Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE

[spenoza]

Alright, I know I start a lot of these kinds of threads, but I love reading what comes out of them. So the new question is, what are the best technical and artistic tricks plied by PCE developers? Feel free to post pictures or videos to provide examples. Extremely complicated effects or very simple effects with dramatic visual or artistic results all quality in my mind. One of my favorite examples is the backgrounds in Vasteel.

[soop]

I like the "parallax" in PC denjin.  Really gives a sense of speed.  And although it's not a trick per-se, the absolutely massive sprites in The Kung Fu are very impressive.  Especially considering the time.

The thing is though, around that time, I was still playing Spectrum games, so things like sampled speech were mindblowing (like the Ghostbusters game).

[roflmao]

The thing is though, around that time, I was still playing Spectrum games, so things like sampled speech were mindblowing (like the Ghostbusters game).

The "I'll be back" from Soldier Blade wow'ed me like that back in the day.

[spenoza]

Another thing I really like is the combination of colors used in LoT on the Dezant level. Also, the desert level in GoT. I found those particular choices to be excellent design from a color perspective.

[Digi.k]

those pink clouds and scrolling effects later on in parodius DA!?! plus some of the boss sizes and drum samples especially on said level with the nutcracker suite music pc-e style!!

There are also some great graphical effects in Parasol Stars not seen in any other versions.

I was also particularly impressed with the rocking ship level in dracula X

[Arkhan Asylum]

The plains of Shadow of the Beast create a very unduplicatable atmosphere.


I also like when simple parallax is done very well to create depth.

Dead Moon stage 1 for example.  Its a simple effect, but the art is done so well that its like DAMN LOOK AT THAT.

[roflmao]

I was just watching a video about Deep Blue and was blown away by the parallax scrolling.  I'm tempted to hunt down a copy of the game just to be able to see that parallax scrolling on a real TV. 

I noticed last night that Air Zonk has really impressive parallax scrolling as well.  I think just about every level has tons of it.  Then, last night I was watching a video of Super Air Zonk and thought to myself "What happened?"  It isn't nearly as impressive from a graphical standpoint, and it's a SUPER CD!

Meh.

[JoshTurboTrollX]

Super Air Zonk sucks in comparison to the original.

I loved a couple of the animated effects in a few Super CD games especially.

In Loom, when the evil wizard finally gets whats coming to him.

In Might and Magic III when you enter the training facility and it shows a horse running.  I could just stare at it for hours.. just amazing animation.

and in Shadow of the Beast, I thought many of the cut scenes were CRAZY well done.  I know alot of people loved the 'picking up weapons' animation in Out of this World for Gens and SNES, but I was equally impressed with Beasts animation for SCD!

Also don't forget John Madden Duo's crazy hyper reality intro where you fly into the football stadium!!

[OldRover]

The shadow effect in Jackie Chan always impressed me, even moreso now that I know how it was done. Clever abuse of the VDC's priority system.

Dead Moon's final boss. The game has pretty awesome line parallax throughout most of the game, but that final boss is just awesome... the fast-paced parallax scrolling and the sheer number of on-screen sprites (especially if you use the green or blue weapons), coupled with the intense soundtrack, make it an cool, unforgettable event. At least to me anyways, hehe. Not a lot of tricks really, just the line scrolling, but there's virtually no sprite waste, something that some other lesser horizontals screw up with even less going on.

[Digi.k]

oh I just remembered the 4th stage in magical chase.. the shadows on the background... O__o

and the green clouds and scrolling backgrounds in the final stage of detana!?! twin bee   O___O

[CrackTiger]

Kabukiden has a cool scene where the camera zooms out from the world map and the landscape shifts around. It's kinda like the 'cinematic' scenes from FFIV, only more epic and complimented with some real cinemas and real orchestral music.


Ys IV has a spot when you go over a waterfall and the world map/bg flips over in 3D.


Legend of Xanadu has some very cool parallax effects in some of its cinemas that is balanced with beautiful art.

[awack]

Ys IV has a spot when you go over a waterfall and the world map/bg flips over in 3D.

I forgot about that, it sneaks up on you.


Showing some card respect for now, scaling in Parodius, threw in the snes port for comparison.

PCE


SNES...there are 3 to 5 distorted sprites that i did not include, like the one in the box.


Ill post more stuff later.

[soop]

Street Fighter II must have some good stuff, right? 20 Megs!!!!!

[Arkhan Asylum]

Street Fighter II must have some good stuff, right? 20 Megs!!!!!

those aren't really tricks.  Those are just tons of nice fuckin pictures, stored on a really big card.  lol

[BlueBMW]

I always thought the effect acheived in stage 3 of Metamor Jupiter was absolutely amazing!  The video doesn't do it justice, but in person it really makes you feel like you're in a rotating space ship or something.

[TurboXray]

Another thing I really like is the combination of colors used in LoT on the Dezant level. Also, the desert level in GoT. I found those particular choices to be excellent design from a color perspective.

That level has a very nice special effect setup too. The first part, the desert sand, is dynamic tiles - not actual hsync scrolls. This allows the large sand beast to be mostly made of BG tiles too, and not all sprites (which would flicker like crazy). It's clever and brilliantly executed, giving the impressive of a large sprite or to a console programmer into that era of systems, who would normally think of that as a separate BG layer. So it's impressive on both perspectives because the PCE has neither the sprite bandwidth or the second hardware BG layer to pull that off. Yet you see it as is

I always thought the effect acheived in stage 3 of Metamor Jupiter was absolutely amazing!  The video doesn't do it justice, but in person it really makes you feel like you're in a rotating space ship or something.

I like that trick too. It's a little more than just a BG linescroll X offset table. They also hsync update the BG color #0 (which nothing can be show behind it) to make a 2nd BG layer. Which definitely helps give the appearance that the canon is rotating. Honestly, the effect really wouldn't work that good without it. That technique of treating the BG color #0 as a special separate BG layer is fairly rare in PCE/TG games, but a handful others use it too.



 There is way too many to list and I'll let other people list the obvious impressive ones. So I'll mention Ninja Spirit. The effect isn't that spectacular looking, but the execution is one that surprised me the most out of all the games I've looked at on the PCE. The 2nd level. The forest level with the 2nd scrolling BG. For someone looking at special FX for PCE, it's pretty obvious that it's just dynamic tiles because it's a simple pattern and a pretty small one at that. But the surprising part isn't the dynamic tile, or that the dynamic tileset is rotated by the CPU in realtime (which is a little impressive considering most dynamic tilesets are prerendered). It's the fact that the game does a split level 2bit overlaid graphics manually. What does that mean? Look at the leaves of the trees. The dynamic tiles show through them. Yet, they're not sprite overlays. They also aren't special case of manual overlaid dynamic rotated tile onto these leave pixels either (which is what you would need to do on other systems, and by the cpu itself manually). Instead, the leaves use the upper 2bit planes of the tile and the 2nd BG layer via dynamic tiles uses the lower 2bits of the tile (a tile is 4bits for a total of 16 colors, 15 unique and 1 see through for low priority sprites or BG color #0). Through clever use and setup/structure of the palette (only needs to be setup once), the video hardware itself does the 2bit tile composite for the game. No cpu intervention or extra resource needed. That in and of itself is special, but the reason I found it extremely fascinating is that this is how I've done some specific special transparent graphic tricks on the PCE using the VDC as a hardware assist (akin to the Amiga doing it in some popular demos). And here I find a game that comes sooo close to doing it. I.e. They could have VERY easily made the leave 'pixels' transparent over the dynamic tile layer. But they didn't, of course. I don't know of any other game that does this type of setup (for hardware assist for transparency or even just simple overlaying). And I'm surprised IREM went to the lengths to set this up, but I'm also saddened that they never took the effect in the alternate direction for some really cool and complex transparency effects.

[FraGMarE]

Dracula X - Rondo Of Blood is an obvious choice... it's like a tour de force of artistic and clever bg/sprite tricks that make it seem like the system can do things it's not supposed to.

I've always thought the multidirectional software parallax in lv1 and lv2 of Ninja Spirit was both technically and visually impressive.  It's all done with tile animation, but it's so convincing that it's hardware-based parallax, somebody would have to point it out to you in detail to know that it wasn't.

All the games with tons of horizontal interrupt scrolling look great doing it (Coryoon, Air Zonk, Dead Moon, etc.) but it's no great technical feat.  In that same vein, the games that use line scrolling (like SFII' CE's floors) or sine wave effects (like the lv2 boss background in Sinistron) are always crowd pleasers.  All of these effects are essentially acheived the same way; by way of controlling the horizontal interrupt, sometimes on a per-scanline basis.

The "rolling barrell" effect in lv3 of Metamor Jupiter is pretty simple to do but also pretty nice eye candy.  As is the "horizon" effect from Chris Covell's Axelay demo.  They both use the same scanline trick, i believe. 

Also, some of the tricks used in Soldier Blade are pretty impressive.  The overpasses that "parallax" over the city, and the huge tank-like boss that is cleverly comprised of both tiles and sprites.  Not to mention the vertical "metal canyon" that uses faked column-scrolling when the huge crack in the Earth opens up.

The transparency effect in Jackie Chan is also very neat.

The rotating "Gunstar-style" title screen of Chris Covell's Tongueman's Logic is also pretty nice looking.  Makes the average person think, "Woa, the PCE can do THAT?!"

Not to blow my own horn, but I made some pretty neat effects for Xymati that are completely doable on the PCE...

/magma06.gif
/hyperspace03.gif

[Keranu]

Another thing I really like is the combination of colors used in LoT on the Dezant level. Also, the desert level in GoT. I found those particular choices to be excellent design from a color perspective.

Totally agree with both of those. In fact, the desert level (Crown) in Gate of Thunder was what really inspired me to play that game ever since I saw it in one of those Duo promo videos. Of course being the dork that I am, I like to pretend that level was a tribute to Insector X .

[Digi.k]

BTW are those real vector graphics at the intro of space invaders Fukkatsu No Hi ?? because I love them even tho it's very short

[CrackTiger]

BTW are those real vector graphics at the intro of space invaders Fukkatsu No Hi ?? because I love them even tho it's very short

A hardcore vector fan would point out that true vector graphics require a vector screen. I've also wondered if those wire frame animations were done in real-time. I think that I asked about it in an "how'd they that?" thread I started a long time ago, but never got an answer.

[_Paul]

Someone needs to dig deep into the PCE wireframe capabilities. Who knows what the machine could really do if it were pushed?
(hopefully the answer isn't: not much).

[SignOfZeta]

Has anyone ever explained, or even come up with a name for, the weird BG effect that is present in Vasteel's battle scenes? Its also used a lot in the backgrounds of the cinemas in one of the Ranma games.

[CrackTiger]

Someone needs to dig deep into the PCE wireframe capabilities. Who knows what the machine could really do if it were pushed?
(hopefully the answer isn't: not much).

I don't know how taxing wire frame 3D is compared to polygons, but I'm guessing its easier since the former predates the latter for common use. Considering the polygonal stuff that has been done in Genesis and Turbo games, I'm assuming that they should be able to do some decent wire frame stuff.

[ccovell]

Has anyone ever explained, or even come up with a name for, the weird BG effect that is present in Vasteel's battle scenes? Its also used a lot in the backgrounds of the cinemas in one of the Ranma games.

It's still just line scrolling / raster effects, with a simple sine wave horizontally, and stretching / compression vertically.

[OldMan]

I don't know how taxing wire frame 3D is compared to polygons...

Wireframes are easier, if you don't mind background wires showing through. It gets a bit harder if you want them erased - at that point, it's not much different from a black-filled polygon.

I'm assuming that they should be able to do some decent wire frame stuff.

Possibly, assuming you don't need a high frame rate.
In one test Arkhan and I did (for the vines in junglehunt), we managed to get 5 lines moving before hitting the frame time limit. The problem is that the pce has a 4-plane BG layer, so drawing 1 dot involves 4 read/update/write cycles. Add in the need for floating point math (faked or not), and you can see it's a problem.
Not saying impossible, but it looks like it would take a hell of a lot of optimization to get anything above about 15 fps for more than a dozen or so lines....

[OldRover]

Doing wireframe on the PCE isn't necessarily easy but it's not tremendously hard either. It's hard to do it *fast* on a large scale in realtime. It also depends on whether you're doing it on tiles or sprites, as the memory layout is a little different between the two. The PCE doesn't have, as far as I know, any direct bitmap modes, so you need to draw pixels in whichever memory arrangement you're going to use, either tiles or sprites. It's tricky because you have to account for surrounding pixels, which means you're going to have to do some bitwise maths. It can be slow, especially if you're doing multiple colors and especially if you're trying to cover a large area. HuC's standard library has a method of setting up a pseudo-bitmap mode, but it's really just a few high-level functions that manipulate tile memory and these functions are sloooooooow despite being written entirely in assembly.

I would surmise that doing wireframe on a screen composed entirely of sprites would be easier due to the difference in memory model, but that's just an educated guess.

EDIT: And what TheOldMan said.

[Arkhan Asylum]

I fiddledicked with doing 3D wireframe stuff on the PCE one time (tried drawing the standard Teapot using the dataset, and fixing it all to a 2D plane).

It went poorly.  The lack of a bitmapped mode, coupled with the 6502ness, and HuC, made it a daunting task.   Drawing lines and junk on a sprite/tile based system is pretty mentaltarded.

Also, I am talking a proper teapot wireframe, including only showing what should be visible. 

If you want a better idea of how herp to the derp it will all turn out, check out the line-based C64 games.  It goes a little like that.

I bet if I molested it enough, I could get the teapot working good and maybe even shade it or at least fill the thing in...

but the practicality of it doesn't exist.  After you're done maiming the CPU drawing the thing, you'll have no juice left to do anything useful.  its not really worth even doing.  Prerender the crap as sprites.

As for the Vasteel effect:

The technical term I use is "wigglejiggle"

[OldMan]

I would surmise that doing wireframe on a screen composed entirely of sprites would be easier

Easier, yes. But a bit slower. (And you have to fight the line limit with sprites).

There are differences between sprites and tiles; but except for a slight difference in the memory layout, they are pretty close.
It turns out that it's actually faster to use tiles than sprites. Why? Because when you are using tiles, the color planes are 'paired'; there are two sets of bits next to each other in memory for the tiles. This allows you to increment to get to the next plane of the pair. With sprites, the planes are at a fixed offset from each other (32 bytes, I -think-. Don't yell if I got it wrong, bonknauts). So, to go from one plane to another, you have to do an add, which takes longer . Of course, you still have to do 1 addition when you move to the next plane pair using tiles, but that's better than 3.

Yes, this is seriously true. The time for setting 1 dot on an overhead map using sprites is actually longer than doing the same thing using fixed tiles. Unrolling the plane loop and using an increment saved about 6 cycles per dot. All the other code was exactly the same (we started with sprites). That was enough of a difference to stop frame timeouts when we updated the overhead map (which had 8 dots to be turned off, and turned on again in another spot).

[Arkhan Asylum]

The difference being, Sprites let you get some transparency!  Vines drawn in the background would result in alot of effort to make nice backgrounds.
 

[spenoza]

Well now, didn't Gunboat and some air combat game use simple polygons? If you can do simple polygons you should be able to do simple wireframes.

[Tatsujin]

Not to blow my own horn, but I made some pretty neat effects for Xymati that are completely doable on the PCE...
/magma06.gif
/hyperspace03.gif

DAMN, we need that game NOW, and on the PCE!!

[Arkhan Asylum]

Well now, didn't Gunboat and some air combat game use simple polygons? If you can do simple polygons you should be able to do simple wireframes.

Youll notice both Falcon and Gunboat have an AVOID stamp on pcengine.co.uk

They suck.

Balls.

Lots of them.

[OldRover]

I took a look at frag's first image in particular as it looks like it can be done with tiles alone. Looks like it would require 40 tile updates per frame, but split across three or perhaps four individual copies, depending on how much memory you're putting aside for unique pattern combinations. Even HuC can pull this off with ease if planned well enough. Shooters rarely require a ton of copies for sprites, so you can use that saved time to do stuff like this.

The second one looks like it's a palette cycle... but I can't be 100% sure without looking at the individual frames.

[shubibiman]

Not to blow my own horn, but I made some pretty neat effects for Xymati that are completely doable on the PCE...
/magma06.gif
/hyperspace03.gif

DAMN, we need that game NOW, and on the PCE!!

Ditto

[Digi.k]

/magma06.gif
/hyperspace03.gif

I love these.. would be even better with some sprites bouncing around there too

[TheClash603]

I always thought the effect acheived in stage 3 of Metamor Jupiter was absolutely amazing!  The video doesn't do it justice, but in person it really makes you feel like you're in a rotating space ship or something.

I never even heard of this game before, and it looks damn good!

I don't notice the technical side of games very much, I am more concerned with having fun, but I do have to admit this thread was very interesting with what has been mentioned.

[SignOfZeta]

Has anyone ever explained, or even come up with a name for, the weird BG effect that is present in Vasteel's battle scenes? Its also used a lot in the backgrounds of the cinemas in one of the Ranma games.

It's still just line scrolling / raster effects, with a simple sine wave horizontally, and stretching / compression vertically.

OK, I was wrong. It isn't used in Vasteel, but it is used in the one Ranma 1/2 game and...something else.

To see what I'm talking about watch this video:

...and skip to 0:32. Its a short use of the effect. Its used much more extensively in the ending (where Ranma gets his crazy dragon punch technique). Watching the Youtube video you'd almost think it was an interlacing artifact or something, but its even more intense in person. Whenever its used in this game (and in whatever the other game is I'm forgetting) the color choice is the same so...maybe there isn't any "special" effect here at all, programming-wise, but it does have a sort of 3D/blurring effect going on, at least to my eyes.

[_Paul]

Ah, the red/blue 3D Glasses effect. Surprised that more games didn't use that.

[Arkhan Asylum]

I took a look at frag's first image in particular as it looks like it can be done with tiles alone. Looks like it would require 40 tile updates per frame, but split across three or perhaps four individual copies, depending on how much memory you're putting aside for unique pattern combinations. Even HuC can pull this off with ease if planned well enough. Shooters rarely require a ton of copies for sprites, so you can use that saved time to do stuff like this.

The second one looks like it's a palette cycle... but I can't be 100% sure without looking at the individual frames.

theres a rom floating around of the first pic, with different tiles, but its the same exact shit.  Charles made it.

and the second one, I accidentallied stuff like that when messing with the Insanity title screen.  Its rasterloleffects, with a palette cycle behind it.

the trick is getting the right wigglejiggle.

[awack]

This isn't a trick, but a strength, the pce seems to be very good at putting allot of unique, well animated sprites on screen at once....when comparing ports , the snes version typically reduces or subtracts and the genesis just doesn't have the number of Palettes needed...some of the combined attacks have a total of 30 colors alone.

[Arkhan Asylum]

Its because the PCE has 16 16 color palettes just for sprites.

Thats alot of color possibilities you can spew on screen at once!

well, 15 colors each (transparency ) so 16*15 colors is alot of fuckyes going on.

and, your screenshots show that perfectly.

[Tatsujin]

Yeah, drac x is always a nice power horse to show off some ubergreat animations and colors. It's a pure graphical fest and beats the shit out of almost every game ever done on it's 16Bit rival plattforms.

[spenoza]

Well now, didn't Gunboat and some air combat game use simple polygons? If you can do simple polygons you should be able to do simple wireframes.

Youll notice both Falcon and Gunboat have an AVOID stamp on pcengine.co.uk

They suck.

Balls.

Lots of them.

OK, so they suck mechanically. How's the polygon action?

[nat]

Not very impressive, I have to say.

[awack]

Damn, i dont even remember posting those screenshots

Faceball is fun for a second if your looking for some 3D action.

[SamIAm]

It's too bad the PCE never had any late popularity in Brazil, otherwise they might be trying to make more rudimentary FPSs for it.

[SignOfZeta]

It's a good thing the PCE never had any late popularity in Brazil, otherwise they might be trying to make more rudimentary FPSs for it.

Edited for clarity.

[SamIAm]

Why?

In the Genesis community, even people who think the games themselves aren't especially fun to play still think the popularity of the system in Brazil and the surprisingly functional FPSs that came out of it are really cool.

[FraGMarE]

I took a look at frag's first image in particular as it looks like it can be done with tiles alone. Looks like it would require 40 tile updates per frame, but split across three or perhaps four individual copies, depending on how much memory you're putting aside for unique pattern combinations. Even HuC can pull this off with ease if planned well enough. Shooters rarely require a ton of copies for sprites, so you can use that saved time to do stuff like this.

The second one looks like it's a palette cycle... but I can't be 100% sure without looking at the individual frames.

The first image is easy to explain.  The very topmost layer is the "normal" non-animated background tiles.  They scroll at 2 pixels per vblank and they have a palette shift applied to some pixels on the edges to make it appear like they're glowing.  The next layer down consists of two 32x16 tile-chunks that repeat vertically and scroll at 1 px/vblank.  The next one down consists of two 24x16 chunks that repeat vertically and scroll at 1 px every 2 vblanks.  the next one is two 16x16 chunks that scroll at 1 px every 4 vblanks.  the deepest layer is two 8x16 chunks that scroll at 1 px every 8 vblanks.  All layers except the very top (normal scroll) layer are made of animated tiles and have the "wiggle" effect built in.  In addition, each of the animated tiles consists of only 4 colors, so they can be "bitplane packed", and the space used in VRAM by them is effectively halved.  As a result, the entire background tile set uses like ~16KB of VRAM space or something like that... pretty minimal for the visual wow-factor generated.

The second image is just a static 64x64 tile chunk that repeats across the screen, has a sine wave applied to it along with a palette cycle.  What I'd *REALLY* like to do with that background, however, is something like the trippy effect from Gaiares lv3 (the hyperspace scene) on the Sega Genesis.  I'm pretty sure one of the bg layers of the hyperspace scene from Gaiares uses a DOUBLE sine wave or something, but I can't be sure until somebody diddles with the ROM in a debugger.  The animated GIF i made just uses a regular sine wave.

For those who've not seen that level of Gaiares, check this link out:

Still, one of the most amazing levels of any 16-bit era shooter, imo...

[Arkhan Asylum]

Well now, didn't Gunboat and some air combat game use simple polygons? If you can do simple polygons you should be able to do simple wireframes.

Youll notice both Falcon and Gunboat have an AVOID stamp on pcengine.co.uk

They suck.

Balls.

Lots of them.

OK, so they suck mechanically. How's the polygon action?

its like watching dice roll in slow motion.

its bad.