Sapiens
Member
Are the player and enemy ships in Silpheed polygons or are they pre-rendered?
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Cool visual effects in 16bit console games.
- Thread starter nkarafo
- Start date
Are the player and enemy ships in Silpheed polygons or are they pre-rendered?
My words exactly!
Member
Anyone that was there at the time should remember the huge impact DKC and its' audiovisual presentation had on the whole industry...
If Sonic started the 16bit war, DKC ended it.
Imho, DKC series was above all else in the SNES and MD library as far as visuals and music go.
If Sonic started the 16bit war, DKC ended it.
Imho, DKC series was above all else in the SNES and MD library as far as visuals and music go.
Sapiens
Member
This really isn't a 16 bit console war dick measuring contest though. It's more about developer appreciation and the feats they were abel to achieve on all 16 bit consoles (including the Turbo/PCE).
Any true veteran of the 16 bit war appreciated each machine equally and took the hardware capabilities into account when they judge the heights the developers were able to reach. Making it about the corporations really makes this whole thread seem smaller.
If you want to make it that, go find another thread.
Polygons (very few of them).
Same for the conversion of StarBlade for Mega CD (though not filled).
Tom Nook Sawyer
Member
nm
HueyFreeman
Banned
More considering it is actually a full 360º 3D game unlike the original Starfox that is on rails.
FMV though
Feel like you guys are selling Silpheed short - having polygonal players/enemies laid over full screen FMV was pretty ridiculous for the time and makes the game look a generation ahead, regardless of how linear it was (also, most shmups are linear?)
Sega CD has such an interesting library.
Sapiens
Member
Panorama Cotton right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufVi3aL6ol0&t=37m50s
Weltall Zero
Member
You're right about the dithering; perhaps they did so because the Genesis, having a more limited palette, used dithering a lot more than the SNES (Woody's hat is one of the places where this is particularly noticeable). But there's also straight out faulty color conversion: Woody's face has very little dithering in either version, and yet the Genesis one manages to pull off convincing skin tones: the SNES one is yellow, orange and brown. The SNES is obviously capable of displaying skin tones just fine (hell, if anything it's the Genesis that has more problems doing that), so it's clearly a case of the SNES version being the least competently done of the two. Of course, compounded with the lack of dithering it makes for an even uglier mess.
nkarafo
Member
On Sega Mega CD there were a few very good looking sprite scaling games.
Batman Returns:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMc0IDbkzCs
Batman Returns:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMc0IDbkzCs
It becomes harder and harder to find gifs
And this is probably the most impressive one for the "vanilla" 16bit consoles.
My words exactly!
Member
Hold on, that's not my intention. I was just responding to the DKC bashing a few posts above mine. It is revisionist history to overlook the visuals of that series when at the time they really caused a stir and even today you have people prefering the looks of DKC SNES trilogy over the Retro ones.
Anyway, to contribute to the thread i remember being impressed recently with a SNES game called Dragon View. It had 3d free roaming sections on the overworld, something rare for the time, especially on vanilla SNES. A video of it action here (~4.45 mark) : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hp84_6Ljxgk
Also, on the subjectbof scaling, always thought that Soulstar on the Sega CD was the best showcase of that technique in the 16 bit consoles.
Video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WnT-hf9orO8
Springfoot
Member
It's not intentional. Part of that trick is an h-blank palette change - old systems like the Sega Genesis were timed according to CRT television hardware. The way those types of TVs work is that they have a gun inside the screen that physically draws a single row of scanout onto the screen from left to right. Once it reaches the right side of the screen, the gun turns off, then moves back into position so it's on the left side of the screen, and down one row (well, two if you're running an interlaced mode) to begin drawing the next line.
Now, it takes actual time for the gun to move back into position, and that period where it's not drawing to the screen but moving back to position is called a blank. There are two types of blanks, hblank, for when the gun moves horizontally back into position, and vblank, where it moves from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen. hblanks are short, where vblanks are long. The nature of the timing between the console and the TV is so precise that you can actually mathematically figure out the number of CPU cycles you have available during this time.
Blanks are useful to these old consoles because they have no form of multitasking, so you uses these periods where nothing is being drawn to the screen to do many types of functions that need to appear instant and concurrent; for example joystick polling is done during one of these blanks.
The way the lava in RKA works is that, during these hblanks, they adjust the palette of the genesis to make it draw different colors. This trick is widely recognized as the way Sonic the Hedgehog would fake water transparency. Well, if you play the old Sonic games, specifically Sonic 1 and Sonic 2, you probably notice these little splash marks on the screen when water is being drawn:
See the 5 little splashes drawn at the water line? Those are sprites - in game, they flash rapidly at 60 hz across the screen. On real hardware, this creates a flickering, translucent effect that sort of looks like wave tops. While they look neat, they actually serve a functional purpose - the hblank palette swap is an imperfect trick. It shouldn't be possible to change all the palette values quickly enough in just 1 hblank to make the effect seemless. That is what you are seeing in Rocket Knight Adventure when you think the lava is sticking to the rocks - it's not. What you are really seeing is that it's taking 2 or 3 hblanks to fully change the palette, and certain colors are changing sooner, which makes the darker shade in the background change first, which to you guys looks like lava sticking to the rocks.
Here are the same type of artifacts in Angel Island Zone in Sonic 3, which doesn't use flickering sprites to mask them:
See how some palette colors don't change until several rows after some other colors? That's because it's taken multiple hblanks to change all the palette entries.
This is a fantastic explanation and set of examples, and I've really enjoyed your posts throughout this thread. I find it fascinating how the precision and consistency of CRT timings allowed devs to create so many of these advanced effects.
MrCunningham
Member
The player ship and most of the enemy ships were made out of very basic polygon shapes. But there were also quite a few scaling sprites thrown in as well. Personally I like the look of Silpheed on the Sega CD, and I think it makes some good use of the hardware. Also because the backgrounds are streaming, the Sega CD uses the system's PCM chip as well as the FM chip in the Genesis to produce the in-game level music.
Another game that kind of used a simaler trick is Pugsy for the Sega CD (which was also developed by Travelers Tales) : https://youtu.be/BPJMXIedOgE?t=491 They used FMV for one of the bosses, while the player still controlled a sprite character. Really weird, but interesting.
Yeah, the Sega CD had some nice hardware sprite scaling abilities...
Adventures of Batman and Robin (this one was coded by the same person that did the driving sections in Batman Returns for the Sega CD):
A few gif's from Soul Star:
Core made really good use of the Sega CD's scaling abilities.
Cow Mengde
Banned
I'm not sure if they qualify, but my first thought were the bubbles in Crysta's ski.
I remember seeing this again when I finally learned how to turn on transparency on the SNES emulator. It was glorious.
That's the same effect Ranger-X used, isn't it?
Star Cruiser for the Genesis. Fully polygonal FPS in 1990.
https://youtu.be/yND5V85iPHc?t=358
First polygonal console game ever, AFAIK.
https://youtu.be/yND5V85iPHc?t=358
First polygonal console game ever, AFAIK.
MissCauthon
Member
No ones mentioned Prince of Persia yet...
DarkConfidant
Member
All of the magic and in battle animations in FF6 are still my favorite.
Hard Drivin released the exact same day
Soltype
Member
Shame we never got this stateside, this version was only chance we had of getting it.
The Real Abed
Perma-Junior
I have this game! I've never put it in my Sega CD though. It's complete in box too. I always loved how the driving levels look. Or any pseudo-3D driving game on a powerful enough console.Yeah, the Sega CD had some nice hardware sprite scaling abilities...
Adventures of Batman and Robin (this one was coded by the same person that did the driving sections in Batman Returns for the Sega CD):
Ranger X uses lots of tricks, but yeah it uses shadow and highlight mode quite a bit.
I also think the color quantization is messed up on the SNES. The SNES image
is quantized lower than the Genesis, has no dithering applied, and the color
mapper doesn't favor flesh tones nor tries to recreate them by putting some
specific colors next to some others.
What I remember from the past is that at times some good dithering couldn't be
applied due to storage limits, because dithering works against any compression
technique. Some developers have only found out in the end that they won't fit
the storage limit and as such some images were quantized even lower while
skipping dithering altogether. But I can't say whether this was of any issue
in here.
Btw; Is there a 24-bit version of this very image around?
Only halfway through reading this thread, but I'm surprised to not see the intro to Sub-Terrania get posted. Even right through to the opening level "cutscene" (with the dude falling down the tube into the ship) it's super impressive.
But yeah, Red Zone I think has by far the best intro. Also a Zyrinx game.
Edit: I'd completely forgotten how slick Toy Story was on the MD. Only ever rented it, but I remember the music and graphical effects (and the FPS bit) blowing me away at the time. Disney were pretty damn solid with some of their releases, particularly in choosing who to give them to.
But yeah, Red Zone I think has by far the best intro. Also a Zyrinx game.
Edit: I'd completely forgotten how slick Toy Story was on the MD. Only ever rented it, but I remember the music and graphical effects (and the FPS bit) blowing me away at the time. Disney were pretty damn solid with some of their releases, particularly in choosing who to give them to.
Treasure had some of the best graphical tricks up their sleeve back in that era IMO.
Gunstar Super Heroes for the GBA had amazing opening to a first boss, with an amazing pixelated wavy heat effect in the background. Really showed off the hidden potential and power of the GBA. (Below is the best gif I could find of it).
Also all of their marionette bosses were remarkable and so cool for the time.
Gunstar Super Heroes for the GBA had amazing opening to a first boss, with an amazing pixelated wavy heat effect in the background. Really showed off the hidden potential and power of the GBA. (Below is the best gif I could find of it).
Also all of their marionette bosses were remarkable and so cool for the time.
Well, what do you mean by "works against"? LempelZiv derived compression generally plays well with dithered patterns - in fact, all of Sonic the Hedgehog's art is LZ77 compressed (and Sonic uses a lot of dithering).
Of course it plays well with dithering patterns. What I meant is, a quantized
image which is dithered will consume more space when being compress because it
also contains more information. Roughly, given any of the Lempel–Ziv derived
compression algorithms, repeated patterns of pixels are replaced with a single
instance. A non-dithered version of a quantized image produces longer runs of
pixels having the same color. This leads to a better compression not only
because the runs are longer compared to any dithered version of it, but also
because the dictionary of the compressor won't increase as fast (or needs to
be reset as fast) and as such can keep the bit-lengths for compressing the
runs of pixels much smaller.
Shifty
Member
You certainly should. I started playing it on my commute after years of failing to get past the first boss, and it's been great.
The bit-ness is usually determined by the width of the data bus. If this is 16 bit, then it's a 16 bit machine.
MrCunningham
Member
You can tell that Zyrinx came out of the European Amiga/ Atari ST demo scene, because their Genesis (and later Saturn/ PC ) games were like pure tech demos.
Sub-Terrania intro (Genesis/ Mega Dive):
Red Zone intro (Genesis/ Mega Dive):
I still enjoyed the few titles that they did release though. The Jesper Kyd soundtracks are glorious in these games.
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
You don't want to use dithering on SNES because of the low resolution. Nothing else.
misericordia
Neo Member
Nice gifs!
cireza
Member
SNES games always look blurry because of this. I have many consoles and play on a CRT TV, and you can really see the blur on the SNES games. That's too bad, because otherwise some games are really impressive (in terms of pixel-art and palette).
Some MD/SCD games also use the 256x224 resolution, but for some reason, I find that they don't look "that" blurry. Maybe there is en explanation to this ?
MrCunningham
Member
A lot of early SNES ports would leave the sprites 1:1 to their Genesis counterparts, which would either make the SNES sprite look really fat when viewed at 4:3 or make the Genesis sprite look really skinny if the sprite was designed for the SNES hardware in mind. Here is an example that I made from Mortal Kombat 1:
(left = Genesis, right = SNES)
The sprites for both these games are at the same resolution, but when stretched to 4:3:
SNES (256x224):
Genesis (320x224):
The sprites from the SNES port output really fat thanks to the lower screen resolution of the SNES game, while the Genesis game looks correct.
But for Mortal Kombat 2, Sculptured Software fixed this issue for the SNES port by reducing the horizontal resolution on the sprites, making them much skinnier:
(left = Genesis, right = SNES)
Which outputted like this:
SNES (256x224):
Genesis (320x224):
The sprites are at the correct aspect ratio on the SNES port unlike MK1, but at the same time they lose a lot of pixel detail thanks to them being squashed.
Though there are some cases where games like Street Fighter 2 runs at 256x240 on the Genesis to keep the aspect ratio of the sprites equal to the SNES version, just because Capcom recycled all of the art assets from the SNES port:
Genesis version of Street Fighter II: SCE displays at 256x240:
SNES Street Fighter II: Turbo at 256x224:
The Genesis game runs at a higher vertical resolution, and has bigger black bars on the top and bottom of the screen to compensate for the differences:
Genesis:
SNES:
Sapiens
Member
Me too - The SNES pics are clearly due to some blunder or rush job - this is where the SNES is supposed to demolish the MD. Weird.
Maybe they ran out of memory on the cart? Maybe the stress of working on two technically sophisticated games at the same time for completely different hardware took its toll on the staff and the cinematics were left to the last day.
cireza
Member
MrCunningham : thanks for the details.
From my knowledge, there are quite a few games that run in 256*240 on MegaDrive. Many third party games (from Capcom or Konami).
You can really see the difference in resolution when you compare Castlevania BL to any of the two SNES Castlevania games. You can see further. This also makes fast paced games easier to play on MegaDrive, because you see better what is coming at you.
If I am right, Shining Force games also use 256x240 resolution.
From my knowledge, there are quite a few games that run in 256*240 on MegaDrive. Many third party games (from Capcom or Konami).
You can really see the difference in resolution when you compare Castlevania BL to any of the two SNES Castlevania games. You can see further. This also makes fast paced games easier to play on MegaDrive, because you see better what is coming at you.
If I am right, Shining Force games also use 256x240 resolution.
Sapiens
Member
You can always tell when a MD game is booting into low rez mode when the SEGA logo is stretched out.
Also, the MD really got the short end of the stick with those MK ports. I feel they could have done so much more with them, but I guess when you had those time constraints (I'd be shocked if they had more than six months to make all those ports back in 1993), we were lucky to get anything half way decent.
Also, the MD really got the short end of the stick with those MK ports. I feel they could have done so much more with them, but I guess when you had those time constraints (I'd be shocked if they had more than six months to make all those ports back in 1993), we were lucky to get anything half way decent.
Brutal Deluxe
Member
Since someone else named it Brian the lion background rotations on the amiga without fancy chips, no gif sadly.
Too bad no other amiga game did it.
Agony did some subtle effects, but the whole game aestethics are really spectacular
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ujVscbKDH4
_05.gif)
Oh i loved that kind of water effect
It was constantly on the bottom of the screen in world minimap of Fire and Ice(it also has horizontal distorsion)
Other games had it but now i don't remember
God Agony looked good back in the day. That title music as well!!
AtomicShroom
Member
Clearly either incompetence, laziness, or lack of time. We're talking about a system that can display a pre-rendered scene like this, for example:
MrCunningham
Member
I don't think this is saying much, but I feel like the Genesis/ MD port of MK1 was better than the SNES port. But Mortal Kombat 2 was a better port o the SNES. Though I do think both MK games on the Genesis/ MD have really good soundtracks. MK2 on the Genesis does have better looking sprites than the SNES game too.
The 32x port does fix some of the things with the Genesis port (and I made a post about it here last year), but even that one is still far from the best version to play.
For Capcom, they did port a lot of their Genesis games directly from the SNES (not including the Sega in-house ports of Capcom games) and sometimes Konami did to. Even though they were actually more committed to making original content for the Genisis/ MD.
Shining force being at a lower resolution is interesting, I wonder why that is? Perhaps to save space on the cartridge for more artwork by drawing everything at lower reoslutions?
Sapiens
Member
Clearly either incompetence, laziness, or lack of time. We're talking about a system that can display a pre-rendered scene like this, for example:
You gotta wonder what percentage of the original DKC cart's memory that title screen took. I bet it wasn't too insignificant. I remember being floored by the title screen back in the day.
That's another reason to vote against dithering in some cases, since any
dithering will degrade the resolution even further (depending on the size of
pattern used).
Here is a little 3d graphics I once did for Notch's DCPU-16. It was supposed
to become a game within Notch's game 0x10c, where you could play it on the
vector display output (SPED-3). Anyhow, 0x10c didn't materialized. I wrote the
entire backbone of the 3d engine from scratch and implemented the most
important algorithms like perspective projection, full 3d clipping, quaternion
rotation, and even some shading, all on the DCPU-16.
This was an ealier prototype showing the board computer in action.
Edit:
shading, DCPU-16
cireza
Member
That would be my guess. When you look at it, Shining Force games have a huge amount of pretty advanced (and also big) pixel-art graphics. All the characters + enemies + backgrounds + faces etc...
It is pretty impressive to see all of this fit inside the "relatively small" 12 and 16 Megs cartridges.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
That was a delight to watch - thanks.
To this day I never made the connection that Doggy - the first cassette game I played on Oric-1 (before that I used to type in the hex dump of games for hours on) was Chahi's too.
Like I said, applying a universal color reduction algorithm to a whole image like that pretty much never turns out well, even if you have more colors to work with. And then you have some additional console limitations on top of that, like how you can only use so many colors per tile, which probably confounds the problem even further.
If you want a good result you need to put manual work in to isolate and selectively optimize separate elements of the picture. I'm guessing this is probably what Rare did for the DKC title image.
Chainsawkitten
Member
If we assume a naive implementation, that's 256*224=57344 pixels. The SNES has a color palette of 32768 colors, which means a color is represented by 15 bits. Let's say 16 bits just so it stores neatly in 2 byte. That's 57344*2 = 112 KiB. Donkey Kong Country had a 32 MiB cartridge (which it proudly advertised) so that's 0.35% of the cartridge size.