they had to be hardware transparencies on SNES. One memorable failed use of transpatencies for shadows in a SNES game is Chrono Trigger. Must have just been to save space. But it looks lame when they disappear and then reappear, every time the game spams transparency effects in battles, which is constantly. That gave me more of a "spazzy" feeling than most flickered effects bitd.



SamIam: that NitM skull on Saturn looked perfect on my crt through composite when the game came out and I had to stare at it to figure out if it was dithered. Even though most <32-bit dithered effects were noticeable to me bitd.

[majors]

I like it when the shadows are reflective of the characters' form instead of a black blob. It adds to the detail and shows the programmers cared(or have technical knowhow).

SotN and Tomb Raider on Saturn come to mind when talking about "transparences" and the Feka's inability to do so in the 32-bit wars.

[Necromancer]

I love flickering transparencies when done right. Like the Xanadu games boss fights which use them or Vasteel. I guess if a game is plagued with slowdown then they might become spazzy. I don't like dithered transparency effects in most cases. I remember watching a Neo Geo arcade game (KOF '94) when it came out and being disappointed by the dithered (waterfall?) effect and wondered why they didn't just use flickering.

My friends who were fanboys of various consoles, including SNES, couldn't tell bitd that many effects were flickered and not "real" transparencies.

The idea of Megaman getting hit and turning into a mesh or the yoga flame being just a dithering makes me uncomfortable.

Some good points, so I have to change my answer to "it depends".  When I answered before, I was thinking mostly of vs. fighting games and Xanadu; in the former, the flickering oval shadows disappear or turn solid at the end of the round (which just looks silly), and in the latter, the meshes used in the hidden passages would look like shat if they were instead a flicker mess.

[SamIAm]

SamIam: that NitM skull on Saturn looked perfect on my crt through composite when the game came out and I had to stare at it to figure out if it was dithered. Even though most <32-bit dithered effects were noticeable to me bitd.

I don't know, man, it must depend on the TV.

For you see, I too have played the Saturn version of SOTN via a composite connection, and it was after having played it in s-video and RGB. I remember arriving at that spot thinking "I wonder if it will look OK because it's composite video this time?" and shortly after thinking "Nope". There was a little bit of melting - I mean, the skull looked more like a skull and less like a blob of white pixels - but the checkerboard pattern was plain to see, and I couldn't make out what was behind the skull.

I think the CRT itself was manufactured in 2000 or so. Perhaps a 1990 set shows something quite different?

[EvilEvoIX]

Isn't the SNES limited to only one plain of transparency anyway?  The SNES can only do one tile layer of transparency from what I have read.  So maybe the SNES programmers still used the tried and true dithering or flashing for these effects due to those limitations or just that they weren't skilled enough to use this effect properly.

After reading this thread I searched on the SNES transparency and found an interesting read:
http://folk.uio.no/sigurdkn/snes/transparency.txt 

****************************************
* Transparency effects the SNES can do *
****************************************

The SNES supports 4 kind of transparent-like effects :

- Color addition : Usefull for drawing transparent rays of light or to just lighten some layers.
  Example : Chrono Trigger uses it in Crono's room when you open the cutain.

- Color averaging (addition then halving) : This is the most widely used transaprency effect. It can average colors of 2 images, making one look like translucent. This allow to draw translucent water, translucent fog/clouds, translucent shadows, ghost sprites, etc...
  Example : The water in Secret of Mana.

- Color substraction: Usefull for transparent shadows, simulating night or stormy weather, etc...
  Example : "Torchlight Trouble" level in Donkey Kong Country

- Color substraction then halving : This one is not really usefull, and noes not make any sense in terms of transparency. I've never found any game that uses this yet. It could be usefull if you wanted a layer to somehow be very dark but still being "slightly transparent".

***********************************************
* Hardware limitation of transparency effects *
***********************************************

In addition to this there is a primordial limitation : The color addition/substraction always happen between 2 pixels of given BG plane/sprites. At most two different layers are implied in transparency. For example, if you're trying to make a transparent ghost sprite stand on a brick background, and have a transparent fog covering all that, while both effects are possible separately, the SNES hardware can just not do that, and it will never show up like you'd expect. Either the background, the fog or the ghost will be "clipped" depending how you set it up. Once you understood that, it makes things simpler.
So there can be as many transparent objects/layers as you'd like on the screen, but they can never overlap without clipping something.

A second limitation is that a sprite can never be transparent through another sprite, because all sprites are merged into a single layer in the viewpoint of the SNES PPU. Sorry, but the SNES hardware can't do that either. You'd have to use a background layer if you're trying to do such an effect.