pros & cons... 16 bit cd games.

[Tom]

^My quick conversion of the sprite to no overlays. Only takes up 4 cells. The original pce one takes up 6 cells standing. The original also took 11 cells for full attack frame, while mine would take only 5 cells. 11 cells!! You can only have 16 sprite cells before flicker/blank out. Mine also takes up less vram because overlaying takes up more.


 Note: It took little effort to optimize/resize the sprite. The red translucent areas in that sprite arrangement are unique sprite tiles. The rest can be reused for other horse guys, cutting down on cpu bandwidth to upload frames.

[Tatsujin]

damn. as for all the backgrounds, PCE was so CPS-1 faithful.

[awack]

^My quick conversion of the sprite to no overlays. Only takes up 4 cells. The original pce one takes up 6 cells standing. The original also took 11 cells for full attack frame, while mine would take only 5 cells. 11 cells!! You can only have 16 sprite cells before flicker/blank out. Mine also takes up less vram because overlaying takes up more.

Awesome, optimized and scaled up in size, i would imagine if some one were to make the foot soldiers larger (10 0f them on screen at once) they would have to decrease the number that appear on screen in order to minimize flicker.

[omotai]

Nununununu!

That's the best battle cry ever.

[awack]

A little fun, the big men from streetfighter 2 HU card and worldheroes 2 ACD.

[Tatsujin]

wow..and suddenly zangief looks like a dwarf from Snow White.

[awack]

Difference in foot soldiers, two arcade dudes in front, their pattern is one in front of the other a lot of times, if some one was to try and use similar sized sprites in the pcengine game then they would definitely have to use the standard res....in my oppinion.

[Tom]

Heh, looks like his younger brothers have come out to help them.

 On a side note, this game kicks my ass. I can't get past level 8 

[awack]

How do you achieve a sense of depth with a system that only has one bg screen with out causing excessive flicker by using to many sprites.

Every thing in the screenshots are sprites.




Again every thing are sprites, the sprites marked by the white arrows will magically turn into tiles when you reach the end, so as not to cause flicker when the boss fight begins.





Rondo uses three types of transparency tricks that i know of.


type that is used in magical chase, shadow effect.
Colors will become darker as they pass thru the areas
marked by the white arrows.


             
Simple sprite flicker, the sprite will reappear every other frame, this is the flashiest of the three, giving the flames a transparent look.


                       1                                                  2

                       3




Changing the colors of the bg tiles.

[esteban]

How do you achieve a sense of depth with a system that only has one bg screen with out causing excessive flicker by using to many sprites?

Every thing in the screenshots are sprites...

Very neat stuff

[Tom]

type that is used in magical chase, shadow effect.
Colors will become darker as they pass thru the areas
marked by the white arrows.

 Dynamic tiles FTW! PCE has a lot of sub palettes, so it can't waste a few for shadow effects on dynamic tiles like that without a second thought.

Changing the colors of the bg tiles.

 They could have done that in realtime, but that one was actually just frames of animation.

 PCE has another option for transparency. A demo I wrote here. The PCE has planar graphics, like the Amiga and ST - so you can do similar "transparency effects" via the hardware like popular Amiga/ST demos. Think of it as transparency hardware assist on the PCE   The composite grouping of bit planes works perfectly for the 16bit video controller (because you only write a 16bit value at a time, no lower - no 8bit direct writes), works nicely for this trick.

[Black Tiger]

They could have done that in realtime, but that one was actually just frames of animation.

 PCE has another option for transparency. A demo I wrote here. The PCE has planar graphics, like the Amiga and ST - so you can do similar "transparency effects" via the hardware like popular Amiga/ST demos. Think of it as transparency hardware assist on the PCE   The composite grouping of bit planes works perfectly for the 16bit video controller (because you don't only write a 16bit value at a time, no lower - no 8bit direct writes), works nicely for this trick.

That's pretty freaking amazing. Would it be practical for a normal game environment?






For anyone who is seeing the screen shots before testing out the roms, it really has to be seen in motion to appreciate the full effect.

[Tom]

Would it be practical for a normal game environment?

 Like all special FX, it has some limitations. IIRC, is takes about 30% cpu (1/60 frame) to do a screen update of that size, but it is practical to use in game. To get the performance I got in that demo, the setup is extremely complicated. The way the tiles is laid out in vram, how the TP layer frames are stored in rom, etc. I had to write special external apps to setup the transparent layer. The TP layer is stored in a total of 8 frames. Think dynamic tiles meets transparency. I only update the upper 2bits if the 4bit plane, so I'm not changing/over writing the mountain tile data at all. I also store the graphic data as opcodes, so it's pretty fast - but can bulk up if you use different TP graphic layers (not really a problem for SCD though). It's hard to see, but there are 3 transparent colors in the cloud layer. Each of the transparent cloud color makes 4 transparent colors of the base mountain. Anyway, it's really complicated to setup. An extension of this is, that you can also do single transparent-color addition/subtraction. Like shadow/highlight but with color. It leaves more room for colors in a tile than the method I used in that demo. But the kicker is, is that this is all done on the video controller side. The CPU isn't "mixing" any color, just transferring some data to certain bit planes and letting the video processor do the rest.


 I also forget to mention that PCE also has "silhouette" mode. This was used in Jackie Chan. Another type of transparency method. (An SGX demo using that silhouette" mode here. Change the .pce extension to .sgx so that mednafen will run it. Or just try it on a real SGX.)

[awack]

I posted this before over at sega16.com, looks like dynamic tiles but not sure.

PCE has another option for transparency. A demo I wrote here. The PCE has planar graphics, like the Amiga and ST - so you can do similar "transparency effects" via the hardware like popular Amiga/ST demos. Think of it as transparency hardware assist on the PCE   The composite grouping of bit planes works perfectly for the 16bit video controller (because you don't only write a 16bit value at a time, no lower - no 8bit direct writes), works nicely for this trick.

Amazing!!

[awack]

To give an idea of whats going on at once.

Drac attack, scaling, line scroll and background animation(simple lightning)
the linescrolling BG does something slightly different, the lines(horizontal ban of pixels) that are close to the top and bottom of the screen will stop and move back a few pixels, this gives the illusion that the background is warping in a circle(blurry TV for best result) i wonder if this puts more strain on the CPU?

When Dracula is hit, the scrolling BG will reverse and move backwards for a moment, i always thought the scrolling would stop and the reason was because the CPU was taking a hit(hit detection) but not sure about that now.