goldenband
Raging in the Streets

There are also several signs of rushing things, in the graphics department too, so nothing tells me that they valued graphics over gameplay, no.
But you'll have a better perspective and understanding once I come back with a proper reply.

As I said there, 99.9% of people don't actually understand what the game is in terms of what the devs were pushing for and why it has some of the characteristics it has.
There are also several sprite flickering mitigation tricks/practices that they did implement.
IMHO, the game is a miracle in terms of a single programmer and a very small company and publisher doing all that they did. It's incredible how good it is given the inexistent background of the staff for everything people were able to track down to this day.

So, I think I have identified something which is responsible for a good chunk of the sprite flickering and there are also some more clever mitigation techniques that they could have used (only ONE shooter in that entire gen, be it consoles or arcades, used them AFAIK and it's a MD game - not TFIV, no).

I'll try to hack it but it may take some time since it's a kind of hack I never implemented, though, in concept, it's easy.
I'll comeback later (may take weeks) with a full reply.
Sprite priority shouldn't have any say in the sprite flickering; when the overflow occurs, it doesn't matter (AFAIK and based on spritesmind discussions among the pros) the priority you had assigned for it. So, it's not like they didn't prioritize gameplay on purpose. But maybe the order in which things are sent to the VDP could be different and that is supposed to make a difference (the top of the sprite list tend to be more affected when there's an overflow for what I've read).

Hey! I was expecting you to participate in the Top 20/Top 100 thread.

https://www.sega-16.com/forum/showth...l=1#post869397

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V40gcmDWIOg

Thanks man, I appreciate the comment and rep, and same to you. I haven't been posting as much lately, more or less waiting for Xeno Crisis to drop so I can give a bit of a break down/analysis!

thanks for the PM! I wrote a reply but for some reason it doesn't seem to send it. Perhaps I'm still limited due to newbieness on the forums? Or maybe the browser I'm using is too vintage...?

Those were different times, huh?