Is it just me or do old 16-bit fighting games....

[dragonboy]

You can do 32 colors for the BG I think, and the layers can share palettes. Also, each character can have a certain palette, just as long as more than two 16-color palettes aren't present on the sprite layer at any time. So the entire game doesn't have to use the same 64-color palette for everything.

Also, characters like Ken or Ryu, etc have many, many frames of animation from just standing to there to each and every one of their attacks, of which there are many. There's no way they could fit that into 10 frames. I don't know of any Genesis game where a character has 100 frames of animation, but I guarantee you that a Street Fighter character has more frames of animation than your average platform game character who only has to run, jump and shoot.

and swim, and climb, and duck, hold objects, hold objects while running, hold objects while jumping, looking up, falling off a cliff, waiting, whatever super-power the character has, and dying.

All of them having at least 8 frames of animation.

[tomaitheous]

I would post pictures, but videos tell more about a game than pictures do

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DZ8C...eature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIpa2...eature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkFUt...eature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd4oJGQhumA

But what are you referring to? Since these are all MD games, I'll assume this is a MD only issue. So are you referring to the color usage or the actual pixel art.

Sonic examples: lots of recycled pretty colors and lots of recycled tiles.

Fighter examples: basically ports of the arcade version made to fit to the genesis format. The SF2 one looks fine, and the other looks fine. Neither as nice as the arcade equivalents (they obviously can't be) but nice none the less

[Genesis Knight]

and swim, and climb, and duck, hold objects, hold objects while running, hold objects while jumping, looking up, falling off a cliff, waiting, whatever super-power the character has, and dying.

Okay, compared to 100 fighting moves per character for a 8 character roster. Sorry, fighting games require way more animation. As for graphical quality, you can't make generalities. Samurai Showdown, for instance, looks great. Eternal Champions looks like crap. So no, you can't say that fighters as a genre looked worse or better than other games of the period.

[AD2101]

Yea we gotta be on different wavelengths here because I don't think Fatal Fury or Street Fighter 2 look bad at all. I kinda wanna pick up FF now from seeing that video actually.

[winona]

Well, Fatal Fury is total crap. Even when it was first released on Neo Geo. So yay...you are right about that one.

As for SFII, I dont know what else you could ever want from it? Its a very good arcade conversion and still looks good io. Naturally not as colorful as a Sonic game but like previous poster said, there are a lot more animations, characters and backgrounds.

Could it have been better yes? The first version of SFII with more animations was apparently pulled?

[dragonboy]

If fighting games required so much memory space, why didn't they ever try using tricks such as extracting all of the empty tiles in character sprites from the rom, and by using 3bpp on parts of the sprites that don't use all 16 colors, or even that "0 if repeat color from last pixel; 1 followed by # of color if pixel is different from last" trick.

EDIT:


As it appears, the tricks work, there is a lot of empty black tiles in the sprite, and parts of the sprite don't use more than half the colors which enables you to store some of the tiles in 3-bbp, and there is a lot of side by side pixels of the same color so the last trick works also.

[MN12BIRD]

I would have to say SFII and MKII (on SNES) are some of the better looking games from that era period. As for the platformer having more frames... your kidding right?? Think off all the special moves, finishing moves, friendships, animalities, babalites for each character in MKII!! this is above all the basic moves, several kicks, punches, blocking, crouching, uppercuts, sweeps.... there are WAY more frames in a fighting game!! and yes the character sprites are huge too!

[tomaitheous]

why didn't they ever try using tricks such as extracting all of the empty tiles in character sprites from the rom, and by using 3bpp on parts of the sprites that don't use all 16 colors

Because there are better and more advance compression methods that just BPP types per tile (you'd still need marker system to identify which tile use which BPP format - causing some size overhead on non reduced tiles).

Genesis tiles use linear bpp format, lending itself *very* convenient in LZSS (and its other variants) for size reduction.

or even that "0 if repeat color from last pixel; 1 followed by # of color if pixel is different from last" trick.

Or just RLE. But if you're going to do pixel level compression, you're better off with something a little more efficient like LZSS+huffman or LZSS+elias gamma code, etc.


The drawback is compression increases cpu resource overhead. I doubt there's enough room in main ram to decompress and keep all the frames of animation for SF2 (and other games of the same level) for even a first player let alone second. So you'd need to decompress a frame on the fly and this slows things down. The game needs quick access to the characters, thus uncompressed frames.

It's not a situation of game developers being lazy - a lot genesis games utilize LZSS variant compression schemes. That being said, I have no idea why the SF2 rom uses uncompressed tiles for the BG layers.

[Mr Smith]

Who cares how they look? 16-bit fighters play better than a group of 12 drunken lesbians. Fighting games really fell apart when they attempted to become 3D.

[dragonboy]

Because there are better and more advance compression methods that just BPP types per tile (you'd still need marker system to identify which tile use which BPP format - causing some size overhead on non reduced tiles).

I meant, using all three methods at one time

Genesis tiles use linear bpp format, lending itself *very* convenient in LZSS (and its other variants) for size reduction.

I looked LZSS up and it looks like a very good compression technique.

Or just RLE. But if you're going to do pixel level compression, you're better off with something a little more efficient like LZSS+huffman or LZSS+elias gamma code, etc.

What I was talking about wasn't exactly RLE. Actually it was something I came up with a while ago. I year or so ago, I taught myself how to program, and I couldn't find enough details about any compression methods so I came up with the "0 if repeat last color, 1 if use new color" idea by myself.

The drawback is compression increases cpu resource overhead. I doubt there's enough room in main ram to decompress and keep all the frames of animation for SF2 (and other games of the same level) for even a first player let alone second. So you'd need to decompress a frame on the fly and this slows things down. The game needs quick access to the characters, thus uncompressed frames.

I see no problem with having some sprites compressed and stored into ram but leaving others uncompressed and left in the cartridge to save some cpu.

It's not a situation of game developers being lazy - a lot genesis games utilize LZSS variant compression schemes. That being said, I have no idea why the SF2 rom uses uncompressed tiles for the BG layers.

I didn't know if compression was invented back then or not.

[tomaitheous]

I looked LZSS up and it looks like a very good compression technique.

It's great and it's been around since the early 80's There are variants that use a circular buffer system too, for decompressing directly to I/O ports like the VDP. Btw- LZ variants also give you free RLE without the need for a separate/extra control code.

What I was talking about wasn't exactly RLE. Actually it was something I came up with a while ago. I year or so ago, I taught myself how to program, and I couldn't find enough details about any compression methods so I came up with the "0 if repeat last color, 1 if use new color" idea by myself.

Using a 1bit mask system or control code? I've traced through a lot of games and came across all kinds of compression schemes and variants of. I've seen many different ways to do RLE, related types, and mask compression. Figuring them out/decoding is a side hobby of mine.

I see no problem with having some sprites compressed and stored into ram but leaving others uncompressed and left in the cartridge to save some cpu.

Actually, most games used that approach. For something like SF2, it becomes a cpu resource issue though. Decompressing takes clock cycles and in general the more compressed it is, the slower it is for decompression. Not to mention if you're doing multiple layers of compression. LZSS is especially slow at decompressing for realtime and factor that in with the speed of SF2 the new challengers at the fastest setting.


Do you plan on doing any console dev?

[dragonboy]

Do you plan on doing any console dev?

When I find a program or something to dev on

[j_factor]

Fatal Fury Special looks pretty good IMO.

[GameUser-16-32-128]

Time Killers and Deadly Moves were both jawsumely bad 16-bit fighters.

[TmEE]

When I find a program or something to dev on

SO, take up MD/Genny, I'm loving it, and you will be too