Burning Force is really smooth in terms of sprite scaling (has lots of them) and runs at 60 FPS, plain and simple. Though I think the smoother in terms of fake 3D is... Sonic 3 Special Stages =P (spheres scale up in steps of 2 pixels, seriously)
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Burning Force is really smooth in terms of sprite scaling (has lots of them) and runs at 60 FPS, plain and simple. Though I think the smoother in terms of fake 3D is... Sonic 3 Special Stages =P (spheres scale up in steps of 2 pixels, seriously)
What about Panorama Cotton?Quote:
Originally Posted by Sik
It doesn't run at 60 FPS for starters (it runs at 20 FPS too) so it isn't anywhere as smooth as the Sonic 3 Special Stages >=P It seems to be about the same as Burning Force in terms of how many scaled sprites it uses.Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
I'm not sure about the animated sprite scaling, but Bimini Run seems awfully smooth to me as well.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sik
Where exactly is this? Calls for a road trip, somebody meet me there.Quote:
Originally Posted by havok666
Hmm, for whatever reason, Panorama Cotton feels a lot smoother/faster to play than Falaxy Force on the MD. There's just something weird and sluggish that frustrates me when I play it. (there's also the fact that I much prefer the Space Harrier and Panorama Cotton route with mainly using a main gun -maybe with added special weapons like Cotton, Soul Star, and Star Fox- rather than having an emphasis on Afterburner style missiles; but that has nothing to do with the sluggish feel of the game, or why the SMS game doesn't seem to have the same problem)Quote:
Originally Posted by Sik
On another note, I don't think the lack of full-screen rotation should be a major issue as long as the game mechanics were adjusted to address that. The bigger issue is that the Arcade game, while not moving the ship much around screen, moves the entire environment (more like a full 3D railshooter), and the Genesi version doesn't recreate that properly at times. (leading to the stiff/sluggish control feeling)
The FM Towns version only has rotation on a handful of sections (obviously animation based) like the first section in space, with most of the rest static like the MD game. (but with far larger and more numerous sprites and more animation -and no flicker) It capture's the arcade's motion a lot better though.
Edit: Actually, I think that's one reason I prefer Star Fox over Soul Star (for the rail stages) or Space Harrier. It's got full 3D PoV, Soul star only slightly moves the BG/terrain by comparison and has you ship fly all over the screen. (Star Fox effectively has a chase view of your ship, which Sega also did for After Burner in the arcade) Panorama Cotton is more in-between. (lots of moving around the screen, but also a significant change in PoV)
That's definitely one of the things I disliked about the Tornado flying stages in Sonic Adventure. (stiff, on-rails gameplay that had an almost fixed PoV and only moved the plane around the screen . . . it felt wrong)
His location says Ontario, Canada, so that would be the mother of all road trips for you. :pQuote:
Originally Posted by shinobimusashi
Niagara Falls, OntarioQuote:
Originally Posted by shinobimusashi
Galaxy Force II, Outrun, Afterburner, and all those other ports of scaling arcade games should have been ported to the Sega CD instead on one big "Sega Scaling Arcade Classics" or something like that.
I'd like for Sega-16's tech heads to explain (if they haven't already) if that would've been possible....its to my understanding that the SCD hardware was both underpowered and bottlenecked by the Genesis. They did however, port that one Taito game, "Night Striker" (Taito's version of "Thunder Blade") to MCD and it was an impressive port.Quote:
Originally Posted by Deo
Quote:
Originally Posted by Melf
Because those games were ported when the console was just out and they wanted to prove that it could do arcade-quality games and decided to port their own arcade games. This was all before the Mega CD was even announced (or in some cases, even planned - Altered Beast, Space Harrier II and Super Thunder Blade were launch titles after all!).Quote:
Originally Posted by Deo
It wouldn't run at 60 FPS (and it wouldn't be really colorful) but the ASIC isn't that slow... Just look at Adventures of Batman & Robin and you'll see what I mean. In fact the floor is more detailed since it's textured!Quote:
Originally Posted by Aarzak
That doesn't change the fact that all those games should have been pushed on the MCD ASAP (especially as many of those games, while impressive, were getting a bit old/out of context -at least for people who actually went to arcades- . . . so the sooner the better -with quality control kept in mind . . . ie not crappy ports that made no use of the hardware -like Afterburner III . . . except that wasn't a rushed launch title at all, but a 1993 release).Quote:
Originally Posted by Sik
Sega had newer scaler games too, or newer 2D games on boards with some scaling effects used. (obviously some games being less practical to port than others)
And careful use of sprites and both BGs (as well as optimized palettes and art) can make the best of the limited colors too. (Soul Star and Batman and Robin did pretty good jobs with that)Quote:
It wouldn't run at 60 FPS (and it wouldn't be really colorful) but the ASIC isn't that slow... Just look at Adventures of Batman & Robin and you'll see what I mean. In fact the floor is more detailed since it's textured!
It would probably be a lot easier if the full-screen rotation was dropped (you'd need 2-pass rendering for that -so slower for cases where V-DMA bandwidth wasn't the main bottleneck)
Hmm, does the ASIC have any problems rendering to sprites rather than tiles? (this came up before, but I don't think it ever got addressed) Rendering scaled/rotated animation (or even several composited objects) onto sprites rather than tiles would allow a fair bit more color flexibility too (each object/composite group of objects would select any of 4 palettes rather than being stuck with a shared 16 colors)
If there is a problem with using sprites, that would explain why so many of the games (that did use ASIC effects) had all scaled/rotated objects on the tile layer. (like Batman Returns, Battlecorps, and BC Racers)
Running at a lower framerate isn't necessarily a big problem . . . Soulstar is technically far slower than Galaxy Force II on the MD (~12 FPS vs 20), but feels far more responsive and fluid. (maybe a little choppy to look at, but the controls seem smooth and responsive -though things do feel a bit boxed-in since the PoV is pretty static and the ship mostly just moves around the screen like in Space Harrier or Nova Storm -unlike Star Fox, or even Panorama Cotton -you move around the screen in both of those too, but it pans/shifted perspective . . . Rebel Assault pans/scrolls too, but looks horrible and has control problems :p )
Something about GFII on the MD just makes it feel really confined and frustratingly unresponsive (Space Harrier doesn't feel like that). Part of it is probably that the arcade game was designed to have panning and rotating PoV effects rather than space-harrier style movement (thus the ship repositioned slowly on-screen but the BG moved far quicker around the ship -which doesn't happen in the MD game, or at least not nearly fast enough . . . and there's no rotation obviously -though the FM Towns game cuts most of that too but still looks more "right")
Edit:
Nevermind, I was remembering wrong: it pans fine on the MD . . . the problem is that it just moves WAY too slow in the vertical, but perfectly fine in the horizontal. (if it moved more quickly in the vertical, it would feel far more free/smooth) It DOES use a panning effect for semi-3D like perspective, unlike space harrier. (it's just the vertical movement that kills it -that and the tunnels are a bit ugly/bland looking . . . it would have been interesting to see how the MD would have pulled off the effect the SMS game used -same for the ground/lava effects with simple raster bars rather than texture effects like G-Loc on the Genesis, Space Harrier II, or Burning Force . . . let alone Panorama Cotton's ground texture effects ;))
...I said those games were out before the MCD was released. Some were even launch MD titles. And I don't know if there would have been much point in rereleasing those games anyways. The whole point of them was to prove that the MD by itself could do arcade-quality games.Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
Sega was moving away from the superscaler at that point, really. Moreover, they were starting to move into 3D games (Virtua Racing was released in 1992 IIRC). Also, by the time the MCD was released, the whole arcade-quality thing was fading away and Sega decided to move onto trying to focus on original games instead. Besides fighting games, there wasn't much arcade game porting going on at that point.Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
At the expense of lower framerate and more VRAM usage (the latter meaning you'll probably need to reduce your visible area, unless you want some severe artifacts appearing). Honestly I'd rather get less colors than having to cope with those issues.Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
Some games do render to sprites actually =/Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
They did it because it was easier. Also, Battlecorps is a 3D game, some objects weren't even sprites but deformed quads (e.g. walls). It was probably easier to render everything to a single bitmap, especially if you consider how likely it could hit the sprite overflow otherwise.Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
And for the record, Battlecorps does use two planes. Floor and sky are one tilemap, objects and walls are the other tilemap. They use different palettes.
Cause its running on the Sega 16 e rep system. Jk but all jokes aside its because its averagish.