Also see: Street Fighter II, The World Warrier
Street Fighter II, paper trails (2021)
31–40 of 41 posts
Re: Street Fighter II, paper trails (2021)
#32The end of the article speculates that the sheet system was dropped since the tiles appear scrambled. I'm wondering if the artists still used the sheet system, but a memory optimizer tool re-ordered the tiles to help free up a little more space on the ROM.
The way Super Street Fighter II has a mix of methodologies seems to count against that. Why only run this optimiser on the new art?
I could see artists might still use a grid when sketching and planning to keep a handle on sprite size / memory usage. But not in the hand packed sort of way, more just each sprite drawn unscrambled on a grid. You wouldn't go through all the rigmarole of hand optimising memory layouts if some stage in the build system is going to ignore it and do its own thing instead.
Re: Street Fighter II, paper trails (2021)
#33I played this game to death on my megadrive (genesis) and now occasionally plate third strike. So amazing to see a bit of street fighter history and funny I'd never noticed Ken's jaundiced eyes and teeth!
The only gaming console I still own is a SEGA Saturn - and a burned copy Street Fighter 2 Alpha practically lives in the disc tray. (I use an Action Replay cartridge solution for booting burned discs called ‘Pseudo Saturn Kai Lite’.) I am fortunate enough to have a live-in music studio, and it actually lives attached to the secondary monitor in the studio for us to take breaks on and do a few fights to decompress. Pr…
Just in case your Saturn ever dies the arcade version is well emulated by Final Burn.
https://github.com/finalburnneo/FBNeo/releases
https://archive.org/download/2020_01_06_fbn/roms/arcade.zip/...
Re: Street Fighter II, paper trails (2021)
#34The end of the article speculates that the sheet system was dropped since the tiles appear scrambled. I'm wondering if the artists still used the sheet system, but a memory optimizer tool re-ordered the tiles to help free up a little more space on the ROM.
> I'm wondering if the artists still used the sheet system, but a memory optimizer tool re-ordered the tiles to help free up a little more space on the ROM.
Seems unlikely. Managing the "physical" layout of sprites on a sheet is a lot of work; there's no reason to do that if it's going to be thrown out by an optimizer in the end.
Besides, notice that, on the optimized SF2 sheet, all of the tiles for one sprite get written out in order; they aren't interleaved left-to-right like the tiles would have been on a sheet.
Re: Street Fighter II, paper trails (2021)
#35Also see: Street Fighter II, The World Warrier https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_warrier/index.html
to save people some clicking, the word "Warrier" here is in fact misspelled intentionally by the article, which discusses how it was misspelled unintentionally by one of the original graphic designers of the game.
Re: Street Fighter II, paper trails (2021)
#36With today's 100GB game downloads, it's easy to say that developers gave up on these kinds of tricks. But they have to be doing something (other than data compression), right? Otherwise we'd be seeing 500GB downloads?
Games are also way bigger these days. It may not feel like they're trying but they probably are.
Re: Street Fighter II, paper trails (2021)
#37Also see: Street Fighter II, The World Warrier https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_warrier/index.html
That is an awesome read as well, thanks for sharing!
Re: Street Fighter II, paper trails (2021)
#38The end of the article speculates that the sheet system was dropped since the tiles appear scrambled. I'm wondering if the artists still used the sheet system, but a memory optimizer tool re-ordered the tiles to help free up a little more space on the ROM.
The way Super Street Fighter II has a mix of methodologies seems to count against that. Why only run this optimiser on the new art? I could see artists might still use a grid when sketching and planning to keep a handle on sprite size / memory usage. But not in the hand packed sort of way, more just each sprite drawn unscrambled on a grid. You wouldn't go through all the rigmarole of hand optimising memory layouts if…
Because if you change the tiles, you need to redo all the tile number tables throughout the program. Much easier to only change it for new graphics added to the game than to rework a bunch of old stuff that works.
Re: Street Fighter II, paper trails (2021)
#39Fabien Sanglard is an ace, his 3dfx posts are legendary. Very enjoyable reading
+1
I very much enjoyed his Game Engine Black Books on Wolfenstein 3D & Doom.
Re: Street Fighter II, paper trails (2021)
#40With today's 100GB game downloads, it's easy to say that developers gave up on these kinds of tricks. But they have to be doing something (other than data compression), right? Otherwise we'd be seeing 500GB downloads?
Part of the size problem in the last generation was because of duplication of assets to load faster from spinning hard drives. They bundled assets for level loads sequentially because it's quicker to have all the assets inline instead of seeking all over the place.
I imagine when the HDD-era engines are end-of-lined we'll get a slight shrink, but it'll probably be eclipsed by the growing number of high resolution assets pretty quickly.