Earthpainting
Member
This is one of the nicest implementation of a world map I've seen. Is the game itself any good?The overworld from Treasure Hunter G.
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Cool visual effects in 16bit console games.
- Thread starter nkarafo
- Start date
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
The first person stage is also really smooth as well:
This stage is in the SNES game too with both lower resolution, framerate and nerfed map.
Fixed for you.
MrCunningham
Member
I have actually never played the SNES version, but from videos I always assumed it looked roughly the same but with a lower resolution and higher colour count. Interesting.
MrCunningham
Member
I would say so. Both versions of the game were also developed by Travellers Tales and Psygnosis, two UK developers that were some of the most technically competent developers on the Genesis/ Mega Drive.
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
Doom stage uses a software renderer, so it is naturally faster on Megadrive. It should be limited to 16 colors since it is mostly done in a single BG plane (except for the outer window not present at SNES version). Apparently, they are faking lighting effects by performing pallete swaps in a tile per tile basis.
Those guys were geniuses.
Those guys were geniuses.
The Genesis would not be fast enough to do this. It is much, much more likely that they are using shadow and highlight mode.
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
It is doable with just a few color changes. Also, bear in mind this is not the usual HW renderer, but a software framebuffer. H/L would have its own limitations.
No, it shouldn't be doable even with just a few color changes. You're talking on a per tile basis, it takes several h-blanks just to change all 16 colors on a single plane. You absolutely cannot change palettes per-tile, that's flat-out not how the VDP operates, software renderer or not. You're still going to have to adhere to the limitations of Sega Genesis DMA. Doing per-tile palette changes on a static image would be an enormous feat, you're seriously trying to argue they did it while still having enough cycles left over to render a raycasted engine? Come on, be realistic.
Shadow and highlight mode is a free operation* that is handled per-tile and, most importantly, looks exactly like the effect going on in Toy Story.
EDIT: Also adding to the evidence is that Toy Story uses Shadow and Highlight mode liberally elsewhere in the game.
*relatively speaking, it's performed by bitshifting a palette entry when it's drawn to the screen.
MrCunningham
Member
Yeah, the still image cutscenes used shadow and highlight to produce fairly large amounts of colours on screen at once...
Genesis game, 165 colours:
106 colours:
SNES comparison, 83 colours:
The SNES game does have a nicer palette even though the Genesis game has more colours. Though the Genesis images are also higher resolution.
nkarafo
Member
I personally liked the colors in the Genesis version more.
Cute Dragon Here
Member
Yeah, the still image cutscenes used shadow and highlight to produce fairly large amounts of colours on screen at once...
Genesis game, 165 colours:
106 colours:
SNES comparison, 83 colours:
The SNES game does have a nicer palette even though the Genesis game has more colours. Though the Genesis images are also higher resolution.
The SNES version appears to be fringing blue with its text. Am I seeing things?
Also would be nice to see a gameplay comparison.
Keep them coming, boys! <3
Speaking of the cool effects, I'm pondering about these two things:
1. You know how the wavy effects that you tend to see in 16-bit console games... Is it possible to replicate it in a Unity 5.3 2D game? I think that effect would basically make it feel more "right".
2. Was there something preventing this effect from taking effect on the sprites?
All this talk is seriously making me consider doing SNES/Genesis/Game Boy Advance homebrew if only to see how I can do it "myself"
Treasure Hunter G is amazing if you like SRPG's.
Doing such an effect wouldn't be difficult using a pixel shader to change the resultant position of the drawing pixel.
I explained the math and concept behind the effect several pages ago.
Nope, there are games that use the effect on all the layers of the screen.
Cute Dragon Here
Member
Ah good. Got an example up? Would be cool to see it.
I don't work with unity personally, sorry.
Cute Dragon Here
Member
Nah, I meant the sprite distortion part.
MrCunningham
Member
To me, the Genesis image does look better because of the systems higher native resolution. The Genesis/ Mega Drive displays at 320x224 while the SNES displays at 256x224. So in order to make the SNES image look correct on a TV, it has to be squashed horizontally like so...
SNES top, Genesis bottom image...
And then it gets stretched out to a 4:3 output like this (Snes still top image, Genesis/ MD bottom):
The Genesis game looks cleaner, because the upscale is nearly 1:1 aspect ratio. Meanwhile the SNES image gets stretched horizontally to fill in a 4:3 aspect ratio. So it loses a lot of detail in horizontal resolution.
Yeah it is.
Check out The Adventures of Batman & Robin or treasure games like Alien Soldier, they do line scroll all over the place.
Did the demoscene make a big impact on Japanese developers in the 80's & 90's?
it is effectively done per tile, but technically it is done on a per-pixel basis. Shadow mode is pretty flexible, where highlight mode gets wonky depending on plane priorities and thus is far more limited.
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
You can use sprites to mask it for fine detail. But you will hit scan limit quickly. It also would apply to backgrounds where there are gaps, so that's why it isn't widely used during gameplay beyond blocks or columns. It is whatever but free operation.
Toy Story still pics do a good use of this, but they are static images.
undoubtedly. SIGGRAPH has been going since the 70's and really started garnering industry prestige in the early 80's.
petran79
Banned
The Sega Mega Play board.
Identical to the console version, except that you got to play the game with an arcade joystick on a clean looking CRT arcade monitor.
Previously the same cab had Sonic 2.
Weltall Zero
Member
I wholeheartedly approve of this thread.
What the fuck? My mind keeps telling me this shouldn't be possible even with a Mega CD, let alone a baseline Genesis.
This is far more due to the fact that for whatever reason they botched the color mapping / reduction on the SNES version. Just look at Woody's face, SNES' one is nothing but clashing yellow, orange and brown. :S
What the fuck? My mind keeps telling me this shouldn't be possible even with a Mega CD, let alone a baseline Genesis.
To me, the Genesis image does look better because of the systems higher native resolution. The Genesis/ Mega Drive displays at 320x224 while the SNES displays at 256x224. So in order to make the SNES image look correct on a TV, it has to be squashed horizontally like so...
SNES top, Genesis bottom image...
And then it gets stretched out to a 4:3 output like this (Snes still top image, Genesis/ MD bottom):
The Genesis game looks cleaner, because the upscale is nearly 1:1 aspect ratio. Meanwhile the SNES image gets stretched horizontally to fill in a 4:3 aspect ratio. So it loses a lot of detail in horizontal resolution.
This is far more due to the fact that for whatever reason they botched the color mapping / reduction on the SNES version. Just look at Woody's face, SNES' one is nothing but clashing yellow, orange and brown. :S
Developer had a great postmortem talk at GDC.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014630/Classic-Game-Postmortem-OUT-OF
There's probably only so much you can do when converting a singular image. If they had split up each character and element into their own layers and optimized the color reductions for them separately, it could probably have come out looking significantly better. But that would have meant much more manual work.
MrCunningham
Member
They did avoid using dithering in the SNES images, while dithering was used in the Genesis version. That alone also changes the output of the colour, especially with the different in between colours used. But yeah, it is a bit botched.
Weltall Zero
Member
Axelay is poetry in motion from start to end, and that music. I mean, look at this transition and sense of depth and distance (0:30, low quality badly emulated video):
https://youtu.be/XPFia7iVMVo?t=28
As a kid I didn't understand why stage 2 had patches of grassland, water and buildings on the wall alternating with space (with bridges over it!). It wasn't until I became familiar with space colonies that it all made sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7qiVPx53DA
I never liked that pronounced cylinder-like distortion of the perspective in Axelay. I think almost all of the early Konami SNES titles suffer from some ill conceived graphical gimmick, which is at worst directly detrimental to the gameplay (Contra 3), because they had some compulsion to show off the new hardware.
magicalsoundshower
Member
To be fair, the perspective effect used in Axelay isn't really anything unique to the SNES. Lots of people seem to think the overhead stages are using Mode 7, but they actually aren't (the fact that a full second background layer is displayed behind the foreground should be the most obvious giveaway, can't do that in Mode 7). It's just clever line scrolling trickery that I can't really explain, but maybe Krejlooc can.
To be fair, the perspective effect used in Axelay isn't really anything unique to the SNES. Lots of people seem to think the overhead stages are using Mode 7, but they actually aren't (the fact that a full second background layer is displayed behind the foreground should be the most obvious giveaway, can't do that in Mode 7). It's just clever line scrolling trickery that I can't really explain, but maybe Krejlooc can.
That trick is called H-sync line displacement, and it indeed isn't mode 7. Off the top of my head, Sonic 3D blast on the Sega Genesis uses it as well for the special stages, and there are PC Engine demos that also demonstrate it.
It's not a complex trick, you are adjusting the vertical scroll per row of pixels using hblank synced interrupts. This gives the illusion of a compression effect because the higher scrolling speed towards the horizon means you are skipping rows of pixels being drawn.
EDIT: Actually, thay HuZero homebrew for the PC engine that someone posted earlier uses this as part of it's trick for the pseudo-3D road generation.
Here's the effect being done on the genesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNHFba0hgFQ
malboroking
Banned
Well, you're wrong about DKC, we were just discussing some of the interesting graphical techniques they used other than prerendered sprites just 2 pages ago.
These games were incredible graphically for the time, nothing on the Genesis touch these quite frankly.
The single most impressive demonstration I've seen out of either console, personally, would be the homebrew version of Star Fox that runs on a stock genesis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUZpF2JLF4s
whitemex88
Member
Not as impressive now but i was blown away at the time
there were still amazing things it was pull even ignoring the subjective opinons of the actual art on the screen representing the tech. The game partly has no persistent HUD solely to give as much tricks to the actual playing field as possible - and having no HUD in your game like that is very unique in the 2D generation and was borrowed by Miyamoto for Yoshi's Island.
So we are counting Sega CD right since it's still 16bit?
Yeah, but that background isnt real time, it's an fmv
Still a cool visual effect. Especially considering it covers the entire screen unlike most Sega CD FMV's that only cover a small window unless it specifically designed to run with the 32X
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
More considering it is actually a full 360º 3D game unlike the original Starfox that is on rails.
So we are counting Sega CD right since it's still 16bit?
FMV though
My very uneducated guess would be that the simple untextured polygon look of everything allows them to get away with rendering the FMV at a lower bit depth. Sort of like the 1-bit silhouette "FMV" intro of Red Zone, but a bit more complex.
You could very well be right!
Stage 10 which has a lot more colors runs much slower
https://youtu.be/Crjgu2aE1QE?t=1949
The Real Abed
Perma-Junior
Yep, Silpheed looks great, but it's just a video trick since the levels are linear. I think a lot of SHMUPs that came later did the same thing. Including some on the GBA if I remember correctly.
The low colors on the flat shaded poly count lets the video compress better while still looking great and running fast enough.
I like to think that if Nintendo hadn't invented the SFX chip (I know, they didn't invent it. Argonaut did. Whatever.) and the SNES-CD had come out, Star Fox could have done the same thing. A 3D ship and maybe enemies, but fully rendered backgrounds. Or something. I dunno. SF is a SHMUP. It's just a front-running SHMUP as opposed to top-down or side-scroll.
The low colors on the flat shaded poly count lets the video compress better while still looking great and running fast enough.
I like to think that if Nintendo hadn't invented the SFX chip (I know, they didn't invent it. Argonaut did. Whatever.) and the SNES-CD had come out, Star Fox could have done the same thing. A 3D ship and maybe enemies, but fully rendered backgrounds. Or something. I dunno. SF is a SHMUP. It's just a front-running SHMUP as opposed to top-down or side-scroll.