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[UnemployedVillain]

This art simply cannot exist in HD. The pixel count gulf is so vast that any HD redraw would be an absolute minefield, almost certain to cause the game's visual consistency to nosedive.

That's fine tho, cuz even in 240p it looks better than SF4 and SF5.

I honestly don't see the point in doing pixel art in HD. You have no hardware limitations for resolution or color palette so you might as well just scan in the hand drawn frames and use them as is, ala Skullgirls

 

[CO_Andy]

if Capcom had waited a year they could of just released SF3 on Atomiswave instead of throwing away money on CPS3

not entirely unrelated but Breath of Fire 4 still remains unsurpassed as far as 2D animations goes in RPGs

 

[UnemployedVillain]

Mother 3 has pretty incredible 2D animation, although its artstyle is much simpler than BOF4's

 

[Remapped88]

That's why I said animation wise it probably doesn't, but graphics wise it has it beat IMO.

Yeah sorry, read wrong. It's a damn shame SNK abandoned it since it was pretty beautiful but it made sense since it cost too much. They already showed some new characters in that style too IIRC before switching to 3D for next gen consoles.

 

[Sayad]

Yeah, I couldn't find any information on this, but I agree that something must have been done to get Elena's animations. She's also lacking lots of details like fingers and toes in most frames, and for that reason, she's my least favourite character in the game in terms of graphics.

She lacks fingers in a lot of those frames because her hand size is just too small in some of them to outline all the fingers, it's simple pixel res restriction. Since she doesn't attack with her hands, there was no need to give her huge well defined hands like most of the cast.

 

[Nuu]

The problem is that SFIII-tier sprite work would be insanely expensive in HD.

Not as much as you think. Capcom could easily afford it. Contrary to popular belief, sprites and 2D animation in general isn't really expensive, it just isn't as convenient as 3D models.

Yeah sorry, read wrong. It's a damn shame SNK abandoned it since it was pretty beautiful but it made sense since it cost too much. They already showed some new characters in that style too IIRC before switching to 3D for next gen consoles.

KOF is known for a huge roster and WAS known for frequent annual updates. That would be impossible for them to do in HD sprites unless KOF was a colossal hit.

I honestly don't see the point in doing pixel art in HD. You have no hardware limitations for resolution or color palette so you might as well just scan in the hand drawn frames and use them as is, ala Skullgirls

There are still benefits to pixel art in terms of getting perfect pixel shading. But it is true that there is sort of a point of diminishing returns. As cool as it is to say Blazblue and UNIEL are "HD pixel" art games. They are much like the Phoenix Wright titles in which they seem to just be handdrawn graphics with pixelated edges.

 

[D.Lo]

She lacks fingers in a lot of those frames because her hand size is just too small in some of them to outline all the fingers, it's simple pixel res restriction. Since she doesn't attack with her hands, there was no need to give her huge well defined hands like most of the cast.

Exactly.

And the head being static is deliberate, shows she's very stable while eyeing down the opponent.

Chun Li remains the best animated IMO though. Her whole body flows like a whip cracking when she attacks.

 

[Kagoshima_Luke]

Thanks, here it is.

And on that glorious 7th frame...!!

On one of the behind the scenes pages, they talk about naked characters, including Oro!



I'd love to hear more about Capcom's toolset, but this sounds brutal as hell.

Is... that his penis and balls?

 

[Sayad]

Not as much as you think. Capcom could easily afford it.

Maybe they can afford it, but they can't justify it. Pitching a 2D HD pixel art fighting game with almost AAA budget in 2017 to Capcom suits! Reminder that they needed the help of outside funds to be convinced that it's time to start making the new entry in one of their most successful IPs!

 

[CadetMahoney]

I honestly don't see the point in doing pixel art in HD. You have no hardware limitations for resolution or color palette so you might as well just scan in the hand drawn frames and use them as is, ala Skullgirls

kof13 was 720p, but I don't know if that counts.

 

[Nuu]

kof13 was 720p, but I don't know if that counts.

Not really. KOF XIII sprites were the same size as Guilty Gear sprites. Just much more detailed.

 

[Remapped88]

kof13 was 720p, but I don't know if that counts.

Not exactly HD but it's the same resolution as Guilty Gear XX's sprites which is more like 480p. Blazblue sprites are full HD and a bit bigger in comparison and look more crisp on the screen in comparison but also less animated. The background characters in KoFXIII are in a higher resolution than the actual characters IIRC. I doubt we'll see any SF3 calibur animation with HD sprites anytime soon unless there's a studio verrrrrrry dedicated in making them.

 

[yyr]

if Capcom had waited a year they could of just released SF3 on Atomiswave instead of throwing away money on CPS3

Um...what?

SF3 came out in early 1997.

Atomiswave games started arriving in 2003. Recall that Atomiswave was based on Naomi/Dreamcast hardware, which itself wasn't available until around early 1999.

That's a pretty long year.

 

[Sayad]

kof13 was 720p, but I don't know if that counts.

Character sprites weren't native res for 720, they were up-scaled. And almost killed KoF.

 

[davidwhangchoi]

I really don't care what people say. On average sprite based game with love and care will look much better than a 3D equivalent. Third Strike was the pinnacle and KOF XIII looked gorgeous. Unfortunately, it only seems that Blazblue is the last of the high profile sprite based fighters. To be fair almost all 2D indie fighters are sprite based or at least use 2D graphics, but with the exception of Skullgirls they don't have the production/dedication. Trajes Fatales is the closest to SNK/Capcom's 90's work and its just merely average.



Street Fighter III has much bigger problems upon release than using a new generation of characters.

It was:

- On an expensive new arcade machine at the time when arcades were dying everywhere but Japan.

- SFIII: NG was pure dogshit.

- Came right while the Alpha series was still hot.

I couldn't see the game being a major hit unless the Alpha series never existed.

all true

 

[BIGWORM]

Thanks, here it is.

And on that glorious 7th frame...!!

On one of the behind the scenes pages, they talk about naked characters, including Oro!



I'd love to hear more about Capcom's toolset, but this sounds brutal as hell.

I always called Oro Toenails because 3 of his st.HK is almost guaranteed stun.

Stinky. lol.

 

[CO_Andy]

Atomiswave games started arriving in 2003. Recall that Atomiswave was based on Naomi/Dreamcast hardware, which itself wasn't available until around early 1999

didn't realize it was that late

probably could have cut some deal with Sega and borrow their tech early much like how Namco borrowed Sony's

 

[Rur0ni]

Depressing.

 

[Tizoc]

I have a soft spot for sf3 ng despite its brokeness ;o
Alex'a ng stage is pretty neat too

Well it ia the graffiti in the back to be exact but i like where they were going with it

 

[RM8]

kof13 was 720p, but I don't know if that counts.

I honestly think KOFXIII is the best looking fighting game ever. SF3 is kind of inconsistent (see the Elena talk in this thread) and I generally don't like the roster, so it affects my perception I guess. But KOFXIII? Pretty much perfect in my eyes.

 

[Septimus Prime]

They had kind of given up on fighting games for most of the 2000s. They've mentioned that SF4's development was about 70% from Dimps because at the time they didn't have what it took to actually make a fighting game themselves anymore.



Haohmaru and God Rugal were some of the better ones too. The Chun-Li and Yun sprites looked like they took the SF3 sprites and hacked away most of the animation.

If I'm not mistaken, the reason Haohmaru looks so good in that game is because he was one of the few completely new sprites. Contrast him with Morrigan, whose sprite was already like a decade old by then, and it's night and day.

But yeah, KoF sprites honestly have always looked worse to me than SF3 ones because their animation just feels less fluid. Like, if you cancel moves, it looks like they're just jumping from one pose to another, whereas SF3 sprites seem to flow much better. Capcom had always been better with things like flow and weight.

 

[Cepheus]

The SF3 sprites look incredible. I wonder where the series would be today if Capcom tried to use a similar artstyle with SF4...

 

[sirap]

Oh wow...I haven't thought about this game in a long time. I was obsessed with the SF3 in my university days. I spent more time practicing parries instead of working on my assignments.

What's the best way to play this game? Is it available on any of the current consoles?

 

[Nuu]

Oh wow...I haven't thought about this game in a long time. I was obsessed with the SF3 in my university days. I spent more time practicing parries instead of working on my assignments.

What's the best way to play this game? Is it available on any of the current consoles?

Fightcade. It's free. Online GGPO netcode. Plenty of players.

 

[BNGames]

Oh wow...I haven't thought about this game in a long time. I was obsessed with the SF3 in my university days. I spent more time practicing parries instead of working on my assignments.

What's the best way to play this game? Is it available on any of the current consoles?

Home arcade (REAL CPS3 hardware)

 

[Korigama]

The pinnacle of 2-D fighter animation. I love the weight each character has and the power you can see each one of them put into their attacks. The blowback of Ryu's clothes after each time he does a Hadoken is spectacular. And everything about Twelve transfixes me. King of Fighters has good 2-D pixel animations but it doesn't even come close to 3rd Strike.

Mark of the Wolves was always a closer comparison to 3S than KoF (in terms of animation detail and the soft-reboot approach as a sequel).

 

[yurinka]

Street Fighter III series has the best animated pixel art ever seen in a videogame.

 

[Caprica Orange]

Home arcade (REAL CPS3 hardware)

Nice cab! Love this game! I went a different route using a supergun:

 

[Krammy]

She lacks fingers in a lot of those frames because her hand size is just too small in some of them to outline all the fingers, it's simple pixel res restriction. Since she doesn't attack with her hands, there was no need to give her huge well defined hands like most of the cast.

Absolutely untrue for a few reasons. You say she doesn't attack with her hands so they don't need to be defined, but her feet don't have toes either, so...? Secondly, characters like Effie and Chun-Li exist, and despite their small hands, were given defined fingers easily enough, so it's not a resolution restriction. Since we can only speculate on the matter, I'm going to say that they just ran out of time to clean up Elena. While it wasn't sourced, another user mentioned that she was one of the first characters to be completed and that she took way more time than the team planned.

EDIT: This also doesn't hold water because there's three or four animations that do have well defined fingers and toes, as if they received more attention than the rest of the animations. Her throw (miss), f+MK, b,d,db+K, and the startup on some of her Super Arts.

Q's SA3 looked like it had 3000 frames of animation, lol

 

[Septimus Prime]

Absolutely untrue for a few reasons. You say she doesn't attack with her hands so they don't need to be defined, but her feet don't have toes either, so...? Secondly, characters like Effie and Chun-Li exist, and despite their small hands, were given defined fingers easily enough, so it's not a resolution restriction. Since we can only speculate on the matter, I'm going to say that they just ran out of time to clean up Elena. While it wasn't sourced, another user mentioned that she was one of the first characters to be completed and that she took way more time than the team planned.

Chun wasn't added in until 3S, though. That gave them quite a bit of additional time to work on her.

 

[petran79]

Blazblue may have hq pixel art characters but animation and physics feels awkward,especially when weapons clash. They feel like plastic toys rather than huge swords. Without weight at all.

SF3 had fluid animation but at that time I preferred Garou. SNK already had the expertise with Neo Geo and all felt much better as a whole. Compared to Capcom that had to experiment on new hardware and make a game from scratch.

 

[Chev]

[sprite size]

Here's one with Skullgirls added (which also had more sprites and more characters per-fight and more color depth and it's seriously a shame Blazblue is stuck behind in terms of sprite tech. Filia isn't even a tall character).

Only Arc system works with BB has gotten close

Skullgirls has gotten a lot closer.

Man, the difference in the quality of Street Fighter's art direction before and after its 00s hiatus is like night and day. Was there a significant exodus of talent from Capcom after CvS2?

Yep. They won't talk about it too much but 2D (or fighting games for that matter) wasn't a priority anymore and lots of people got shoved into dead end jobs or left and a lot of knowledge was lost. Same reason the first iteration of SF4 was so janky gameplay-wise, they basically had to relearn everything. Recently they've shown bits of an anatomy and drawing guide from Capcom's golden age compiled by Akiman, and despite their admitting at GDC it is as relevant to 3D as it was to 2D they found it lying around forgotten in a company warehouse.

Some of the beginning sketches looked hilariously choppy.

Why "hilariously"? Surely you realize we draw only essential frames in an animation draft?

 

[show me your skeleton]

i want to live in the 2D-mega-bucks-AAAA-games timeline.

 

[PantsuJo]

20 years and only one game even tried to outdo it, and with SNK going the cheap route, I'd say the dream is dead.

I agree, sadly.

 

[Panajev2001a]

The best pixel art fighter...some of the best 2D animations ever.

 

[Hesemonni]

Thanks, here it is.

And on that glorious 7th frame...!!

On one of the behind the scenes pages, they talk about naked characters, including Oro!



I'd love to hear more about Capcom's toolset, but this sounds brutal as hell.

 

[Eccocid]

Isn't it same technique as ps1 Disney games like Hercules etc? Basically hand drawn cel animation converted to digital.

I wouldn't call it as pixel art tho. Yeah its made of pixels just like every other 2d art on the screen but its just cel animation.

 

[SkylineRKR]

SF3 looks amazing still. Was so disappointed by the Online Edition, they fucked with the artwork, took the attract and scoreboard out and the gamespy stuff sucked.

I think as far as console ports go, the Ps2 version might be the best. Though I also enjoyed 3S on XBL against friends.

As for SFIV, I always found it hard to look at. And SFV is too gritty. I think Second Impact was the pinnacle. Not that TS looked bad, but less detail went into the backgrounds and the colors seem to be more washed out.

 

[Chev]

Isn't it same technique as ps1 Disney games like Hercules etc? Basically hand drawn cel animation converted to digital.

I wouldn't call it as pixel art tho. Yeah its made of pixels just like every other 2d art on the screen but its just cel animation.

For starters there are no cels in the process, only paper, but there weren't any cels for Aladdin either. But beyond that no, it's still pixel art, it's not just a matter of tracing drawings but also finding the right pixel arrangements to convey details. Paper only gets you the basic movement and then there's a whole lot of things involved. While using some of those techniques Aladdin was pretty basic by comparison, more than Darkstalkers which was the first Capcom game where they really thought out their animation techniques. Here's a GDC slides giving an example of how ratios were thought out to bring out details.

 

[Sayad]

Absolutely untrue for a few reasons. You say she doesn't attack with her hands so they don't need to be defined, but her feet don't have toes either, so...? Secondly, characters like Effie and Chun-Li exist, and despite their small hands, were given defined fingers easily enough, so it's not a resolution restriction. Since we can only speculate on the matter, I'm going to say that they just ran out of time to clean up Elena. While it wasn't sourced, another user mentioned that she was one of the first characters to be completed and that she took way more time than the team planned.

EDIT: This also doesn't hold water because there's three or four animations that do have well defined fingers and toes, as if they received more attention than the rest of the animations. Her throw (miss), f+MK, b,d,db+K, and the startup on some of her Super Arts.

You're not following:
- she doesn't have fingers because her hand is too small to draw fingers on at that sprite res
- she has small hands unlike most of the cast because she doesn't attack with her hands

Limps used for attacking being exaggerated and well defined to make it clearer to identify attacks in SF is not something I came up with but taken straight out of Capcom's mouth.

Also, this is the size of Elena's hands, how are you going to draw five fingers at this pixel res:

Elena still get well defined fingers when her hands are part of the key information/interest of the animation, like her win pose or when her fingers aren't closed together. Both Effie and Chun have bigger hands than Elena and, more importantly, their hands are used more in expressing their animation so they get more details there.

 

[SixMachine]

Here's one with Skullgirls added (which also had more sprites and more characters per-fight and more color depth and it's seriously a shame Blazblue is stuck behind in terms of sprite tech. Filia isn't even a tall character).

Skullgirls has gotten a lot closer.

Skullgirl's felt that it was missing something in the animation that had "oomph" like SF3, and even KOF13. I know that the sprites are well made and in screenshots they do stand out, but in motion I think they didn't nail it compared to SF3. A while ago someone in a fighting game thread said Skullgirl's animation was like paper cutouts hitting each other, even though that sort of does injustice to the work the team put it in, since it is still very good,I do agree that the analogy hits the sentiment.

Since making something aesthetically pleasing in motion is more than just how many frames and pixels it has (Skullgirls has it in spades), I think a lot of it has to do with the speed and clarity of the motion. You can make it snappy to make it seem fast, but if it is too fast a lot of the animation is "lost" on the viewer, which I personally think happens because of the type of game Skullgirls is, which is trying to emulate the Vs. series where they are constantly just going into different motions without really hiding a transition. Sort of like seeing Makoto pause on certain punches to show impact and speed up to make a punch combination look snappy on her SA1. Likewise a lot of people will miss things when they see a Skullgirls combo, like dialing through a chain that just has a bunch of attacks canceling into the next without pause.

 

[tomwhite2004]

kof13 was 720p, but I don't know if that counts.

The bi-linear filtering on all the sprites in XIII is absolutely gross, at least the backgrounds were left alone.

 

[sixteen-bit]

you forgot

 

[MrCarter]

The last good Street Fighter. 4 and 5 were a huge step back in my eyes. More hand draw sprites, less bad 3D models.

I absolutely loved the sprites in SF3 but I can't deny Capcom did a great job on the 3D models in SFV reminiscent to that detailed 2D-animation from the past.

And some of them even have a hit box.

 

[gafneo]

I wish there was a whole era dedicated to pixel art from the Street Fighter 3 days. Would have been great if we got some Castlevanias and some Final Fights with this look.

 

[Coulomb_Barrier]

Greatest fighting game of all time (excluding vf 4 evolution).

Yes I like you.

 

[groansey]

One thing I never understood is why backgrounds from previous versions weren't included subsequent iterations.

Same with the Alpha series.

At least in the home versions.

 

[rec0ded1]

"At ease losuh"
One of a few games that made me realize how dumb it is to resist change. When it first hit arcades I talked mad trash about it and wanted the old cast back. So glad it didn't take long to change my tune. Wish it was on the current consoles because damn I love watching the animations.

 

[jufonuk]

time to play this again on my 360

shit why can the switch version of SFII include a version of this on it?

 

[WarRock]

For starters there are no cels in the process, only paper, but there weren't any cels for Aladdin either. But beyond that no, it's still pixel art, it's not just a matter of tracing drawings but also finding the right pixel arrangements to convey details. Paper only gets you the basic movement and then there's a whole lot of things involved. While using some of those techniques Aladdin was pretty basic by comparison, more than Darkstalkers which was the first Capcom game where they really thought out their animation techniques. Here's a GDC slides giving an example of how ratios were thought out to bring out details.

Wowa, which GDC presentation is that?