Magical Game Factory Official Thread

[Barone]

The CPU struggles with lots of small objects, not a bunch of big ones.

I think you're a bit wrong here.
Bigger sprites == more collision points to handle... In the end, it would be almost the same of handling many little objects.
See WWF Wrestlemania Arcade. When you have 4 "big" sprites on screen you have a lot of slowdown. Then you TKO one of the enemies and the framerate gets a huge boost, while the sprite is still there, on the floor... The collision detection is what causes slowdown in situations like that. The AI is a problem too...
VDP would contribute more to the flickering than slowdown IMO.

That's what makes the Golden Axe games look so ugly - all the empty ground and the bad distance fade effect that they used, which made the ground look even bigger.

IMO what makes Golden Axe games look so ugly is the poor use of color, the very low number of animation sprites, the dull static backgrounds...

And you'll not have less enemies on screen while playing alone or in 2p due to the multitap support. The 3 or 4-player mode just need to set a different enemies on screen limitation, it's just a single additional line on the source code.

[matteus]

No.
Genesis CPU can't handle that without heavy slowdown. Final Fight CD is running in a M68K @12.5Mhz while Genesis M68K is @7.67Mhz.
Like Christuserloeser said, the SOR3 sprite size is the max in the doable world IMO. Even so, who guarantees that WM would be able to squeeze the hardware as much as Sega of Japan did during those days?
Pier Solar had several great things and good demos on those mini-games but the in game animation is not on par with Soleil (Crusader of Centy) IMO for an example... And Soleil cart is just 8Mbit while Pier Solar is 64Mbit. More MEGA POWER allows for more content and maybe better animation/bigger sprites but everything depends on how the game will be programmed...

I also agree that Golden Axe sprite size would be best for 3 or 4 players... You don't have enough playable area to have 3 players in games like SOR2, SOR3 or FFCD; it would be very hard to see where your character is and with which enemy he's actually fighting...

There were a lot restrictions in Pier Solar that I spoke of in an interview with 1UP, personally I don't agree with you on the MD can't do FF style sprites because of the clock speed but we'll see what they come up with. Fonz knows all the tricks that were used in SoR3, I spoke to him many moons ago about it, he did a mdsa compression benchmark back in 2006, which was admittedly with the MCD in mind but I have faith in the teams abilities...

[Barone]

I'm not saying they are not capable of anything... But to know the tricks and be able to implement all of them using good optimization are different things. I hope that they can manage to do it, but a game is a lot more complex than just a demo.

MCD M68K clock is a lot higher and people tend to ignore that... It's 65% more raw processing power, you can't ignore that!
Compare Out of this World on Genesis and on Sega CD. Compare the Samurai Shodown on the Sega CD with bigger sprites and almost no slowdown with the Genesis version using a bit smaller sprites and having much more slowdown...

[matteus]

I'm not saying they are not capable of anything... But to know the tricks and be able to implement all of them using good optimization are different things. I hope that they can manage to do it, but a game is a lot more complex than just a demo.

MCD M68K clock is a lot higher and people tend to ignore that... It's 65% more raw processing power, you can't ignore that!
Compare Out of this World on Genesis and on Sega CD. Compare the Samurai Shodown on the Sega CD with bigger sprites and almost no slowdown with the Genesis version using a bit smaller sprites and having much more slowdown...

This is where the magic of the game factory will come in (I hope) haha

[djshok]

IMO what makes Golden Axe games look so ugly is the poor use of color, the very low number of animation sprites, the dull static backgrounds...

And you'll not have less enemies on screen while playing alone or in 2p due to the multitap support. The 3 or 4-player mode just need to set a different enemies on screen limitation, it's just a single additional line on the source code.

Yeah that too, the colours in GA were rather bad, and you're right about everything else too. But just look at the GA shot in this pic:



Note how the ground tiles fade into the horizon very harshly. It really gives the illusion that it's a much larger space than it really is, it looks like there would be miles of ground from foreground to background. Yet it's just a few steps for the characters to walk up there, and they obviously don't get any smaller. That's just badly drawn art and it looks wrong. Fortunately none of the other games in the pic do that, and they all look fine.

About the multitap, I support the idea but only if it won't limit or detract from any other aspect of the game.

[Barone]

This is where the magic of the game factory will come in (I hope) haha

ahahahah
Yep, let's hope for that.

Note how the ground tiles fade into the horizon very harshly. It really gives the illusion that it's a much larger space than it really is, it looks like there would be miles of ground from foreground to background. Yet it's just a few steps for the characters to walk up there, and they obviously don't get any smaller. That's just badly drawn art and it looks wrong. Fortunately none of the other games in the pic do that, and they all look fine.

You're right about that, but the picture is from the arcade version, right? I don't remember anything like that on the Genesis (the whole package looks much worse though...).

I think the floor is better designed on the TMNT picture... That "perspective" is the right way to go.
But for the characters I prefer the more adult style of Golden Axe.

About the multitap, I support the idea but only if it won't limit or detract from any other aspect of the game.

Me too. But it really doesn't need to detract, they just have to be a bit smart.

[Guntz]

I think you're a bit wrong here.
Bigger sprites == more collision points to handle... In the end, it would be almost the same of handling many little objects.

One big sprite is still one sprite when it comes to collision detection. Lots of little sprites adds up quickly, because they are independent from each other...

MCD M68K clock is a lot higher and people tend to ignore that... It's 65% more raw processing power, you can't ignore that!

You can ignore it when you realize there isn't a perfect direct bridge between the Sega CD's resources and the Genesis 68k. It's well known the Sega CD has some annoying limitations and bottlenecks, especially at the expansion port.

[StarMist]

Yeah I like the idea of the multitap as much as the next guy, but I'd rather have bigger sprites and more enemies on screen instead of a 3 or 4 player mode. I think SOR2 sized sprites are the way to go. Anything smaller and you get too much empty floor space. That's what makes the Golden Axe games look so ugly - all the empty ground and the bad distance fade effect that they used, which made the ground look even bigger.

You're right about that fade effect but there is extra floor space to GA and that's what makes it so superior to SOR3: running actually feels like running in GA whilst also being given enough space to make it avoidable (the enemies don't avoid many rushes but that's just their AI, which MGF should outdo), in SOR3 running feels like a warmup to a special move because everything's so close together. Thus SOR3 has no sense of pacing, everything just seems like one big scrum; SOR2 is miles better simply because one can't run. -- And I still don't think GA very ugly, it's only pallid. Re your pics above Battletoads in Battlemaniacs is one of the absolute ugliest games ever made.
Now, I don't believe MGF will go for sprites any smaller than what are in SOR2, that's pretty much the benchmark all round. Here's hoping they find some balance to the running.

[Barone]

One big sprite is still one sprite when it comes to collision detection. Lots of little sprites adds up quickly, because they are independent from each other...

So we had Earthquake both in Genesis and Sega CD versions of Samurai Shodown, 'cause according to your "logic" there's just two sprites.
And the MK and SF games don't have the same sprite size of the arcade on the Genesis just for fun. Wait...

You can ignore it when you realize there isn't a perfect direct bridge between the Sega CD's resources and the Genesis 68k. It's well known the Sega CD has some annoying limitations and bottlenecks, especially at the expansion port.

No, you can't.
Looks like you never played the games and versions that I used as examples... And you are far from the correct interpretation of the things.
The extension port bottlenecks don't affect the main processing tasks for games like that. Most of the program is being processed inside the MCD without any help of the Genesis.
What you said is more likely to be a problem when you are using its ASIC but the two examples that I provided don't use it.

You're right about that fade effect but there is extra floor space to GA and that's what makes it so superior to SOR3: running actually feels like running in GA whilst also being given enough space to make it avoidable (the enemies don't avoid many rushes but that's just their AI, which MGF should outdo), in SOR3 running feels like a warmup to a special move because everything's so close together. Thus SOR3 has no sense of pacing, everything just seems like one big scrum; SOR2 is miles better simply because one can't run. -- And I still don't think GA very ugly, it's only pallid. Re your pics above Battletoads in Battlemaniacs is one of the absolute ugliest games ever made.
Now, I don't believe MGF will go for sprites any smaller than what are in SOR2, that's pretty much the benchmark all round. Here's hoping they find some balance to the running.

This.

[Christuserloeser]

Big sprites are built using smaller sprites.

Note how the ground tiles fade into the horizon very harshly. It really gives the illusion that it's a much larger space than it really is, it looks like there would be miles of ground from foreground to background. Yet it's just a few steps for the characters to walk up there, and they obviously don't get any smaller. That's just badly drawn art and it looks wrong. Fortunately none of the other games in the pic do that, and they all look fine.

That's the final battle in GA, and the entire floor is accessible. The screen scrolls vertically up and down with the player's movement.

[Barone]

Anyway, bigger character sprites will need bigger smaller (sounds like an oxymoron; oh well) sprites to be composed.

We can talk about several problems affecting the size and number of sprites, like the RAM limitation...
But my original point was just that we have games like Out of this World and Samurai Shodown clearly showing that the extra clock does make difference in favor to MCD processing power.
We can't expect that FFCD would run as well on the Genesis. It's crazy...

People insist to ignore but solely based on assumptions, no real examples...
SoJ engineers should be really dumb guys since they included a more powerful M68K on the MCD for no reason. They would have been outsmarted by 19-year old teens...

Poor Sega.

[Kamahl]

Collision detection with a big sprite is the same as with a small sprite, it's a bounding box. The size is irrelevant.
So a bunch of big objects are easier on the CPU than a bunch of small ones, since there are fewer bounding boxes to compare.
The problem is the VDP.

Out of this world is rendering the sprites using the CPU, so it's obvious that a better CPU makes a difference. Samurai Showdown was just very poorly optimized. The faster CPU can make more calculations but still, the normal genesis CPU should be more than enough.

[Barone]

Collision detection with a big sprite is the same as with a small sprite, it's a bounding box. The size is irrelevant.
So a bunch of big objects are easier on the CPU than a bunch of small ones, since there are fewer bounding boxes to compare.

Ouch! You got me here.

Out of this world is rendering the sprites using the CPU, so it's obvious that a better CPU makes a difference.

Yep, just what I was saying.

Samurai Showdown was just very poorly optimized. The faster CPU can make more calculations but still, the normal genesis CPU should be more than enough.

Again, how can you affirm that? Is there any example or demo or piece of the source code proving what you said?
Do you really believe that FunCom's code was more optimized than Saurus's (directly related to SNK)?

[Kamahl]

Again, how can you affirm that? Is there any example or demo or piece of the source code proving what you said?
Do you really believe that FunCom's code was more optimized than Saurus's (directly related to SNK)?

Street Fighter 2. Still, it's not so much that the new code was better optimized, but that even if it was just as bad, the better CPU would help. What I meant was that a game like Samurai Showdown should not require a better CPU than what the regular genesis has.

[Barone]

Street Fighter 2.

I strongly disagree...

SFII is running in @256X224 while SS is running @320X224.
The Genesis version of SS also has the judge, moving around all the time with some animation too.
SS uses "flashing" shadows in order to give a transparency sensation. SFII just uses the most simple shadow possible.

Another sign of the programming job quality is the sample playback, far superior on the Samurai Shodown.

What I meant was that a game like Samurai Showdown should not require a better CPU than what the regular genesis has.

I still doubt since I never saw any fighting game clearly better on the Genesis than SS in terms of resolution, animation details, sfx, use of color...