Best technical and artistic tricks on the PCE

[CrackTiger]

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. 

A small number of tiny dice.

[SignOfZeta]

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.

FPS suck in general. Crappy FPS on systems that obviously can't handle them suck even more.

A system living on for a ridiculous number of years is really wonderful, especially if only regionally. Brazil's love of Sega systems the rest of the world threw away years before is super cool. It would have been neat to see...I don't know, Street Fighter Alpha or Guardian Heroes or something, but not Duke.

Games cost money, and are meant to be played, to actually have fun with. Now its just a free ROM to add to our infinite collection of ROMs, something to be analyzed and talked about, to make Youtube videos out of, etc. But people actually MADE that thing. They went to work every day for months porting a game that barely ran on the PCs of the time. Then somebody (I assume) actually saved up money all week and plopped it down on that piece of crap, and that's just depressing.

Its like Ultimate Mortal Kombat III for Famicom. Sure its impressive, but if you (and by "you" I mean, "every single person in the world") aren't actually going to play it, ever...who gives a shit?

[TurboXray]

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....

If it's wireframe and you don't care about different colors, you can setup the VDC for 1bit bitmap. You write/use the 1bit frame buffer in main ram, then you blit it to vram. But vram tiles need to be setup in a specific order. And the vram increment pointer needs to be set to 32. It's true that you need to write a whole WORD to the vram port at a time, but the latch is only on the MSB port. Just write a zero on the LSB port once at the very first write (or whatever value you want to repeat), and only write to the MSB when copying the rest of the 1bit frame buffer data. Instant scanline blitting. You can either update the vram pointer at the end of every bitmap 'scanline' transfer or let it wrap on to do 1 scanline writing per 8 high block area, doing 8 passes total (each pass writes scanline Y of an 8 high pixel group in the pseudo tile arrangement bitmap in vram). And since you're only using the first two bits of the tile (and one plane you don't even write to, so it's a free cycle to update), you can uses the other 2 bitplanes to hold a crude/low color BG image that the poly lines overlay onto. It's very complex to setup, and probably difficult understand (you have to keep your head constantly wrapped around it), but once you do both - you'll see that you have do a ton of stuff you can do (you also have the option of making the wire frame overlay translucent over the other 2bit planes or not). You could take the slower route, 1bit frame buffer and 3bit tile graphics, but it requires you write the 1bit frame buffer data to the LSB and read the MSB and write it back to the MSB. So, quite a bit slower - but more colors and still the ability for translucency (don't forget you can still apply subpalettes to the tiles to make the underneath buffer more than just 8 colors. I've done many of private demos/tests messing around with this kind of stuff).

 You could use sprites in the same fashion and it's a little easier too (setup wise), but that's a waste since you'd probably want some movable sprite ability. Of course stock ram isn't much for holding a working frame buffer. 240x200x1bit is 6000bytes, leaving only 2192bytes left over on a stock hucard (without cheating and using the Populous hucard setup with its extra 32k of ram on chart). That's pretty tight, but doable.

[SamIAm]

...that's just depressing.

...who gives a shit?

Most retro fans agree that enjoying some older games requires an understanding of the context of their releases. For example, Blazing Lazers wouldn't be half as well regarded if it had come out it in 1994. Here we have an FPS that came out in Brazil in 1998 - assuming most people couldn't afford PCs, this was probably the first FPS that fair number of Brazilians played, at least at home. If it was at least playable, then I dare say some of them probably had fun with it. Ain't nothing wrong with that.

[termis]

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...

Man, it's been a while, but what a treat that level is.  Just watching (and listening!) to that stage gave me a huge grin.

Actually, even more so than the trippy wavy-effect, I thought that hyperspace effect was awesome (I still remember being very impressed back in the day, and it still looks great today).  I can't recall anything similar in a PCE game (shooter or not).  Perhaps because I've seen the wavy-effects done already at the time with the Thunder Forces and all.  Granted, the Gaiares wavy effects has helluva lot more going on than.

[awack]

A few pce shooters the wavy...Violent Soldier, Image Fight 2 and Super Darius 2 etc.

Its hard to tell whats going on in the  Gaiares video, but one of the best effects of that type Ive seen is from Terraforming.

Fast forward to 25:40

[Arkhan Asylum]

I like the derpy effect when you beat levels in Final Soldier.

it reminds me of yars revenge.

[NecroPhile]

This came up in another thread but wasn't answered (unless I missed it), so I figured I'd repeat it here:  how does the magnifying glass work on the stage select screen of Darkwing Duck?  I don't know if it's technically impressive, but it sure looks neat.  Do any other games use a similar effect?

[awack]

As far as a similar effect is concerned, this is the only thing i can think off the top of my head, in this Case, it looks like a different sprite with a different color palette.

[shubibiman]

I have ti play this game. I've got it for 1 year now but still haven't had time to play it.

[RR1980]

As far as a similar effect is concerned, this is the only thing i can think off the top of my head, in this Case, it looks like a different sprite with a different color palette.

which game is this?

[Tatsujin]

As far as a similar effect is concerned, this is the only thing i can think off the top of my head, in this Case, it looks like a different sprite with a different color palette.

which game is this?

http://www.pcedaisakusen.net/1/28/647/1/Sol-Moonarge-jp.htm

The only RPG so far done by Irem

[CrackTiger]

This came up in another thread but wasn't answered (unless I missed it), so I figured I'd repeat it here:  how does the magnifying glass work on the stage select screen of Darkwing Duck?  I don't know if it's technically impressive, but it sure looks neat.  Do any other games use a similar effect?

Maybe it doesn't factor in to how that effect is achieved. But it seems all the more impressive on a system with a single tile layer.

But the best kinds of effects are ones that that simply look cool or good regardless of whether or not they are technically challenging.

[TurboXray]

This came up in another thread but wasn't answered (unless I missed it), so I figured I'd repeat it here:  how does the magnifying glass work on the stage select screen of Darkwing Duck?  I don't know if it's technically impressive, but it sure looks neat.  Do any other games use a similar effect?

There are a few games the use/abuse the sprite priority for other than normal masking stuff, but not in this particular way. It's pretty clever. Clever like Jackie Chan silhouette effect. And what's even weirder, is that DWD of all games has this trick. Everything else in that game is plain jane/below average FX wise.

 The effect works like this: Sprites have a priority setting directly inherent to the order they appear in the SAT (sprite attribute table, there are 64 entries for 64 sprites). Sprite #0 has a higher priority and shown above sprite #1, and so on. The each sprite also has a BG priority setting. Set to 0, the sprite gets shown behind the BG colors #1-15 (palette assigned doesn't matter and color #0 is always shown in the least/farthest layer. No even low priority sprites show behind this). If a sprite is higher priority than another, but is set to show behind the BG while the less priority sprite is set to show above the BG layer and they collide, the visible pixels of sprite 1 that overlap visible pixels of sprite 2 - cause the BG to show in its place instead.

Code Select Expand

  _________
 |  _______|_       <- sprite layer 1 (cut out mask)
 | |  _______|_     <- BG layer
 | | |  _______|_   <- sprite layer 2 (magnafied image)
 | | | |         |  <- sprite layer 3 (magnafying glass and hand)
 |_| | |         |
   |_| |         |
     |_|         |
       |_________|
   
   
    ______
   |  __  | <- sprite layer 1 mask
   | /  \ |
   | \__/ |
   |______|

 A group of high priority sprites (low priority to the BG layer) for a mask with a hole in the center. The mask is behind the BG tiles, so you can't actually see it. But the center has a circle of blank pixels. This allows sprite layer #2 to be seen in that area, everything else is hidden behind. Sprite layer #3, the magnifying glass, is highest priority and above the BG layer - so it shows above everything and moves in unison with sprite layer #1. Sprite layer #2 scrolls at a different speed and direction, but to remain behind the mask it needs to drop out sprites on the border edges as not to be show outside the masking box.

 It's clever that they used it in this way. It definitely took a bit of thinking to flesh this out.

[NecroPhile]

Thanks for the explanation, nuts.  It is pretty dang clever - if only they'd applied some of that cleverness to the controls.

[Mathius]

As far as a similar effect is concerned, this is the only thing i can think off the top of my head, in this Case, it looks like a different sprite with a different color palette.

which game is this?

http://www.pcedaisakusen.net/1/28/647/1/Sol-Moonarge-jp.htm

The only RPG so far done by Irem

I gots to have this also! Reminds me of Castle of Illusion.

[CrackTiger]

I gots to have this also! Reminds me of Castle of Illusion.

It's actually a traditional RPG like Tengai Makyou II or Phantasy Star IV. It just happens to have the occasional side scrolling section.

[Mathius]

I gots to have this also! Reminds me of Castle of Illusion.

It's actually a traditional RPG like Tengai Makyou II or Phantasy Star IV. It just happens to have the occasional side scrolling section.

Sounds even more interesting!

[Keranu]

Castle/World of Illusion was the first game to pop in my mind too!

[Tatsujin]

Watch the nice opening

More isn't up on yu0tube so far.

[BlueBMW]

I've been playing Dead Moon the last few days.  While its not exactly a technical feat per say.... the way the did the multiple layer background scrolling in this game looks absolutely amazing!  It just gives a real feel of depth and distance.  And the way they speed up / slow down the scrolling when you start / stop moving.... very nice very nice.  And the chiptunes are pretty good too.

[CrackTiger]

I've been playing Dead Moon the last few days.  While its not exactly a technical feat per say.... the way the did the multiple layer background scrolling in this game looks absolutely amazing!  It just gives a real feel of depth and distance.  And the way they speed up / slow down the scrolling when you start / stop moving.... very nice very nice.  And the chiptunes are pretty good too.

It's amazing how well they setup the parallax and used other effects, but managed to pair it with nicely touched up and carefully polished, yet counteractive dull artwork. Everything looks perfectly fine... yet never tries to push beyond that. It looks like a tech demo by a homebrewer who pulled out all the stops, but couldn't quite pull off top tier professional looking graphic art.

I'm not a fan of full screen spamming of Coryoon style strips of parallax, at least the way that many games do it. But Dead Moon is the best I've seen on any console. Except maybe Spriggan Mark 2.